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|| #blog #2408-dailies

I think I want to avoid weak words

↪ I will obliterate weak words from my vocabulary

👋

A common tip when it comes to writing is to cut out weak or unnecessary words.

These can be of several types - some are redundant (e.g. "completely full"), other's are weak or show indecision (e.g. "I think"), others are just verbose (e.g. "in order to" can just be "to")

As with all advice, this isn't for everyone and not for every kind of writing, but I like it - I prefer the resulting prose after this has been applied. And as a programmer I like clean code and I enjoy cutting out things that are useless. That being said, I'm not good at it when it comes to writing.

So I'm going to make a conscious effort at it going forward. Maybe there even is something here I can automate? 🤔

The worst ones for me are phrases I use to protect myself from being wrong. "I think", "I believe", "if I remember correctly", and others. I use them all the time, so avoiding those will be my main focus.

My first thought is that it does not make sense to be strict with these posts, since they are almost a stream of thought without much editing or review. But my hope is that being more aware of these in my all writing will help me be a little more assertive, confident, and generally improve my communication across all mediums.

So I'll keep an eye out for these in all my comms 🔍

See you tomorrow 👋


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