{"id":2742,"date":"2019-02-15T08:53:51","date_gmt":"2019-02-15T14:53:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/?p=2742"},"modified":"2019-02-15T08:53:51","modified_gmt":"2019-02-15T14:53:51","slug":"an-added-bonus-or-a-passing-fad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/an-added-bonus-or-a-passing-fad\/","title":{"rendered":"An Added Bonus or a Passing Fad?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>

I read a piece by Benjamin Dreyer a few days ago in Medium, a website I recently discovered thanks to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, owner of the Washington Post<\/em>, and richest human on the planet. Bezos, if one keeps up with sleazy current events, was outed by the National Enquirer<\/em> after announcing he and his wife were divorcing. The Enquirer<\/em> soon after published stories about the affair Bezos was having with another woman. Bezos fought back, not denying the affair but enlisting his famed security chief to investigate how the tabloid got hold of his text messages and reportedly some rather embarrassing selfies.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bezos wrote a piece about it in Medium that is quite extraordinary and could result in serious legal trouble for the National Enquirer<\/em>, which he accused of blackmailing. You can read it here<\/a>: I started poking around Medium and have now added it to my favorites list. There is a ton of interesting content here from dozens of categories. Some of it is curated from elsewhere, but a fair amount is written for the site. Users select topics of interest and the site provides the content. I naturally chose \u201cwriting\u201d as one of my many interests. That is how I came across Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief of Random House and author of Dreyer\u2019s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.<\/em> It is now on the ever-rising reading list.<\/p>\n

His most recent piece is on eliminating extraneous words from your writing. As Dreyer\u2019s introduction notes, we are all guilty of tossing in unneeded words. As a copy chief, one of his tasks is to remove those offenders, in his words, \u201cwith which we all encase our prose like so much Bubble Wrap and packing peanuts.\u201d In the interest of simpler writing, I am providing several examples from his list as well as a few of my own that he did not mention. Here we go:<\/p>\n