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[citation needed] For example, consider the following English sentences: "I know you're coming." "I know that you're coming." In this construction, the conjunction that is optional when joining a sentence to a verb phrase with know. Both sentences are grammatically correct, but the word that is pleonastic in this case.
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
For example, in the sentence, "The bloody thing is shit, hey": "Bloody", as an attributive adjective, is an optional constituent of the sentence (thus not an expletive in the syntactical sense) and is a profanity. "Shit" is necessary to the sentence, and it is a profanity. "Hey" is not a profanity, but it is unnecessary.
Content words such as nouns, verbs and adjectives may be preserved. Subjects of this aphasia are aware of their errors in speech. Damage to the Broca's area does not affect comprehension of speech. [8] Wernicke's aphasia is characterized by fluent language with made up or unnecessary words with little or no meaning to speech.
Onomatopoeia: word that imitates a real sound (e.g. tick-tock or boom). Paradiastole: A rhetorical device using euphemistic or mild language to avoid offence or harsh reality. Parallelism: the use of similar structures in two or more clauses. Paraprosdokian: A sentence or phrase with an unexpected twist or surprise at the end.
It may be unclear which words are unnecessary, or where advice against prolixity may harm writing. In some cases a degree of repetition and redundancy, or use of figurative language and long or complex sentences can have positive effects on style or communicative effect. [11]
For instance, while the previous sentence is grammatically correct and uses words appropriately, its rhetorical structure contains unnecessary repetitions and could be revised as, "Linguistic redundancy is regarded as having more than one: agreement feature in morphology; phoneme distinguishing feature in phonology; or word to express a single ...
In literary criticism and rhetoric, a tautology is a statement that repeats an idea using near-synonymous morphemes, words or phrases, effectively "saying the same thing twice". [1] [2] Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. [3] Like pleonasm, tautology is often considered a fault of style when unintentional.