![]() ![]() Did you catch the redundant words in that sentence? Here’s a better version: you don’t need to say the same thing with two words.īrand new, advance planning, basic necessities… the list of these common phrases is longer than this blog post. You don’t need to say the exact same thing with two words. You can certainly find a shorter or more common word in your thesaurus than a jargony one. The English language has thousands of words. To get your point across, use words people are familiar with. If they need to grab a dictionary to finish a sentence, your writing has room for improvement. Some people think jargon makes their writing sound smart, but you know better. If you find negative statements in your writing that contain don’t, shouldn’t, can’t or another such word, find a way to rewrite them without the “not.” That will probably mean you need to find a more powerful verb. “You don’t want to make these mistakes in your writing” could be better stated as, “You want to avoid these mistakes in your writing.” It’s more straightforward. Instead of saying what something isn’t, say what it is. And that makes your writing that much stronger. Oftentimes, you can eliminate these extra pieces of punctuation with commas or by ending a sentence and starting a new one. But a piece of writing littered with all sorts of punctuation - parentheses, colons, ellipses, etc. Remove extra punctuationĪ powerful hyphen here and a thought-provoking semicolon there can be effective. Don’t move back and forth between the two. Try to stick to “I” voice or “you” voice throughout one piece of writing.Īnd if you must switch, start with one and finish with the other. For example, you might start your introduction talking about yourself, then switch halfway through the piece and start addressing the reader. Sometimes it’s necessary to use both first and second person, but that can be jarring for readers. The screen door didn’t shut noisily, it banged shut.įind a more powerful verb to replace the weak verb + weak -ly adverb combo. Instead of describing the cat as walking slowly, say he creeps or tiptoes. Rather than saying the girl runs quickly, say she sprints. ly words)Īdverbs weaken your copy because these excess words are not truly descriptive. See what I mean? If you spot a comma-heavy sentence, try to give each idea its own sentence. But long sentences often contain several ideas, so they can easily lose the reader’s focus because they don’t provide a break, leading readers to get stuck or lose interest, and perhaps the reader might get bored and go watch TV instead. Many long sentences are grammatically correct. To sign up for this free training, click here. ![]() The Write Life has teamed up with Self-Publishing School to create this presentation, “How to Write & Publish Your Book in 90 Days.” In it, you’ll learn how to finish your book in just 30 minutes per day. To make it easy for you, we’ve added to the bottom of this list a downloadable and printable PDF that summarizes these copyediting tips into a checklist. So pull up your most recently saved draft, and get to work. Is it really possible edit your own work when all the words you just finished writing are so precious? Yes! It can be done - and for the sake of making your writing stand out, it must be done. How to edit: Follow these copyediting tipsĮven if you don’t want to become an editor, you’ve got to learn how to edit. And since procrastination is the writer’s best friend, you might not even have time to even ask a fellow writer pal take a quick peek for errors.Īnd so, in some cases, it falls to you to be your own editor. But most of us don’t have the luxury of hiring an expensive editor to review our personal blog post It might even be hard to spend the money for a book editor. After you’ve revised your book, story, blog post or article until you can revise no more, you just hand it off to your editor to clean up, right? If you meet a writer who claims to have the secret for doing so, please let the rest of us know!įirst drafts - and second drafts and sometimes thirds - exist to hash your ideas out on paper. Writers rarely spit out their best copy on the first draft.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |