Bull's Eye Business Writing Tips

Correct these sentences:

Cut the following redundant words in the following:

1. A more thoughtful and considered ranking and ordering of our long-term goals is both necessary and essential.
2. The defendant contends and attests that he was not present but elsewhere at the time when the crime was committed.

Comments about last week’s question:

Nick St Amant commented:  I liked your advice on hyphens. I'd like to add that I use a mental rule sometimes.  When the phrase is an adjective, it might be hyphenated, but (and here I'm not sure of the part of speech it might be) when it's not, you might not want to hyphenate.  For example: "I have bought off-the-shelf software" is fine, but "I have bought software off the shelf" would not use hyphens. What do you think?  ( I think you are correct.)

Years ago I got into a discussion with a colleague about the word "backup." He wanted to know if it was one word or two.  After some thought, we decided that as a verb, it's two words, i.e., you can't say "I backupped my data," but would say, "I backed up my data."  BUT, I also performed a data backup. Such usage evolves.  If you look at the etymology of the word 'baseball,' you'll see that it originally was 'base ball,' then 'base-ball' and finally, baseball.'  Could be that in generations to come, 'off-the-shelf' will become 'offtheshelf.'  Nonetheless, off-the-shelf is correct in today's usage (when used as an adjective for sure).

Quote of the week:

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.”  (John Foster Dulles, former US Secretary of State (1888-1959)