Saturday, July 26, 2008

Waste is a terrible thing

Quick advice: Just drop "in order to" from your writing. It's wasteful. When you next get the urge, delete those three little words and see how you've empowered your sentence. Same goes for "in fact." Ditch those words; not needed. Don't let anything get in the way of you getting to the point of what you want to say. Less is more -- three words you'll hear often from me.

That said, I'm wondering about other kinds of waste. The waste of energy doing the wrong thing, when the right thing is far easier to do. The waste of time spent on people not worth your while -- I don't advocate rudeness, I just don't think you owe everyone a piece of you. (I've learned this the hard way -- I'd write "very hard way," but that would be a waste of the word "very" when "hard" says it all.) Save your precious self for those who count.

I'm hoping to offer food for thought on all kinds of waste; life is about managing it. I don't come close to having all the answers, but sometimes it's the right question that brings you to enlightment.

Yours in waste management, WMW

3 comments:

Alina said...

Hi Christia!

I have no idea when I started to use "in order to", it was a stranger to me and now we meet once in a while. I should really drop it.

And you are right no one, except gods of each religion, owes a piece of themselves to everyone :)

Glad I've found you're blog,
Alina

The Mon Man said...

Personally, I am irritated when people say "all of a sudden," that's a waste of 2 seconds and 4 words. It's trite. People can cut it down to suddenly or the simple "than."

Waste Management Woman said...

WMW here. Must be a typo -- the comment on "all of a sudden" should have said "then" is better, not "than". (Don't worry, a friend of mine found a dropped word in my profile -- we all need editors!)