WRITING

Prune Your Writing in Three Easy Ways

Proofreader marking a sheet of text.

Writers write drafts of their work to refine the final product. In simple terms, writing the first draft enables the writer to record the basic ideas. In the second draft, the writer organizes the raw ideas into a coherent form with a coherent message, and in the final draft, the writer assesses the entire document and prunes it without mercy, to produce a clean, efficient, final version.

Today, I will discuss ways to prune your final draft of empty, useless words so that every word you keep conveys your message. These techniques work for fiction and nonfiction writing. There are three ways to do this — by eliminating phrases that contribute nothing to a sentence, by eliminating helper verbs, and by rephrasing a sentence to say the same thing with fewer words.

Remove empty words or phrases.

The best writing is as simple and as lean as possible. By ‘lean,’ I mean that it contains no empty phrasing. Empty phrases are words that you can remove from a sentence without changing the sentence’s meaning. For example:

It goes without saying that summer days in Houston are hot and miserable.

If ‘it goes without saying,’ why say it? Shorten it to: Summer days in Houston are hot and miserable.

Similar such empty phrases include but are not limited to:

• It is a truism that
• Couldn’t help but notice
• To be sure
• As you know

These phrases contribute nothing to a sentence’s meaning. I was able to remove the entire empty phrase, ‘It goes without saying,’ and the sentence’s essential meaning was unchanged — but it became more powerful without the excess verbiage.

Why do writers use phrases like these? Probably to increase word count or to sound more impressive or formal, because you never hear people use these phrases in normal conversation. If these phrases or strings of words like them appear in your writing, they must go. Kill your darlings.

Remove helper verbs and phrases.

There is a difference between helping verbs and ‘helper verbs. Helping verbs are necessary parts of speech for clear communication, such as: