Doesn’t wordy writing drive you crazy? It’s easy to spot a wordy sentence or paragraph when you’re the reader, but sometimes it’s hard to be succinct when you’re the writer.
During the summer before my junior year of college, I interned for my local branch of the National Writing Project. I had the wonderful opportunity of working with different kinds of writers—poets, short story writers, non-fiction writers. Every day, I’d listen as people read aloud part of a piece they’d been working on. I quickly discovered that incredible writing is wicked tight writing.
When writing is tight, every word is significant. There’s no wordiness or redundancy. It sounds great, but all of us writers know that it takes a lot of messy editing to get those clean sentences. So here’s some help in eliminating unnecessary words: a list of phrases that you can put on the chopping block, and what you can replace them with.
