As I continue to read poorly edited (I’m not referring to typos) KU books, I continue to find fundamental problems to talk about.
Here’s one that will probably be obvious to many people when I point it out, but it would never jump out in a self-editing session to them.
Here’s a real example:
Maria glanced in the window of the coffee shop and saw that it was nearly packed to completely full capacity.
Modifying Absolutes
This lesson is again on the level of word choice in sentence construction.
There’s a lot to pull from this one mistake. The first is in modifying absolutes. There are times when there’s no choice. One must modify a word that has an absolute meaning.
An example of an absolute is “perfect.” It exists as an absolute extreme. I don’t have much of a problem with saying “nearly perfect” (in other words, modifying the absolute), because synonyms like “flawed” have too much baggage to get the right meaning.
The first part of this lesson is to always try to get the right meaning without forming this construction.
I believe the Chicago Manual of Style even lists this as a mistake. The reason is that something either is absolute or it isn’t. Absolutes set up a pure binary, so it doesn’t really make sense to modify it somehow.
The common example is “unique.” The word unique means “one of a kind” or “the sole example.” This is absolute and should not be modified.
For example, “That’s the most unique car I’ve seen.” The word “most” doesn’t do anything, because the word unique already has that information in it.
One should write, “That car is unique.”
Reduce Wordiness and Redundancy
But that’s not the real fundamental flaw in the example. The fundamental flaw is redundancy and wordiness.
Let’s just look at “packed to completely full capacity.” First off, “completely” serves no purpose. “Full” and “completely full” have the exact same meaning, so it is redundant to say it that way (it’s again modifying an absolute in an unnecessary way).
But “full capacity” is kind of redundant as well, because “packed to full capacity” and “packed to capacity” have the exact same meaning.
It is also touch jargon-y, almost like corporate doublespeak. The other option was to use “full.” That flows much better to me.
Now “full” is an absolute, so we come full circle and have to decide what to do with the “nearly” before it.
I say scrap it!
A Revised Version
When looking into a coffee shop, a human isn’t going to see a difference between “nearly full” and “full.” It’s just going to look full. Here’s my fixed version:
Maria glanced in the window of the coffee shop and saw that it was full.
Go back and read the original now. Wow. This version is so much better. The last two lessons I said an editor wouldn’t point it out because the mistakes were too fundamental.
Any editor worth paying for will point out this type of mistake, so I have to assume the self-published writer that wrote this book did not hire one.
