Not only 'not only' but also 'also'

 

After a decade of writing the internet for local businesses, the role of educating people about garage doors and patio paving was made redundant, so I took a different job: editing the internet.

Turns out there are people and machines, and people using machines, who can churn out internet content faster than me, and, for a time, I was paid to knock their output into shape.

Believe it or not, this work chiefly consisted of deleting the word 'also'. A task I undertook with relish.

Finnginn's first rule of concise writing:

If a word can be removed from a sentence without changing the meaning, remove it.

In 90% of instances, 'also' can happily be removed from a sentence by application of Finnginn's first rule. I consider it a courtesy to the reader to excise the words 'also', 'both' and, more often than not, 'available'.

My biggest bugbear, however, is the ugly construction: 'Not only... but also...'. We have this lovely way in English of expressing the same thought in an elegant three letters. A person might write: 'Not only... but also...' But they always mean: 'and'. There's zero need to describe a restaurant as serving not only fish but also chips. Once you become aware of this hallmark of hack writing, you'll see it everywhere. 

One writer with whom I collaborated closely during this period of editing the internet confided that they caught themself editing 'also' out of a text message to their partner. 

I knew then that my work there was done. 

Which was fortunate, because head office flew in from Copenhagen shortly afterwards and made 50 of us redundant.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: one redundancy may be considered unfortunate, two: smacks of carelessness.