Day 219: Remove superfluous quantifiers.

Writing style and writing quality are difficult to balance effectively. Writing style is the habitual use of particular expressions, word choices, and sentence and paragraph structures. As an editor, I believe that style has lower importance than audience appropriateness, clarity, and concision.

One characteristic of style that can be revised is the use of superfluous quantifiers, i.e., unnecessary words that refer to a quantity. Consider these two sentences.

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“She made a presentation to the entire board of directors.”

“I will inform all of the stakeholders.”

The superfluous quantifiers are “entire” and “all of,” respectively. For example, “the board of directors” implies all the members of the board, or the entire board. The sentence meanings don’t change when these words are removed, giving us these concise sentences.

“She made a presentation to the board of directors.”

“I will inform the stakeholders.”

“Yes,” you might be asking, “but what if the writer doesn’t mean the entire board or all the stakeholders?” The writer will need to explain:

“She made a presentation to the board members who attended the meeting.”

“I will inform the appropriate stakeholders.”

Day 220: Use plural subjects to avoid gender bias.

Subjects and pronouns must match in number. This means using a singular pronoun with a singular subject, or a plural pronoun with a plural subject. Consider this sentence.

“The driver turned off his meter.”

The subject is “driver,” and it refers to only one person. The pronoun is “his,” and this, too, refers to only one person. Thus, the subject and pronoun agree in number. This gets tricky when referring to a group of people or a type of person. Consider this sentence.

“No driver will turn off the meter when they are waiting for the passenger.”

Here, the subject is still “driver.” However, the pronoun being used for “driver” is “they.” This avoids using he, which demonstrates a gender bias. (After all, women can be drivers, too.) Although using “they” avoids gender bias, it is incorrect. The subject is singular, but the pronoun is plural.

You can write he or she, which is correct, but this is cumbersome to read. The best choice is to make the subject plural: change “The driver” to Drivers. Now we have this correct, non-biased sentence.

“No drivers will turn off the meter when they are waiting for a passenger.”