There is nothing worse than flabby prose but the English language is one of the wordy ones and we love nothing more than to use those words. Too many sometimes. And it leads to confusing and sometimes ugly reading. Cleaning up your writing is a simple matter of following these easy tips.

Cut the Subject Delayers

Constructions like “there are”, “there is”, etc., may be needed to create an effect but most the time all they do is shove the subject further out of reach. Read through your writing and cut as many as you can. 

Too Many Prepositional Phrases

Sometimes when you read through what you write, you will see a lot of prepositional phrases that can be removed or tightened up. For example, instead of writing “she got there in the nick of time”, you could consider, “she got there in time”.

Remove the Redundancies

If you use MS Word to write in, it has a great feature called “Find”. Open it and type the word “and” – you might just be surprised at how many times you used it in your manuscript, especially in unnecessary and pointless pairings. Do you really need to write “each and every”? or “first and foremost”? You can also cut some of the adjectives that really aren’t needed – “impersonal opinion”, for example. From an individual’s point of view, it is just an opinion. “Future plans” is another one – when else do you make plans for?  Or “true facts” – aren’t all facts true?  

Go through your work carefully and pick out the superfluous adjectives – “identically alike” for example. No matter what you were taught in school, there isn’t any need to clutter your writing with adverbs and adjectives. And two of these need extra attention – the “hedges” and “intensifiers”.

A “hedge” is a qualifier, a word or an expression that waters a message down. Some examples of hedge adverbs are “possibly”, “perhaps”, or “usually”; adjectives include “many” or “most”, while verbs are “might” or “could”. Yes, you will need these words occasionally but most of the time they are nothing more than unnecessary modifiers.

An “intensifier” does what it says on the tin. They come in all forms; adverbs like “very”, “actually”, and “of course”; adjectives like “major” or “basic”, and verbs like “show” or “prove”. Take this sentence, “she was completely full”. When you are full, you are full; being completely full doesn’t make you any more full. 

Go through your manuscript with a fine-tooth comb; you might be surprised at how much you can get rid of. Try it; use the “find” feature in word and search for “and”, or “very” to start with and see how many you can remove without affecting your message.  Then look for words like “actually” – a highly used and abused word, mostly an unnecessary one.

There are times when you need to use these words; don’t remove them just because you can. Remove them where they are not needed. Go to part 2 for more ideas on how to trim the fat from your writing.