Retention and Redundancy
When to Redund and When Not to Redund
I know redund is not a word; it’s a joke.
Actually, strike that. I used it in and you understood what I meant, so it’s a word now. I’m sorry but I don’t make the rules. If you didn’t want redund to become a new English language verb meaning “to repeat something unnecessarily,” then you should have thought about that before you read and understood my made-up word. Let this be a lesson to us all.
Today’s Shelf Life topic was thought of by my partner, who offered to write Shelf Life for me after I said, over dinner, “I have to write Shelf Life today but I don’t want to” (a thing I say like clockwork twice a week). He said, “Why don’t I write it for you?” which he meant as a funny joke, by implying that he would not be a good candidate to write today’s Shelf Life. I said, “okay you can” so he tried harder for a rejection and said, “it will be an essay about video games then,” and I said, “that’s fine.” By then he was panicking and trying to back out of it so I assured him it only has to be more than 1300ish words and relatively free of typos and he said, “Aha, what if I just write one typo-free paragraph and then repeat it again and again?” And then I said, “Good idea thank you I will write a Shelf Life about redundancy,” and then I ate a brownie, and now here we are.
Redundancy refers to the state of being not needed or unnecessary. It can refer to repeating something unnecessarily. Something that was necessary the first time it was said may be redundant on subsequent times it is said. It can also refer to saying something explicitly that has already been implied in such a way that one can safely assume it was understood. For instance, when someone says “ATM machine” they are technically being redundant because the “M” in ATM is short for “machine”; but, moreover, the word “ATM” is so ubiquitous that, even without mentally spelling out the abbreviation in one’s mind (“ATM? Do you mean an automatic teller machine??”), the abbreviation itself signifies the machine it represents and so, to say “machine” on the end, is unnecessary—and redundant.
Oddly enough, the abbreviation PIN has grown in its meaning to the degree that it is no longer, necessarily, redundant to say “PIN number.” The abbreviation PIN originally stood for “personal identification number,” and so when someone says “PIN number” you might imagine they are saying “personal identification number number” and have a little chuckle at their expense. However, there are plenty of businesses that now require a “PIN” to be more complex and include letters and symbols. The abbreviation “PIN” has taken on its own meaning separate from the meaning of the words it abbreviates and now a PIN may not necessarily be a number; so to specify a “PIN number” is no longer always redundant.
Languages are cool.
Hi, it’s me, I’m back from several interesting linguistic tangents that unfortunately were not germane to this article and have been deleted. I don’t know why I’m like this. Just kidding we all know it’s ADHD. This is why I don’t get any sleep.
Redundancy in communication is generally a bad thing except when it’s critical to ensuring your message got across and the line between those two things is fine and constantly wiggling around like the snake that lives under my deck. Today’s Shelf Life is to help you understand when to repeat information to drive important points home and when to trust the reader to retain the information they’ve been given.
This is not only guidance for fiction- and creative-nonfiction-writing. This is also advice for writing communications like emails and letters. Letters are a piece of paper you write a message on and then send to another person using the postal service. They come from the same era as FABBT (flesh-and-blood bank tellers).
Before I dig in, I’m going to go ahead and call out the “pyramid of learning” or “cone of experience” often attributed to Edgar Dale that you may find if you Google, that indicates people retain 10 percent of what they read, 20 percent of what they hear, 30 percent of what they see, and so on. This pyramid or cone has been refuted. A lot of times. Dale did create a cone of experience that he used to illustrate that people retain more of what they see than what they hear, more of what they hear than what they read, and so on. But Dale did not include mathematical percentages and he did not base his cone of experience on any research. There is no science behind the “people retain 10 percent of what they read” sound byte. It’s not that simple.
When people read they take information into their brain and they retain some of that information. The amount of information retained, as far as I can tell, depends on a number of different things including:
How good the reader is at remembering things, generally.
How important the information is to them at the moment they read it.
How interesting the information is to them at the moment they read it.
How much information there is for them to take in.
And more, obviously, but those are the important ones I’m going to talk about.
The more information someone collects from what they’re reading, the less overall they can retain. Everyone has a limit to how much information they’re going to retain in their brain on a given subject and the longer or denser your written message is—be that message a work email or a novel—the less of what’s there they can retain.
Put another way, once you hit information saturation people stop remembering new details unless they let go of some old ones. The amount of information it takes to saturate somebody is variable but I think most everyone has a saturation point somewhere.
Most people don’t take notes when they read something. Blessings upon those of you who take notes when you read, you are the real MVPs. Many people do not. After all, we can always refer back to what we have read if we need a refresher.
When you write something short, like an email or a short story, the reader has the opportunity to read over the whole thing and then read it a second time, if necessary, with the full picture in mind, to organize the information in order of importance. To be fair, the reader can also do that with a novel but most readers will not read the whole novel once and then turn around and read it again to get the most out of it. Then again, to be fair some more, most people don’t do that with emails either—even when they should.
This means the most crucial information has to be put before the reader such that it is:
Interesting enough to retain; or
Obviously important enough to retain; or
Repeated enough times that it is retained through brute force.
That last one is where redundancy comes in. Readers remember things that are interesting to them, or things that are obviously important, and they also remember things they hear (or read) multiple times.
As a writer, you have the least control over what the individual reader finds interesting. You have more control over what the reader believes is important. You have the most control over how many times a given message is repeated for the reader.
When you have some information to convey to the reader that you need them to carry forward through your entire email, or your entire novel, or your entire series of novels, you have a few options to help the reader with their retention. You can attempt to make the information more interesting, or make sure the reader knows it’s important, or you can repeat it multiple times—or a combination of all three.
However, you do not want to get to the point where you’re repeating information that’s already been retained; that can make your reader feel bored or even condescended to. You don’t want to rely totally on brute force to just keep pushing the same message over and over.
Now, I am not a brain scientist or an information retention scientist or in fact any kind of scientist, but I believe that, interestingness and importance being otherwise equal, people are most likely to retain the information they receive first. When you start reading something, like when you open a brand-new book and start on page 1, every piece of information is new. You receive your first piece of information, there’s no reason not to retain it. It’s not competing for space. Every piece of information you get after that, you have to decide whether you keep it in detail or discard it. Once your brain starts to get full of what you can juggle in working memory, you have to start letting some stuff go when you want to remember something new.
In the Harry Potter series of books, characters remark over and over again that Harry looks like his father but has his mother’s eyes. This information is neither interesting nor, at first glance, important. We already have been told what Harry looks like and also he’s on the cover of every book and he’s on movie posters and is a Lego minifigure. We know what he looks like. As we rarely see the parents, who are deceased, it doesn’t much matter that he looks like them. Also everyone looks like a combination of their biological parents and ancestors, that’s how genealogy works.
However, the author who must not be named needs readers to retain that important for seven novels until it finally becomes important at the end. That’s why it gets repeated by a random character like every five minutes. The information needs to stick with the reader while flying under the radar because you can’t always point out your important information with a big flashing arrow coming from a marginal note that reads “Hey remember this it’ll be important six books from now.”
That series used the same tactic often, of repeatedly showing the reader something seemingly unimportant only for it to turn out to be important later on in the same book or in the series (for example, the Shrieking Shack in book three or the Ravenclaw House Ghost throughout the series).
Something that’s been repeated for the reader many times will stick with them even if it doesn’t stand out as important, so when the time comes when they need that information they will have it, even if they didn’t make a point of remembering.
How can you make sure you’ve repeated something enough times, or made it interesting or important enough, to ensure the reader retains it till the necessary moment when you, the writer, will call upon it?
This is one of the harder things for a writer to assess in their own work because the writer knows this thing is important; the writer cannot fail to retain it. This is the area where I rely upon beta readers and editors the most. You need a reader who is coming to the story fresh, without knowing what to expect, so you can find out if they retain the correct information—whether you dropped enough hints or too many.
When I share early drafts with the folks who read for me, I follow up a questionnaire specific to that manuscript to ask the reader for their thoughts on particular elements. For instance, if I had the main character walk past The Goblet of Foreshadowing on page one and that goblet is reintroduced and becomes important later, I may ask my reader: “What is the earliest you recall encountering The Goblet of Foreshadowing in this story? When’s the first time you saw it?”
I ask these specific questions after my reader has completed their read and shared any general feedback, because I don’t want to contaminate their initial feedback with leading questions—and also because sometimes they answer the questions on their own in their initial feedback without prompting, which is often rewarding.
Beta readers are also helpful for letting you know when you’ve laid it on too thick or you’re bashing the reader over the head with your foreshadowing. If you don’t have any beta readers on the hook to help you out, make sure you read up before choosing your fighters.
I’ll leave you with this final tip. When you’re composing an email and you have a handful of things you need the reader to retain and then you have additional supporting information and details, lead with the handful of things you need the reader to retain and
Put them
In a
Bullet list
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