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Tech Writing - Is 'Overall Average' redudnant?

Hey Everyone,

Maybe I'm jumping at shadows after a busy week so far... :)

I encountered the following in something I'm reviewing (redacted)
"This field displays the overall average for all vendors."

But isn't "average" by definition, imply "overall"? I'm thinking I should remove "overall".

Thanks,
Steve

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Mal Osborne

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Stephen Kairys

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Wow...lots of good info there. I'll have to find out (I'm documenting some charts and graphs in an application) what they mean by "average". My gut feeling is that it's

SumOfAllValues/TotalNumberOfValues.

And, the text (it's a tooltip) clearly states that it's the overall average for all vendors. (Emphasis is mine. :) )

That's it for me for this evening. Will be back online tomorrow.

Thanks!

John

I agree "it depends". If you are look at (reviewing) several things (that are somehow related) then "overall average" means average of all the related things (to me at least). If you have several things and say just "average", you would need to say what thing the average refers to.

Somewhat difficult to say precisely with the given information.

Stephen Kairys

ASKER

Thanks, John. To shed a bit more light on the context, the full sentence is:
"This field is normalized against the overall average for all vendors."

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John

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Stephen Kairys

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Thanks, guys. Happy Holidays!