Newsletter and Grammar Coach

Nutritionists use the term “empty calories” in reference to sugary and fatty foods and snacks that contain calories but are deficient in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, protein, fiber or other nutritional components. Although empty-calorie foods can produce short-term energy bursts, they do more harm than good, including prompting overeating to compensate for insufficient nutrients. The body stores unused empty calories in the form of fat, thereby contributing to cardiovascular disease and unwanted weight gain.

Despite those warnings, empty-calorie foods are appealing because they taste good. Sugared drinks, potato chips, candy, ice cream, fried foods, sugary breakfast cereals, cookies, pastries, mayonnaise and crackers are all tasty culprits.

Likewise, writing can be impaired by empty-calorie words that occupy space but fail to contribute useful content. Many people tend to sprinkle their writing with superfluous empty-calorie “filler” words, either unknowingly or in a feeble attempt to amplify a point. The test to identify filler words is whether they can be omitted without altering meaning.

The test result is easy to see in a law enforcement agency’s announcement that “Sheriff’s deputies have succeeded in locating the four missing individuals.” Finding the missing people obviously was the measure of success, rendering the words “succeeded in” superfluous in that context. The more succinct statement “Sheriff’s deputies have located the four missing individuals” preserves the meaning, with greater punch.

The text of a history lesson about a coup in Honduras included the statement that “Jean-Bertrand Aristide was awakened in the early hours of the morning on February 28, 2004, and forced onto a plane that took him to the Central African Republic.” Some people find the phrase “early morning hours” enchanting, but the word “hours” in that sentence is not only superfluous but imprecise. Aristide’s awakening likely required only seconds, not hours. No meaning would have been lost by writing, “Jean-Bertrand Aristide was awakened in the early morning of February 28, 2004.”

“One call gets you four to five proposals from four to five different companies,” a radio commercial teased. Four to five companies are inherently different — that is, not all the same company. That renders the word “different” gratuitous. The advertiser may have repeated “four to five” for emphasis, but the fundamental message is, “One call will generate proposals from four to five companies.”

In a scholarly article about “human microchipping” published in an academic law review journal, the author wrote, “BioHax International, located in Sweden, began placing implants in the workers of local start-up Epicenter back in 2015” and added, “While both of these instances are quite scary in terms of how easily RFID technology could be hacked, these articles were written back in 2006.” In both cases, the adverb “back” was superfluous; the year conveyed the notion of the past.

A real estate investment company’s economic forecast report declared, “Private credit entering the real estate ecosystem over the past several years has been very healthy for the market overall, and the dynamic of private credit is not going to end anytime soon.” The writer stumbled on a couple of hurdles. Did you spot them? Writers typically summon the sterile adverb “very” to brace a weak adjective — in this case, healthy. A more resourceful writer would have used an unassisted, expressive adjective such as “lucrative” or “bountiful” rather than “very healthy.” In addition, the word “anytime” is unnecessary; deleting it to read “not going to end soon” enables the statement to cross the finish line one word sooner.

After thieves disabled the electrical system of a public school in Vallejo, California, the school system’s superintendent announced, “Upon further examination, we discovered that someone had broken in and had stripped all our copper wiring to the breakers, essentially leaving the campus dark.” The word “essentially” was superfluous padding. The theft left the electrical system inoperative. The school was in the dark. No further qualifiers were needed.

Updates about active fires must convey vital information succinctly. Anxious homeowners and business owners who are awaiting news have no patience for verbose, officious speech. An announcement that fire crews “stopped the forward progress of the fire” is needlessly redundant. Progress is, by definition, forward movement. “Fire crews stopped the progress of the fire” is more to the point.

You likely can find the “empty-calorie” redundancy in the abstract that two university professors wrote for a scholarly journal article that began, “The state’s educational systems must collaborate together to enable transfer students to gain the necessary skills that support degree completion strategies.” That‘s right — “collaborate” and “together” are redundant. The authors should have written either “collaborate” or “work together,” but not both.

Many other words — primarily adverbs — and phrases are superfluous in most instances. Be wary of these and other “empty calorie” terms:

• absolutely (when used to exaggerate a point rather than to describe something with no limitations or restrictions)
• all time (as in “all-time record,” because a record inherently encompasses all time)
• as a matter of fact (raises suspicion that the prior material contained fallacies)
• as far as I’m concerned (self-evident)
• certainly (may undermine confidence in prior content)
• clearly (a well-developed argument doesn’t need this reinforcement)
• completely (when used with self-defining terms such as “empty,” “full”
• definitely (see “certainly”)
• for all practical purposes (a noncommittal phrase)
• for her part (or his part or their part), as in “Hobbs, for her part, said the department is simply following the law and ensuring the long-term supply of groundwater.”
• just (as in “the painting is just beautiful”)
• needless to say (then don’t say it)
• really (when used as an intensifier, like “very”)
• reasonably (to whom?)
• seriously (have you been joking until this point?)
• simply (unneeded, as in the “for her part” entry)
• totally (when used with words such as “full,” “obvious” and “engulfed” that inherently indicate totality)

Be wary of phrases in which one term defines or envelops another, such as “introduced for the first time” “foreign import,” “end result,” “novel invention,” “bald-headed,” “carefully scrutinize,” “originally founded,” “basic fundamentals” and “final destination.”

Scrutinize your writing and pluck out as many of these “empty calorie” words and phrases as possible. By making your points more succinctly, you’ll hold the attention of your readers longer — and keep them hungering for more.

Preparation of a piece of writing for publication is like driving from home to work: in order to get from here to there you need to follow the rules of the road. When you’re behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, you have to drive on the proper side of the road, stop at red lights, and obey speed limits. When preparing a manuscript for publication in a book, magazine or scholarly journal, certain standards likewise must be met.

While rules vary among publications, some manuscript preparation guidelines are widely applicable. We have compiled a list of 12 tips that drive manuscript preparation.

1. Stay in your lane: Authors write. Graphic artists design. A manuscript is not a page layout. It is the written content that a graphic designer will subsequently incorporate into an artistic layout. A manuscript should consist only of text, with minimal character formatting, such as italics, boldface, superscript and subscript character attributes as needed. Manuscript text should not be formatted into columns; lines of text should run the full width of the page.

2. Apply breaks judiciously: Excessive line returns create traffic jams for designers. Avoid many unhappy returns — manual line returns are for writing on typewriters, not word processors. Writers should let type wrap naturally to successive lines because line breaks in a manuscript rarely coincide with line breaks in the published layout. If you want to specify a page break for a new chapter or other break in the content, do not repeatedly hit the “return” key until text is forced onto the next page. Use either a page break or section break command to start a new page.

3. Alignment: Set body text to align left, with a ragged right margin. Avoid the temptation to justify type, with straight left and right margins. Word processing applications typically are inelegant in justification of type, leaving uneven spacing between words that can throw speed bumps into the editing process. The designer will set paragraph alignment controls as needed for the publication.

4. Margins: Just as roads have shoulders, manuscripts have margins. Most publishers ask writers to use uniform 1-inch margins — at the top, bottom and both sides of manuscript files. Although the finished publication may have different margins, the designer will make that adjustment at the layout stage.

5. Type font: While heading and body text fonts vary widely among periodicals and books, and writers may have a particular font in mind for their finished work, those choices are not made at the manuscript stage. The standards for manuscript preparation are Times New Roman, Arial or Calibri, with all body text in 12-point, double-spaced type. The graphic designer will choose and apply type font formatting.

6. Styles: Leaving all manuscript text formatted as the default “normal” style complicates the designer’s job. One thing an author can — and should — do is set and apply styles to all manuscript written components — headings, various levels of subheadings, captions, table and figure headings, footnotes, bibliographic citations and other elements. In Microsoft Word the “style” function is found under the top-level “tools” menu). The fonts that a writer chooses for styles are only “placeholders.” The designer may choose different fonts for the layout. Microsoft Word styles are helpful, though, because they can be imported into page layout applications, where they easily can be redefined for the page layout. As long as all text in the manuscript is tagged with style attributes, the designer can format that text in the entire document by modifying the definition of the style.

7. Indents: The first line of each paragraph should be indented to help readers identify the start of a new paragraph. But don’t use the space bar or the tab key to manually indent the first line of a paragraph. After you have chosen font, size and other character attributes for body text, use the paragraph formatting menu to set an indent — typically 0.5 inch — for the first line of a paragraph. Then after highlighting your formatted body text line, use it to create a style. Styles are helpful because you can apply all the formatting they contain to other text with a single mouse or keyboard click. That will help you maintain consistency throughout your document. If your document contains block indents — such as a block quotation — use block indent formatting for such material rather than using the spacebar to position it.

8. Illustration materials: Photos or illustrative figures should be kept separate rather than embedding them in the manuscript. Depending upon individual settings, Microsoft Word may apply compression and reduce the resolution of imported images. If the resolution setting is “high fidelity” and preferences specify that images in the file should not be compressed, that can result in an excessively large manuscript file size. For printed documents, illustration materials should be high resolution — 300 dpi or ppi (dots or pixels per inch) or greater in TIFF, PNG or JPG format. Further, placement of photos in manuscript may not coincide with the parameters of the layout. Publishers typically prefer separate, well-labeled files for each illustration item, with prompts in the manuscript indicating the preferred locations for figures and photos relative to the text. Numbering the illustration materials can help ensure their proper placement.

9. Avoid text boxes: Microsoft Word text boxes don’t necessarily import as intended into page layout applications. To indicate content that is to be boxed off from other text, type instructions to the designer above such material. Supply tables as separate files consisting of editable text, rather than as image files.

10. Figure titles and captions: Unless instructed otherwise, create a supplementary file containing titles and captions for illustration materials. Their position in the published layout may not necessarily coincide with the spot shown in the manuscript, so keeping them in a separate file will assist the designer in creating the layout — and also will serve as an inventory checklist of illustration materials and accompanying descriptive information.

11. Citations: One component that lacks a standard is citation style. Depending upon the publisher, references can appear in footnotes at the bottom of pages, or in a references list following the main body. Some publications prefer tagging in-text citations with superscripted numbers, but other publications specify abbreviated author name and date references within parentheses. Authors should confirm the preferred citation style of individual publications before submitting manuscripts.

12. Caution about tracking: Complete your review of “tracked” changes before submitting your manuscript for publication. Accept or reject changes as you wish, and delete all comments, in order to create a “clean” document that is ready for layout, on the road to publication.

All of these tips are applicable to authors publishing their books through EditPros’ BookPrep service. As part of the BookPrep package, EditPros professionally formats the interior pages of each of each author’s book, designs the book cover, and readies the consolidated material for print publication. EditPros also formats and converts manuscript files into e-book formats for sales through Amazon (Kindle), Apple (iBooks), Barnes & Noble (Nook), and Kobo, by means of submission to IngramSpark's e-book service.

With BookPrep, authors retain all rights to their books, and collect 100 percent of sales royalties.

We invite you to LEARN MORE about the EditPros BookPrep service.

Lori V. wrote:

“Our company uses the term ‘permanent’ as a classification of employees. I think that term is incorrect because permanent means forever, doesn’t it? No one lasts forever, so what would be a more accurate word?”

The grammar coach replies:

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