A huge problem in other people's texts and the worst is that often they dispute it's an issue! "It's obvious what "it" means."
I learned Indonesian about twenty years, and the language is a lot less prissy about avoiding repetition than English. I picked up on this, and people I wrote for noticed it positively.
"This man, a man who has spend five years trying to destroy America - is this really the man you want to vote for?"
The example is a little exaggerated, but it gives you the idea. Indonesian does this all the time - "orang itu orang Inggris", "that man is an English man".
People who give speeches talk this way, and there's a reason - it's because it makes it easier for people to understand.
This is a fantastic article, by the way - you stole ;-) so many of my ideas.
Avoiding hedges is great. When I'm editing people, I call it, "Say what you mean."
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Oh, I have one hint for you - I have a list of specific adverbs (and some adjectives) that add little and that I almost always remove.
One of them is "definitely": "Hedges are definitely bad, let’s stop using them."
(Ah, that's a run-on sentence, by the way. :-D)
What does definitely add? Nothing definite!
"Hedges are bad, so let's stop using them."
I might even write: "Hedging is bad, so don't."
I don't even have a formal list, but it also includes words like "rather", "somewhat", and your own "very".
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Keep up the good work and have some claps!
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Oh, one more hint from the vault. I often edit people all of whose sentences are similar in same length. I find that unaesthetic, and in my experience it impairs people's comprehension of the text.
My theory is that each sentence starts to feel like the previous one so that the eyes glaze over and start to drift closed...
You can often fix that by trying to make the topic sentence in each paragraph a bit shorter and then stretching out later in the paragraph. The short punchy sentence introduces a new paragraph and makes the reader sit up a bit.
