The amount of redundancy is one of the major differences between written and spoken English. It’s very common in spoken English but not so common when we write. Usually when we write we only express each idea once. This is because we are striving for the ABCs—Accuracy, Brevity and Clarity.
But it’s not just repeating ideas. There is one expression I see regularly in written English, which I would say is not ‘good’ English.
Here it is:
The reason I am writing this is because I want you to understand that in business English it is a good idea to remove redundancy.
The word ‘because’ is always about the reason. It implies ‘reason’.
So for the sake of ABC:
I am writing this because I want you to understand that in business English it is a good idea to remove redundancy.
So I am writing this blog post because I want to make it clear that when you use ‘because’ you don’t need to include ‘the reason is’. (Not, “So, the reason I am writing this blog post is because …”)
Got it?
Happy writing.
