Redundancy and Tautology in OET Writing: Saying It Once, Correctly

“The patient’s past medical history includes a previous history of hypertension, which was first diagnosed two years ago.” Every word in that sentence is spelled correctly and the grammar is sound. It is also saying “past” twice and “history” twice for information that needs neither repetition: a medical history is, by definition, already in the past, and a diagnosis is, by definition, already a prior event once you are reporting it. Redundancy is this exact pattern — pairing a word with another word that already contains its meaning — and it is one of the most consistent, correctable sources of lost Conciseness & Clarity marks in OET Writing.

Why does redundancy cost you Conciseness & Clarity marks?

Conciseness & Clarity is the OET Writing criterion that checks whether a letter communicates its content in the most efficient form possible — not the shortest letter wins, but the letter that says everything it needs to say without padding it out with words that add length and no information. It sits alongside Purpose, Content, Genre & Style, Organisation & Layout, and Language as one of the six official criteria an OET Writing script is marked against, and redundant word pairs are one of the cleanest examples of what this criterion is designed to catch.

A referring or discharging clinician reading an OET-style letter in real practice is almost always reading several of them in a working day, often under time pressure, and every unnecessary word is a small tax on that reader’s attention. “The patient has a past history of hypertension” and “the patient has a history of hypertension” communicate the identical clinical fact. The first version is not wrong — it is simply three words longer for zero additional meaning, and that gap, repeated across a whole letter, is exactly what moves a script from a strong Conciseness & Clarity band to a merely adequate one.

This sits alongside the broader precision and wordiness issues covered in our precision in OET writing guide: precision is about exactness of fact, conciseness is about not padding that fact with extra words, and redundancy is the specific, learnable error where the padding is a second word that already restates the first.

The redundant phrases that appear most often in OET scripts

Redundancy is unusual among Conciseness & Clarity errors because it is a closed, memorisable list rather than a style judgement. Below are the phrases that show up most frequently in OET Writing scripts, with the redundant word identified and the corrected form.

Most of these pairs share a pattern: one half of the phrase is a modifier (past, future, each, back, final, completely, again, brief) that restates a meaning the main word already carries. Once you can see that pattern, new redundant pairs become easy to catch even if they are not on this exact list — “actual fact” (a fact is already actual; it cannot be a fictional fact), “unexpected surprise” (a surprise is already unexpected), and “continue to remain” (to remain already means to continue being in a state) all follow the identical logic.

Why redundant phrases survive multiple rounds of self-editing

Redundancy is hard to self-catch for a specific reason: both halves of the doubled phrase are correct English, so nothing about the sentence trips a grammar check or sounds strange when you read it back. “The patient’s past history of asthma” reads completely naturally — it is the kind of phrase used loosely in spoken clinical handover all the time, where brevity matters less than in written correspondence. The habit transfers into writing without the writer noticing, because at no point did an incorrect word get used; two correct words were simply placed next to each other when one would do.

This is also why redundancy tends to cluster with other register habits. A candidate who writes “past history” in paragraph one is likely to write “future plans” or “each and every” again later in the same letter, because the underlying habit — reaching for a familiar doubled phrase rather than the single precise word — runs through the whole piece, not just one sentence. Examiners marking Conciseness & Clarity read for that pattern across the full script.

How redundancy differs from simply writing “too much”

It is worth separating redundancy from general wordiness, because they call for different fixes. General wordiness is explaining one idea across more sentences than it needs — restating the same clinical fact in a second sentence after already stating it in the first. Redundancy is narrower and more mechanical: it is a single phrase where one word duplicates the meaning already present in another word right next to it. A wordy letter needs restructuring and cutting at the sentence level; a redundant phrase needs one word deleted and nothing else changes. That is also what makes redundancy one of the fastest wins available in a final proofreading pass — unlike a structural Conciseness & Clarity issue, which can require rewriting a paragraph, fixing a redundant pair takes a single keystroke once you have spotted it.

How does this connect to the Conciseness & Clarity criterion?

Conciseness & Clarity sits alongside Purpose, Content, Genre & Style, Organisation & Layout, and Language as one of the six official OET Writing criteria, and our Conciseness & Clarity guide covers how the 0-7 band is assigned across the full range of issues this criterion checks, from redundant phrasing to over-explained single points. Redundancy sits at the easiest end of that range to fix, because — unlike deciding whether a clinical detail is relevant enough to include — there is no judgement call involved: either a word repeats a meaning already present in the phrase, or it does not.

A letter can have accurate content, correct structure, and the right clinical terminology, and still sit at a lower Conciseness & Clarity band than it should purely because of a handful of doubled phrases scattered through it. That makes this one of the cheapest marks available in the entire marking scheme to protect: fixing redundancy changes no facts and restructures nothing, it only removes words that were never carrying meaning in the first place.

A 60-second redundancy check before you submit

Because redundant phrases read as completely natural English, search for them by category rather than relying on a normal read-through to flag them:

1. Scan for time-modifiers on nouns that already imply time. “Past history,” “future plans,” “previous diagnosis” (if the word “diagnosis” is already being reported as something that happened) — ask whether the noun already contains the time reference before keeping the modifier.
2. Scan for doubled intensifiers and absolutes. “Completely eliminate,” “totally unaware,” “absolutely essential” — check whether the main word is already an absolute state that cannot be graded by degree.
3. Scan for “back,” “again,” and “together” after verbs that already mean that. “Revert back,” “repeat again,” “join together,” “merge together” — the verb alone almost always carries the full meaning.
4. Read the opening and closing paragraphs separately. Candidates often reach for a familiar stock phrase — “brief summary,” “final conclusion” — exactly in the sentences meant to open or close the letter, where a slightly more formal tone feels appropriate but tips into redundancy instead.

This takes under a minute once you are checking for the pattern specifically, and it is a category of error a standard grammar checker will not flag, because every word in a redundant phrase is spelled and used correctly on its own. For the fuller set of self-editing steps beyond this one issue, our 4-minute proofreading routine and 10-point pre-submission checklist cover the rest of a complete final pass.

The honest limit of self-editing for redundancy

Redundant phrases are hard to catch in your own writing precisely because neither word is wrong — “past history” sounds like careful, formal writing to the person who wrote it, which is exactly why it survives several rounds of self-proofreading unchanged. The gap only becomes visible when someone reads the letter the way a receiving clinician, or an OET examiner trained to mark Conciseness & Clarity, actually reads it: counting how much of each sentence is carrying new information and how much is restating something already said.

The free Writing Checker is a solid first pass for spelling and basic grammar, but phrase-level redundancy is exactly the kind of Conciseness & Clarity issue that a full criterion-by-criterion review is built to catch. Our OET writing correction service reviews your actual letter against all six official criteria, including the doubled phrasing that reads as natural, careful English to the writer and as lost marks to the examiner. View our OET correction packages →