I was on the fourth grade football team, playing tight end, the first time someone called me the “Gardener.” For some reason, whenever the quarterback threw a pass to me, I ended up diving into the dirt to catch the ball. Trust me, I spent a lot of time in the dirt. Maybe the quarterback who, like me, was only 9 years old, couldn’t throw the ball far enough. Or, I was too slow. Most likely the latter was true, which is why my football career never lasted past the sixth grade.
Today I’m still called the Gardener. However, I’m now called the Gardener because I like to dig deep into an incident report and pluck out the weeds, or rather unnecessary words and phrases. It’s almost an obsession with me, but it’s all done with the goal of writing reports that are always readable and understandable. There are always words, phrases – sometimes even whole sentences and paragraphs – that can be pruned from anything you write. The trick, of course, is to know when to remove a word or phrase – and when not to.