Tighten Your Writing by Condensing Tautologies

To tighten each sentence, search for redundant words where the meaning could be clearly expressed with a single word. Most writers know to eliminate doublets and triplets, but overlook other redundancies in:

  • word pairs or groups where the meaning of a word implies or includes its modifier
  • word pairs or groups where the specific word implies the general category
  • throw-away phrases that describe the writer’s intentions, give directions to the reader, or describe the structure of the text
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Understanding Why Common Phrases Are Actually Redundant

It’s common writing advice: Avoid redundancies. Redundant writing dilutes our message, kills subtlety, and wastes space and time. The words you waste with redundant language could be better used for examples to support your ideas or details that drive your point home and make it memorable. But redundancies are hard to spot without thinking deeply about every word in every sentence.

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A Primer on Passive Voice: What It is, When to Use It, How to Fix It

Everyone remembers their high school English teachers admonishing them against using the dreaded passive voice. According to composition class lore, using passive voice was the chief writing sin—and avoiding it was the key to strengthening writing. If true, then two questions remain:

  1. What is passive voice, anyway? (Don’t worry: Even the most pedantic folks can get it wrong!)
  2. How do we re-write sentences to avoid passive voice? (What good is pointing out a writing ill without offering a writing cure?)

In this blog post, we’ll give you a refresher on passive voice, show you how to fix it, and explain the four times when passive voice is acceptable in your writing.

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How to Cut Sentence-Starting Clutter

Writers slow down their sentences with unnecessary words that delay the point. They may do this because middle school English teachers told them to use transitions; they read great 19th century writers renowned for languid and balanced sentences; or they’re trying to sound sophisticated by relying on industry clichés. Your readers won’t care why you write as you do—they will only care that they must read it. So do them a favor and cut the clutter.

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Can Action Verbs Be Written in Passive Voice?

Writing in active voice is often cited as a core part of plain language. Though the idea seems simple, it becomes confusing when you see phrases like active voice and active verbs used interchangeably. In this article, we’ll clarify the difference and help you choose the right voice to communicate your ideas. The better your understanding of language, the better you’ll communicate with your audience—and that’s the goal of plain language!

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Complying with Federal Plain Language Guidelines

Writing in plain language helps you communicate with your audience. If that’s not enough incentive to write clearly and organize information logically, then consider this: Professionals throughout the United States and around the world are required to write in plain language.

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How to Develop Powerful Funding Proposals for Nonprofit Donors

Nonprofit organizations and universities usually rely on two main sources of funding: public grants and private donations. Public grants usually draw straightforward proposals. Usually, the grantor issues an RFP or other notice of funding that includes instructions about what information they want, and sometimes, what format the information should be in. Private donations are harder to apply for because they lack a formalized process.

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6 Tips to Improve Your Proposal Writing

No matter how many times you’ve done it, writing a proposal is always a little nerve-wracking. Whether you're applying for grant funding or pursuing professional services contracts, pressure to distinguish your organization from the competition and show your expertise is high.

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The Perfect Brief Part 12 - The Brief Brief List

For our final installment on The Perfect Brief, we offer a list you can quickly peruse to ensure you have checked all of the elements in your brief to make it the most convincing document you can put before a judge.

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The Perfect Brief Part 11 - Polishing Your Brief

A polished document encourages a generous reading, so review to correct mistakes, shorten the brief, and generally make the judge’s job easier. Below are several ideas to ensure that what we send to the court is our best work and enhances our reputation with the judge.

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The Perfect Brief Part 10 - The 10 Myths of Brief Writing

Over centuries, these false notions have grown to dominate a litigation practice and stuff our briefs with the results of unsavory habits. We aim to dispel them, so you can deliver to the court your most persuasive brief.

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5 Tips to Tackle Inbox Overload

Whether you just returned from a two-week vacation or a two-day weekend, you probably logged on to your laptop to find a full inbox. Responding to email – and generating email for our own projects – consumes much of our workdays; we spend more than a quarter of our workweeks on email. If you’re overwhelmed by your inbox or just frustrated it’s preventing you from getting to other tasks, try these five strategies to clarify your emails and spend less time in your inbox.

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Q&A with WordRake Founder Gary Kinder

What gave you the idea for WordRake?

Although I have a law degree, I’ve devoted my career to writing and teaching writing. I’ve taught to businesses, universities, government agencies, and writing/publishing conferences. But most of my teaching was in the thousand-plus writing programs I taught to lawyers around the country. While I was teaching to lawyers, I noticed patterns in their writing, and I wondered if I could use those patterns to help them. After years of studying the patterns, I realized that a finite set of “signs” showed up consistently in words and phrases that added no meaning or formed a dull expression. And I saw that this was not peculiar to lawyers: these signs appeared in all writing. I analyzed the writing of the best writers, from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists, to writers in Esquire and Vanity Fair, to Supreme Court Justices. In about 2000, I wondered if I could work with software engineers to put these signs and patterns into algorithms. I was astounded to see how the signs and patterns so consistently hunted down useless words and dull phrases.

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5 Kinds of Errors to Check in Legal Proofreading

Because presenting our work in a clear and pleasing manner is so important, effective legal writers devote 35% of their time in any legal writing task to revising, editing, proofreading, and otherwise polishing the document.

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Don’t Let the Blank Page Intimidate You

Facing a blank page is like stage fright without seeing the audience—maybe the most intimidating experience we can have. It’s intimidating because someone will read whatever we put on that blank page, and they will pass judgment. We’re putting ourselves out there.

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Our Story

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WordRake founder Gary Kinder has taught over 1,000 writing programs for AMLAW 100 firms, Fortune 500 companies, and government agencies. He’s also a New York Times bestselling author. As a writing expert and coach, Gary was inspired to create WordRake when he noticed a pattern in writing errors that he thought he could address with technology.

In 2012, Gary and his team of engineers created WordRake editing software to help writers produce clear, concise, and effective prose. It runs in Microsoft Word and Outlook, and its suggested changes appear in the familiar track-changes style. It saves time and gives confidence. Writing and editing has never been easier.