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?