Re: process:
The phrase “in the process of” never adds anything to the sentence in which it appears. You can safely omit it and thereby tighten your sentence — e.g.:Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site: Modern American Usage is, to my mind, a model of clarity and good sense (though I like to type out numbers up to ninety-nine).“I have on my desk a little manuscript from the fourteenth century written by an unknown author, which I am in the process of [delete ‘in the process of’] editing.” Donald J. Lloyd, “Our National Mania for Correctness,” in A Linguistics Reader 57, 58 (Graham Wilson ed., 1967).The singular of “process” is pronounced /PRAH-ses/ in American English, /PROH-ses/ in British English. But what about the plural? Is it /PRAH-ses-iz/ (/PROH-/ in British English) or /PRAH-suh-seez/? The first, preferably: the second is an affectation because the word is English, not Greek.
“Appropriately for a community that was in the process of [delete ‘in the process of’] acquiring the sophistication of golf and drugs, this was not a case of a mean little robbery gone wrong but a thoroughly contemporary killing.” Owen Harris, "A Long Time Between Murders," Am. Scholar, Winter 2001, at 71, 79.
I wonder if people who use "in the process of" do so out of habit, or if some are trying to convey that it's not a single act, but a series of acts that will take time. I'm in the process of researching this. Not.
ReplyDeleteI think you’re right. Or it might suggest that whatever the work is, someone’s not doing it at that moment. I still like Garner’s suggestion to delete.
ReplyDeleteI’m in the process of wondering whether to follow this advice.
ReplyDeleteI’m sure you’ll make the right decision going forward.
ReplyDelete