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.
comments: 4
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.
I 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.
I’m in the process of wondering whether to follow this advice.
I’m sure you’ll make the right decision going forward.
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