In James J. Kilpatrick’s weekly column today in The Fort Pierce Tribune, “The Writer’s Art,” he focused on one of my favorite topics: redundancy.

Some phrases need an extra word because it “helps the cadence of a sentence or clarifies an unfamiliar usage.” For example, instead of using a couple versions, you should instead use a couple of versions. However, Kilpatrick agrees with me that less is more.

He gave the example of a headline that mentioned great masterpieces. “Surely all masterpieces are great by definition,” he said. Therefore, great is unnecessary and gets in the way of us getting to the necessary word – masterpieces.

My editing professor taught us common redundancies, also called tautologies. Here are several: free gift, PIN number, ATM machine, final destination, brief summary.

Note previous grammar tips from “The Writer’s Art:” “Grammar tips: sentence basics, not so basic,” “Grammar tips: concision editing, often misused words,” and “Grammar tips: referent pronouns made easy.”