‘Close’ Proximity, ‘End’ Result, and More Redundant Words to Delete From Your Writing

Advice on extraneous words from the Random House copy chief

Benjamin Dreyer
Forge
Published in
7 min readJan 24, 2019

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There’s a lot of deleting in copyediting, not just of the “very”s and “rather”s and “quite”s and excrescent “that”s with which we all encase our prose like so much Bubble Wrap and packing peanuts, but of restatements of…

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Benjamin Dreyer
Forge
Writer for

Benjamin Dreyer is vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief, of Random House, and the author of Dreyer’s English.