Functional Redundancy and Ellipsis as Strategies in Reading and Writing.
Keith Grant-Davie · 1995
Parkinson's Law states that work tends to expand to fill the available for completing it. A variation might describe the elasticity of language: words can be multiplied to fill the space available for expressing an idea. In light of this law, most writing textbooks preach the virtue of conciseness, especially those that focus on technical writing (e.g. Burnett 309-12; Lannon 263-73; Reep 156-57; Shelton 17-22; VanAlstyne and Maddison 14-16). A typical section in such texts demonstrates how to recognize and eradicate problems like redundant pairs (benefits and advantages), redundant modifiers (man datory requirement), redundant categories (rectangular in shape), phras es used where words would do (at this point in time instead of now), and empty sentence openings: There is a strong likelihood of rain tomorrow rather than Rain is very likely tomorrow. Dietrich Rathjens identifies brevity as one of the definitive components of clarity in technical writing: Brevity means that we cut every word, phrase, or sentence, whenever possible, to the extent that the intended meaning of the text is not altered (43). And for well over a decade, Richard Lanham has been urging writers to calculate and reduce the lard factor in their writing (4). Collectively, the sins listed above are called redundancy or wordiness. Redundancy is widely seen as a kind of linguistic cholesterol, clogging the arteries of our prose and impeding the efficient circulation of knowledge. However, I will argue that, just as a more thorough understanding of cholesterol reveals the existence of good cholesterol (HDL) as well as bad (LDL), so a broader view on the principle of redundancy reveals its effective ness in certain situations, particularly beyond the sentence level. In this article I aim to revive the beneficial or functional sense of redundancy and show that functional redundancy in writing need not be a contradiction in terms. I believe a discussion of redundancy should include its opposite, ellipsis, so I will define both terms, emphasizing the beneficial sense of each, and then show how they appear in both reading and writing. In the latter part of the article, to illustrate the pervasiveness of redundancy and ellipsis, I will discuss examples of each in document design and in figures of speech. My attention will mainly be on technical writing, but the principles I will discuss may apply to other genres, too.