Welcome back to the writing workshop, a weekly series of tips to help everyday writers sharpen their messaging. Today let's talk about the extraneous THAT placements just waiting to take over the world.
It was a commonly held belief that Dickens' novels were so long because he was paid by the word. It would seem that is not the truth. So apparently Dickens' issue was the need for a better editor? Anyway, nobody is getting paid by the word in today's world of notoriously short attention spans, so make sure you ruthlessly cut any extra words from your writing.
The word "that" is a good starting point.
Any time you have finished writing a piece, do a quick scan for the word "that" and read the sentence back to yourself without it. For example, if you remove that from "I think THAT Sean Connery is the best Bond of all time," you still have "I think Sean Connery is the best Bond of all time."
See? Removing the extra word didn't change the meaning of the sentence at all! So stop doing THAT and check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing.
It was a commonly held belief that Dickens' novels were so long because he was paid by the word. It would seem that is not the truth. So apparently Dickens' issue was the need for a better editor? Anyway, nobody is getting paid by the word in today's world of notoriously short attention spans, so make sure you ruthlessly cut any extra words from your writing.
The word "that" is a good starting point.
Any time you have finished writing a piece, do a quick scan for the word "that" and read the sentence back to yourself without it. For example, if you remove that from "I think THAT Sean Connery is the best Bond of all time," you still have "I think Sean Connery is the best Bond of all time."
See? Removing the extra word didn't change the meaning of the sentence at all! So stop doing THAT and check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing.
RSS Feed