Omit needless words, codified
27th March 2004
I continue to try to improve my writing. “Omit needless words” is all well and good, but identifying needless words can be a difficult task for the untrained eye. Paul Ford’s Passivator bookmarklet highlights adverbs and passive verbs, both of which can indicate weak writing.
More recent articles
- GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and model card - 7th August 2025
- OpenAI's new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good - 5th August 2025
- ChatGPT agent's user-agent - 4th August 2025