I don't subscribe to the view that good editing requires the ruthless elimination of every single word that is not logically essential to a sentence. Sometimes idiom or the natural cadence of English favors phrases that aren't stripped to the bone. There's nothing wrong with "hurry-up" even though "hurry" means the same thing. [The same is true for "I thought to myself."]
But in many cases, extraneous words really do gum up our prose; many padded expressions are weak, flabby and ineffective.
Phillip B. Corbitt, The New York Times, September 16, 2014
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