Is it redundant to say "period of time?"

March 8, 2025 10:50 AM

The sentence is "...but in many circumstances psych patients can stay in the emergency department for a prolonged period of time." Can't i just say "prolonged period" without losing anything? Thanks!
posted by BadgerDoctor to Writing & Language (27 answers total)

Yes, but "period of time" is a common phrase and no one is likely to notice the redundancy but yourself.
posted by JimN2TAW at 11:00 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]

Yes, you can just say "prolonged period" without losing anything. Periods are intervals of time, you don't need to specify.
posted by ssg at 11:06 AM on March 8 [3 favorites]

Can you just say "for a while"? Obviously that depends somewhat on the intended audience and register.
posted by tivalasvegas at 11:07 AM on March 8 [1 favorite]

“Period of time” is such a common way to phrase things in American English that shortening it to “prolonged period” makes me feel like something is missing. Grammatically and literally you can remove “of time”, but the sentence doesn’t feel as natural to me without it.

In your specific case, “prolonged period” could also be misconstrued as “prolonged menstrual event”, especially since you’re talking about medical care.
posted by itesser at 11:17 AM on March 8 [4 favorites]

"...but in many circumstances psych patients can have a prolonged stay in the emergency department."

sounds better to me, as "stay" encompasses the concept of "period of time"
posted by jewel-jerk-dazzle at 11:21 AM on March 8 [6 favorites]

Yes, and you could also say for a "prolonged time" and skip the "period".

Some of the unique strength of English as a language is that there are so many different ways to phrase and subtly shade the same basic idea. This is can also be a weakness, obviously.

If you are specifically trying to convey that the problem is emergency room, you might address that directly, ie "instead of a more appropriate facility".
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 11:27 AM on March 8

Not everything we need to do with language is about communicating as efficiently as possible. "Period of time" is technically redundant (what else can a period be, in the given context?) but it has a kind of flow and euphony that can make a sentence read more smoothly. That may be why it has become so commonly used that it's almost like a single unit of language, the way certain cliches calcify and no longer really function as cliches because they've become so ossified we no longer really hear them as imagery. Sadly, my brain will not let me toss up any examples right off the top of my head.
posted by Well I never at 11:47 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]

I would definitely just say "prolonged period" because I prefer concision.

I wonder though if you could help the reader and convey more by abandoning this vague indication in favour of something that tells us what counts as prolonged! For example, "can stay for several days if needed", or "can stay for up to six weeks though 4 days is more typical" or whatever. Perhaps your reader has more context than I do, but I don't actually know if a prolonged period in an emergency ward is 12 hours or 12 days.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:54 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]

At the risk of a tangential comment vs. an answer, and maybe helping Well I never's search for another example: my gosh police using high rate of speed annoys me a lot. Do they mean high acceleration (burning rubber) or really fast but a constant speed??? But I think my pet peeve is similar to the OP's quandary, nobody is going to change, it's just bureaucratic speak.
posted by forthright at 11:59 AM on March 8 [1 favorite]

It's redundant the same way "two weeks time" is redundant (and, tangentially, cop-speak like "red in color" and "high rate of speed.")
posted by emelenjr at 12:24 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]

I would go with either prolonged stay or prolonged time. A prolonged period may not be especially meaningful to someone for whom English is not their first language or without that level of vocabulary.
posted by beaning at 12:37 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]

I also like I am Joe's spleen suggestion of giving a specific range of possibilities.
posted by beaning at 12:47 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Great answers so far!

What do people think of

"...but in many circumstances psychiatric patients can stay in the emergency department for days if not weeks."

The register has to be formal as this is part of a much longer reply to a hospital board of inquiry regarding psychiatric "boarders" in the emergency department. I feel like theres an inverse relationship btw concision and formality :(
posted by BadgerDoctor at 1:11 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]

What do people think of

"...but in many circumstances psychiatric patients can stay in the emergency department for days if not weeks."

I'd put a comma after 'days.'
posted by kickingtheground at 1:24 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]

"...but in many circumstances psychiatric patients can stay in the emergency department for days if not weeks."

The register has to be formal as this is part of a much longer reply to a hospital board of inquiry regarding psychiatric "boarders" in the emergency department.


Well, it should definitely catch their eye and thus may have subsequent follow up. Which may be good if the long term goal is having them understand services and perhaps build better ones.

But if your goal here is to make the inquiry go away with as little to-do as possible, then I'd stay with the phrase "a period of time" as it is bog standard board-level language.
posted by beaning at 1:33 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]

I feel like theres an inverse relationship btw concision and formality

Yep. Knowing your audience and the goal of the writing can help determine the level of formality. Younger audiences, especially children, go for conversational with very short sentences, maybe just phrases. Sixth to eighth grade reading level with lots of short sentences but a formal structure for a general audience. And as formal as possible while pretending to be conversational for boards made up of older generations. But's that's just my opinion.
posted by beaning at 1:34 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: beaning

Yeah--

"...prolonged period of time" is at once vague, wordy, and redundant. The holy trinity. Institutional folks eat that shit up.

That might be easiest
posted by BadgerDoctor at 1:58 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]

In hospital systems I'm familiar with, an emergency psychiatric patient staying in the ED for a long time would be some sort of failure of the system, e.g. there isn't a bed available in an inpatient unit, so this is somewhat undesired.

If true, perhaps the "can" verb is too passive? Also, "can" has two meanings "if you wish" and "because of other factors" which is vague.

How about this:

"but in many circumstances, psychiatric patients can be forced to stay in the emergency department for a longer duration, when they are too unstable, by policy or law, to be discharged, and an appropriate treatment facility is not available"
posted by soylent00FF00 at 2:35 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]

" I feel like theres an inverse relationship btw concision and formality"

I disagree. Much formal writing is flowery and elaborate and imprecise, but it does not need to be.

When I am writing an incident report, I stick to the facts. I try to be as clear as possible. I use the least emotional language I can. To me, that is formal. Formal like a court deposition.

You may feel you need to be vague to downplay something that you are not happy to disclose. In my experience, if you are too vague a sharp reader will always notice this and press for more details.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:53 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]

PS: I thought "...but in many circumstances psychiatric patients can stay in the emergency department for days if not weeks" was good, and my remain kibitzing is about "many circumstances". That could be quantified if you think it's relevant. "the average stay is 2 days but some patients stay for two weeks or more if needed."
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:57 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]

I would say they DO stay, not can (by simply removing the word "can"). You already qualified with "in many circumstances" that it doesn't mean every patient. And it more clearly says this isn't hypothetical; it is happening.
posted by ctmf at 4:48 PM on March 8

I agree with Well I Never. What makes eloquent communication sound eloquent has much to do with word choice, but also word flow within sentences and paragraphs.

Given a choice between shorter and longer phrases that are semantically equivalent, sometimes the longer version helps to round out a sentence that would otherwise end too abruptly. Or it may act as a sort of emphasis about the subject in question.
posted by SorryNotSaurian at 6:23 PM on March 8

George Orwell's 6 rules for better writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Look at #1! Also #3.

tl;dr: "prolonged period" is better.
posted by splitpeasoup at 7:27 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]

Periods aren't just for time though, spatial periods exist. That's no reason to cut the "of time."

I think the temporal aspect is strongly implied by 'prolonged', but consider a sentence like "the pattern in the second panel is streched and hence has an elongated period". Using "spatial period' may be technically redundant but it aids understanding.

I'd use the longer version of both for clarity, unless it's a situation where you need to meet a strict and tiny word count.

Style for medical or science writing is different from style for novels.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:31 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]

The phrase "period of time" is a holdover from when the word period had multiple meanings that it doesn't have now. In medicine period used to mean the course of a disease. (That's how we come to use it to mean the menses. Period was a polite medical euphemism for a layperson.) In 1850 if you had said the patient would stay in emerg for a period, you might have been misunderstood to mean that they would stay in emerg until they were considered fully cured. Even now, if you don't add the words of time someone out there is capable of thinking you meant that the patient could stay until their menstrual bleeding had stopped.

It also used to mean lifespan, so without the addition of ..of time, saying that a patient might stay in emerg for a long period would once have potentially been understood to mean that they would eventually die there, still resident at the end of a long lifespan.

And finally the word period also used to in the same way that we use the word sentence, especially a run on sentence (which ends with a symbol we came to call a period because it designated where one ended.) Describing a psychiatric patient whose speech production was notably long, confused and did not stay on topic, you once might have said that long periods was one of their psychiatric symptoms.

Right now, however, the word period is shifting in meaning towards implying years or centuries of time, as when we speak of geological periods, the Medieval period, or an artist's arpeggio period.

Your predecessors latched onto the phrase period of time long ago because they needed to specify. Some medical student in 1810 got told off for not saying what kind of period they were referring to. But you don't need to specify that you mean a period of time. The word you don't need to use is the word period itself. Be specific. Stating whether the patient will be in emerg for hours, days, or weeks or months will communicate more accurately what you mean.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:55 AM on March 9 [2 favorites]

The way I've always seen 'period' lengthened is 'considerable period'.

In your use case I might say 'considerable period: days if not weeks.'
posted by jamjam at 4:43 PM on March 9

For me the thing that needs clarifying in that last OP sentence is whether the patient is getting psych treatment in the ER for some actual justifiable medical reason, or whether this is about the crisis in hospital care that causes people not to be able to get into psychiatric hospitals because of a shortage and they are just in limbo in the ER for weeks.
if the former is what you mean, then your sentence is fine. Definitely say days if not weeks bc I would have thought prolonged period meant up to a day, and my comment was going to suggest specifying how much time you mean by prolonged period of time.
If the latter: I would say something like "... psychiatric patients can be forced to wait in the emergency department for days if not weeks."
posted by ponie at 5:18 AM on March 10