Four Easy Ways to Write Concisely

Concision can play a huge role in the impact of your message. No one wants to wade through unnecessary words, and worse, wordiness can weaken your writing.

Here are some easy ways to tighten your writing as you self-edit. You are self-editing before you call your copy editor, right? Of course you are.

Elminate the make:  make a promise, make a deal, make a bet, make dinner (okay, you could make dinner.) But you get the idea: doesn’t it sound better to promise, negotiate, wager? Also, to cook dinner sounds more precise, doesn’t it? Or better yet, to boil pasta, simmer tomato sauce…

No basis for basis: on a monthly basis, on a weekly basis, on a temporary basis. Try monthly, weekly, temporarily. Even “each month” is better, though that’s still one word too many.

Step off the preposition train: Track down prepositions like of and to. They can often be eliminated. Especially tedious are preposition trains, where one preposition stacks upon another upon another.

How many books of Stephen King’s do you have in the library that is in Springdale?

How many Stephen King books do you have at Springdale Library?

Eliminate redundancies. Your editor will love you for this one.

Free gift

Each and every one

Share in common

Because the reason is (the reason is because)

Ask a question

Advance planning, advance reservations

Prior plans

The month of July

Repeat over and over

Positive (or beneficial or desirable) benefits

Sudden explosion, sudden impact, sudden anything, really. “Sudden” is a cheesy way to grab attention.

Close proximity

Your high school English teacher isn’t being paid to read your writing, and you don’t get extra credit for extra words. So make it easy for your reader, and they may just love you back.

JoAnne Dyer is an editor, writer, proofreader, and event planner. She founded Seven Madronas Communications in 2015. Seven Madronas specializes in helping change-makers and people doing good in the world. She’s edited dozens of nonfiction books and writes regularly for Nest Publications and The Connector magazine. When she’s not agonizing over subject/verb agreements, she’s hiking in the red canyons of Utah or cooking vegetarian dinners in her native Seattle, Washington.

JoAnne Dyer
Seven Madronas Communications
www.7madronas.com
206-465-9146
Twitter @7madronas
Facebook JoAnneDyerSeattle

STOP WRITING IN GERMAN

(AND OTHER TIPS FOR AUTHORS)

1-- Yes. German. Only German capitalizes common nouns. English does not.  Capitalize the noun only when it is part of an official title, as in “CBS News interviewed President Barack Obama.” But “Hillary Clinton is running for president.” As the letters editor at a major metropolitan daily newspaper, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people write sentences such as this: “I think our City Council is wasting the Taxpayer’s money on building a new Bus Lane.” As they say in German, “Nein!” Lower-case those nouns. And check that apostrophe while you’re at it. I’m sure the money isn’t coming from just one taxpayer. Correct sentence? “I think our city council is wasting the taxpayers’ money on building a new bus lane.”

2-- De-clutter. Think about eliminating those unnecessary explanatory phrases that mire your poor protagonist in syntactical quicksand: “I saw that there was a beautiful bouquet of roses in a vase on the table.” Better: “There was a beautiful bouquet of roses in a vase on the table.” There’s really no need to say that your protagonist saw something as a preamble to describing what he or she saw. The reader will know intuitively that the “I” in your novel is the one who saw the roses. You can do this for third-person protagonists, too. Opt for: “He’d never heard such nonsense in his life,” instead of “He felt that he had never heard such nonsense in his life.” Say “The thunderstorm scared him,” rather than “He felt scared by the thunderstorm.”

3-- The least said, the better. The fewer words you use, the more evocative the scene will be in your reader’s imagination. Don’t bog your prose down in “whiches” and “thats.” That kind of language is for lawyers, not authors: “The dog that my neighbor used to have, which was a cocker spaniel that died years ago, liked to lie on the porch.” Yikes! Talk about a convoluted chasing of the authorial tail! Try this instead: “My neighbor’s cocker spaniel, dead these many years, liked to lie on the porch.”

4-- Choose active over passive. Make the subject of your sentence take the action, rather than focusing on the object that received it. Example: “The boy was hit in the eye by the hockey puck.” For something shorter, sweeter and to the point, give the action to the puck: “The hockey puck hit the boy in the eye.”

5-- Trust your reader to fill in the blanks. I once read a manuscript that described a woman’s trip to a grocery store in San Antonio. She left her house, pressed her key fob to unlock her car door, opened the door, got into the driver’s seat, closed the car door, turned the key in the ignition, backed out of the driveway, drove to the store (and on the way, the author named every street she drove on), pulled into the parking lot, turned off the engine, got out of the car, locked the door and went into the store. Whew. But the author wasn’t done quite yet. Once inside the store, the woman went to the produce department and the author proceeded to describe every fruit and vegetable on display, as well as all the customers shopping in that aisle. He could have written instead: “Cathy went to the store and bought a bag of oranges,” and the reader would have instinctively known that Cathy did all the minutiae involving her car, without needing the details written out. The other customers should have been described only if they were going to play some role in the plot; otherwise, the reader will understand, without all the gory details, that other people were shopping at the same time as Cathy.

6-- Chuck the chuckles. Use “said.” It’s simple and unobtrusive. “I remember when you slipped on the banana peel,” he chuckled. Actually, he couldn’t have. Listen to real people talk. If they’re chuckling, they stop to say something. They can’t chuckle and talk at the same time without snorting and choking.

7-- What’s in a name? Give your characters names appropriate for the time period they’re living in, or you’ll shoot down your story’s credibility. I read a novel once whose heroine lived during the Civil War. The author had named her Jennifer. Sorry, but Jennifer is a 20^th century name which came into popular usage after George Bernard Shaw used it in his 1906 play, The Doctor’s Dilemma. Before that, it was known only in Cornwall. Is your protagonist a 14^th century mystic sighing away her days in a crumbling and drafty convent? Great, but don’t call her Kailey or Alyssa.

8-- Listen to that gut feeling. If something isn’t working in your novel, whether it’s a paragraph, a single sentence or a whole subplot, let it go and try a different approach. When you try to force something that doesn’t work, it reads to editors, literary agents and publishers like you forced it. You can’t fool them.

9-- If you’re writing an article for a magazine or newspaper, all the above rules apply, except of course, the one about names. Show respect for the submission guidelines, especially on word counts. At the newspaper where I work, we have a policy that letters must be no more than 150 words long. Yet, people keep sending in 500-word missives and are miffed when they’re not published. When I was a reporter, I quickly learned to write my stories to length because I found that if I didn’t, the first thing the copy editors would cut was always the paragraph I loved best. Spare yourself that grief and stick to the assigned word count.

10-- To learn from the technique and style of a genius, read The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne or The Luck of Ginger Coffey, two novels by Brian Moore. He can deliver a devastating one-two punch to your emotions with just three words. Not one word is wasted. That’s what you’re aiming for.

Naomi Lakritz has been writing and editing at daily newspapers for 37 years. She is a columnist, editorial writer and the letters editor at the Calgary Herald. She owns Naomi Lakritz Editing Services, based in Calgary, Canada, and edits manuscripts, website content, academic papers and a variety of other documents. She also translates from French and Italian into English. Her website is www.quantumorange.net and she can be reached at njlakritz@shaw.ca

Make Your Voice Original by Getting Rid of "Received Text"

What Is Received Text?

When I first heard the term “received text,” its meaning wasn’t immediately clear. I thought back to my Catholic elementary school lessons, and veritable old Moses grabbing a pair of stone tablets out of the sky. Received text—good? Important? Kinda heavy?

In fact, “received text” isn’t a good thing. It is a form of cliché, received from the nebulous lingo of lazy writing, stereotypes, aphorisms, business jargon, and slang re-digested back into soundbites and advertising copy. It’s our lingua franca, for better or worse: useful enough when it supplies you with easy rejoinders while stuck in an awkward conversation, but unhelpful when you are striving for nuance and originality in your fiction.

Most of us can identify a cliché: fast as lightning. A penny saved is a penny earned. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. (Actually, that one amuses me.) But the English language is full of humdrum, often nonsensical phrases that suck the life out of prose: a home-cooked meal, humble abode, gone downhill in recent years, soon learned, at present, stunning beachfront, fast friends, terrible mistake, flirted shamelessly, rotating cast, newly minted, perfect opportunity, let loose… etc. Any of these can be funny if you use them in full awareness of their unoriginality, and delight your reader with them in an unexpected, even absurd context: in short, if you reclaim the element of surprise.

Because that’s what good writing is. Surprising. Interesting. Creative. If you show up at a restaurant expecting artful food from the kitchen, but get a bowl of pablum, why stay to finish the meal? Clichés are mush. If, however, the food looks okay, and has some flavor but reminds you of every meal you’ve ever eaten at Olive Garden, then you’ll probably finish it but never be back. Received text ultimately has the same effect on a reader; and frankly, though I'm loath to waste money on a mediocre meal, I would prefer the loss to having wasted ten or fifteen hours of the weekend on a mediocre novel.

Fiction is the place to be bold and brave. To tell your truth, no matter how weird it sounds. Recognizing lifeless imagery is half of the task, but the other half—fixing it—is addressed outside of the page, too. To live a writer’s life doesn’t mean wearing peacoats, drinking yourself past the fear of a blank page, or needing to move to a villa in Italy before you can pen a magnum opus.

It does, however, mean keeping a notebook. It means noticing what you think and feel. It means taking your eyes off the damn ball once in a while, and noticing the details that are always around you every single second of the day. It begins with growing once again familiar with your vast capacity for originality, and taking the risk of writing it down. We're all born with these abilities. We grow up and learn to be dull. And then, when we make a commitment to improving our writing craft, we get to relearn our creativity, and cheerfully experiment with it in the lines of a manuscript.

Examples

It is impossible for this single blog post to expunge received text from your writing once and for all. The best I can do is illuminate the first few lamps along the road. So: I've had fun draining the life out of six of my recent, favorite lines in fiction. I used word choices and phrases that I often see as an editor (the underlined parts). The information is the same, but the writing is bland, vague, and off-the-cuff. After each one, you'll see the much-better original.

1. She had an unmemorable face and bleach-blonde hair, and I was thinking to myself that if I were in her boyfriend's shoes I wouldn't want to touch her with a ten-foot pole.

"She is peroxided and greasy, with the flat, stunted features of generations of malnutrition, and privately I am thinking that if I were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate named Razor." (From In the Woods, by Tana French)

2.Rosie's mom was always a bundle of nerves. She was rich and had the luxury of holding a grudge and unchallenged stereotypes. Her fridge held nothing but condiments and old bread. Charlie didn't know what she ate, and once suggested to Rosie that maybe she was a vampire, but she didn't think it was funny.

"Rosie's mother was a high strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries, and feuds. She lived in a magnificent flat in Wimple Street with nothing in the enormous fridge but bottles of vitaminized water and rye crackers. . . . Fat Charlie thought it highly likely that Rosie's mum went out at night in bat form to suck the blood from sleeping innocents. He had mentioned this theory to Rosie once, but she had failed to see the humor in it." (From Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman)

3. Dench was a shifty-eyed hippy. 

"This was the grifter in Dench, something violent in the name of freedom . . ." (From "Wings," by Lorrie Moore)

4. That was so typical. WASPy people will make a fuss about a lost kitten, but we Dominicans, we believe in tough love.

"That's white people for you. They lose a cat and it's an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon." (From The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Junot Díaz)

5. He looked surprised, and she could see realization dawning in his eyes. He was naive and coddled, and she wished he would toughen up.

"He looked at her in surprise and his eyes changed slowly, like land growing lighter after a cloud passes. He was naive, and it infuriated her the way he still possessed the luxury of disappointment." (From Be Safe I Love You, by Cara Hoffman)

6. She laughed in the face of sadness.

"She seemed to be the only one who could laugh out of sadness, a sadness that made the laughter deeper and louder still, like the echo of a scream from the bottom of a well." (From The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat)

Sarah Cypher, Editor at The Threepenny Editor

sarah@threepennyeditor.com

Feel free to share a few of your own stinkers with me on Twitter (@threepenny).

Read more about Project 2015--making this year your breakthrough year—here.