Writing Tip #1

I promised to include some writing tips in this blog, so here’s my first one. Not that I’m some sort of writing guru, but I have discovered—and am still discovering—things about writing that may be useful to others.

When you’ve finished a piece of writing, especially a longer work, scan for frequently used words. When I finished the second draft of the book I’m working on now, I scanned for “anyway” because I have a habit of starting sentences with ‘Anyway…” Then I started scanning for other “useless words” like:
seem, feel, upon, anyway, so, some, but.

Anyway, it seems that seem and feel are my favorite words and I didn’t even know it! In evaluating the use of these and other useless words, I found that in most cases I could just eliminate them. The result was a stronger, declarative sentence. Not so wishy-washy. In other cases, there were better substitutes. Depending upon the context, here are some words I used to replace “just.” Barely, exactly, merely, only. I wish I had kept track of how many of these words I eliminated.

It was truly shocking!