From the course: Ninja Writing: The Four Levels of Writing Mastery

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Avoid pointless distinctions

Avoid pointless distinctions

From the course: Ninja Writing: The Four Levels of Writing Mastery

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Avoid pointless distinctions

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- So we looked at implied words, which are completely unnecessary. I want to talk about something similar here: Pointless distinctions. Sometimes, and I'm seeing this a lot when I'm editing, people are making distinctions that are not really necessary within that context. Take a look at this example. Manchester United expect to be top of the league in calendar-year 2016. Where's the pointless distinction there? It's calendar-year. What other kind of year are we trying to distinguish it from? In business journalism, we do sometimes make the distinction between a calendar-year and a financial-year, because they can be different time periods. It could be a year but it could end in the middle of the year, so it would be the 12 months to the middle of the year. So if we refer to a company's result for the year, we may want to distinguish between the calendar-year and the financial-year within that article. But you've got to look at what people will assume and then take your distinctions…

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