Deadwood

Deadwood. What is it? Where does it come from?

Deadwood can be defined as any words in a sentence that do not add meaning to the sentence. (Refer to Page 127 of the textbook for examples and explanation; Page 129 for exercises. Try a couple - how much deadwood did you remove?)

Words that don't add meaning? How can that be? All words have meaning, so they must add something, right? Not necessarily. True, words standing alone have meaning. But in the context of a sentence, they may not add anything. Three ways words don't add meaning are:

1. They are redundant - they say the same thing twice (short in length, for example)
   
2. They are logically obvious (the complaints we have heard about - of course, because you don't know anything about complaints you haven't heard about!)
   
3. They are "extra" words used mostly for stitching parts of sentences together or for rhythm and cadence (it helps me to think or it helps me think - what's the difference?)
   

Why do we write deadwood in the 

first place, then? The answer is deceptively simple: we write the way we speak. Think about it. When you write, there's a little voice in your head (usually your voice, but more about that later) and you write down what the voice says. It's rhythms, cadences, grammatical mistakes, and fumbling around for just the right word for the situation can lead to deadwood.

Speech is a social process, much more than just a method f

or moving information from one individual to another. It's about who is in control, how engaged and sympathetic you are, and sometimes just a way to keep connected to other individuals (think Seinfeld - they talked about nothing for nine seasons!) We humans have been speaking to each other for as much as 100,000 years - maybe longer! And for 99.5% of that time, there was no such thing as writing. Writing as a principal means of communication among a significant portion of a population is absurdly recent (maybe 150 years or less in the US).

We live in an age of text. Despite all the doom and gloom about the downfall of writing and literacy, there has never been a time when more people could read and write, and when more communication occurred in written form.

Writing is a relatively new technology. We know how to use it, but it's not ingrained into our DNA the way speech is. It's no wonder most of us struggle with writing clearly.

We'll spend much of this semester looking at tips and tricks to becoming better writers. Cutting out deadwood is just one of the tricks. It helps make your writing more understandable, more direct, simpler, with just the right amount of detail - all of which helps accuracy. Sound familiar?

A way of seeing the variety of language

You've found from your searches that there are between half a million and a million words in the English language, yet most of us have a working vocabulary of 20,000-30,000, and of those, we use maybe 2,000 on a daily basis.

So this raises two questions: 1) Where do all those words come from? and 2) how on Earth do we manage to communicate with each other?

Here's an image that may help. It's called a "fractal." The small parts are the same shape as the large parts. Another way of saying it is the large parts are made up of smaller copies of themselves. Another way of saying it is it is infinitely recursive, and scale-independent.

Anyway, look at the central light green portion. At the very center is a little snowflake - that's your daily vocabulary. The light green section as a whole is your working vocabulary of 20,000-30,000 words. Beyond that are areas of specialization. Once you get out to the edges, very few people share that vocabulary. To translate something from the red to the blue, you have to trace a line back down to the light green, then back out. No one person knows everything.

It might be easier for red to understand blue than to understand purple, which traces a very different path out to the edges.

Hope this helps.