Simon Willison’s Weblog

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.

Posted 27th March 2004 at 10:06 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not - it's all very confusing - 22nd April 2026
Where's the raccoon with the ham radio? (ChatGPT Images 2.0) - 21st April 2026
Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 - 18th April 2026

This is Omit needless words, codified by Simon Willison, posted on 27th March 2004.

Next: PHP and Apache 2.0

Previous: It's only going to get worse

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/03/27/omit