Are you wordy? Recognize the signs
Scan your
writing for the following symptoms of wordiness:
- Being” verbs. You’ll have to use them sometimes, of course, but
they often slow the pace of a sentence. Compare “still, dustgreen trees”
to “trees that are a dusty-colored green.”
- Passive constructions.
Passive voice, which occurs when the subject of
the sentence receives action rather than performing it, inevitably clogs
sentences. Compare the flies that “are killed by the impact” versus the
flies that simply “die.”
- Filler words. We writers love words…maybe a little too much.
Are all of our words necessary? Play a game with your WIP: take a few
sentences and try to rewrite them to be half as long, a third as long,
even just an eighth as long. Experiment with what words you can cut
without losing meaning.
- Read the rest of the
article by Sarah Baughman at Suzannah's site at wrap http://writeitsideways.com
- However. And this from
me. You must be careful not to make your book into a synopsis of the story
you tell and your characters cardboard people. The reader still needs to
know how your characters think and feel, their despair and joy, to enter
their minds so the reader becomes one with the character and to the reader
that character becomes a person.
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