Avoid unnecessary words

It's always a good idea to cut down on unnecessary words that can clog our sentences and kill our best attempts at clear communication.

Here is an example of unnecessary words or phrases from a document that was sent for my review this week (names are excluded here to protect the not-so innocent):

online websites
As opposed to those offline websites? There is no need to use online here.

Another excellent way to trim unnecessary words is to beware acronyms that are misused. Here is a list of acronyms to which we often add a word that is already contained in the last letter of the acronym.

ACT test
The "T" stands for test, silly!

ATM machine
The 'M' in ATM stands for machine, so this is redundant. Just say ATM.

More examples:
CAD design
CNN news network
HTML language
PIN number
RAM memory
UPC code