5 (More) Quick Tips to Make Your Writing Shine
18:55
Editing is like being a magician. You start with a pile of
words and end up with a book that will make readers laugh and cry. Line edits are
one of the most important part of this magical process. This is where you take
a good plot and turn it into great writing that will keep people glued to the
pages until 2am. A couple of weeks ago, I shared five of my favourite tips to
take your writing to the next level. Today I have five more quick tips to help
your writing reach its best. These tips are also great to keep in mind when
you’re first writing your book too.
Understand Your Vocabulary: The English language is filled
with amazing words that roll off the tongue and make your prose melodious and
memorable. And there are so many words to choose from. But be careful. Make sure
you’re using those unusual and canorous* words correctly or readers might get
confused as to what you mean. As a side note, avoid words that readers are
unlikely to understand easily, such as canorous. Though they may sound
beautiful, simple writing that one can actually understand beats the most
poetic, complicated writing any day.
Canorous: Melodious or resonant. But you knew that already,
didn’t you?
Use Tenses Consistently: It’s very easy to slip from one
tense to another when writing, even within a sentence, without noticing. Keep a
weather eye out for tense switches when editing, such as “Jane walks to the
shop. A zombie tackled her to the ground, intent on devouring her brains.”
Switching tenses breaks the flow of prose you’ve been building up and jolts
readers out of the story. Not to mention that it’s just not good grammar.
Remove Repetitive Repetition: We’ve all read writing where
the author has been trying to build up a mood or scene over several sentences
but has ended up saying the same thing twice, just in different words. This can
be as blatant as “Jane ran away from the zombie. She sprinted down the street
leaving it behind her.” Both sentences tell us that Jane is fleeing from the
rabid zombie, just using different words to say it. In this instance, the
sentences can be combined, or one can be deleted. A slightly less obvious
example is this: “Jane screamed as the zombie approached her. She was utterly
terrified.” Jane screamed because she was terrified. Thus there is no need to
repeat the emotion in the second sentence.
Home in on Homophones: Homophones, or words that are spelled
differently but pronounced the same, are some of the easiest things to get
wrong. Spell check doesn’t always pick them out because the wrong word can be
spelled totally right, and our eyes can skip over them pretty easy when
skimming through the text. But there’s a great difference between aisle and
isle, or side and sighed. Fixing homophone mistakes makes your writing much easier
to understand and doesn’t leave your readers wondering what on earth you were
trying to say about isles in the supermarket.
Use a Thesaurus (Sparingly): Have you ever been faced by a
passage of writing where one word gets used over and over again? For example: “Jane
ran down the street, away from the running zombie. She ran past a hardware
store, paused, then ran inside.” See how annoying that is? Using a thesaurus to
help find alternate, but not overly obscure words, can be a real aid when you’re
having trouble thinking of another way to phrase a sentence. But don’t go
overboard with it. You don’t want to look like you’ve been reading the thesaurus,
even though you have.
These are five more of
my best tips for sparkly writing. Are any of these new to you? What tips would
you add to the list? Anyone interested in a part 3?
4 comments
Excellent advice! I'm glad you decided to do a part 2!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you liked it. I couldn't resist bringing poor Jane and her zombie back for another round of tips.
DeleteYes, this is excellent advice! I especially think using a thesaurus sparingly is important—we like to have mature vocabularies, but I think we need to remember is that your writing should be familiar and reasonable. The average person tends to have an average vocabulary, and so while we writers might hone in on those super fancy words, we can't use them all the time or else we'll be confusing and weird.
ReplyDeleteAH YOU CHANGED THE DESIGN AND IT IS MORE THAN BEAUTIFUL ARE YOU AWARE OF THIS? IT IS LOVELY. I NEED TO CATCH UP WITH YOUR BLOG MORE OFTEN! But really, this is lovely!
That's the real shame of knowing interesting and unusual words I guess. They're so awesome, but then you can't use them before your readers probably aren't going to know what they mean. It's a balancing act. Using some less common words is ok I think, so long as it's fairly easy to work out what they mean from the context, but then you don't want to load your prose down with them.
DeleteAw thanks! I'm so glad you like it. I found the best template to make the blog look so pretty. If I'm honest I keep opening the blog and just staring at all the prettiness of it and feeling pleased with myself.