Smothered Verbs

Mark Nichol over at Daily Writing Tips:

In the interests of trying to help prevent the smothering deaths of countless sentences, here’s a public-service announcement about how to avoid this senseless tragedy: If a noun phrase (verb plus preposition plus article plus noun, though variations are frequent) can be condensed by converting the noun to a verb and deleting the other words in the phrase, do it.

The examples seem so obvious:

“I’m glad they’ve come to an agreement.”
“I’m glad they agree.”

“The committee will perform an assessment of the situation.”
“The committee will assess the situation.”

“Are you interested in submitting an application?”
“Are you interested in applying?”

Omit unnecessary words.