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Five Tricks to Improve Your Writing Style Now - Trick 2

August 17th, 2007 | grammar, sentence tips

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Style problems getting the way of your prose? Pick up the pace! Break through bad style and you’ll find yourself zipping along the autobahn feeling spunky and free.

A billion years ago, I started this series and forgot to post the rest of it! Bad blogger, bad! You may have forgotten, the first trick:

1) Avoid unnecessary adjective clauses.

Trick two has the same catchy grammatical joy:

2) Avoid redundant impersonal constructions that use “To Be” verbs.

I’m sorry, I just couldn’t think of a better way to say it. Some ideas are boring and technical no matter how you phrase them. But that doesn’t make them any less important.

Probably, you have a few questions. Maybe a few anxieties and flashbacks to evil grammarian teachers in middle school with pointy rimmed glasses and yard sticks that sounded like thunder when they slapped onto your desktop. (Or that could be my personal problem.)

I got to hand it to the grammarian, though. She taught me about impersonal constructions. These sentences begin with an indefinite pronoun and a “to be” verb.

It is…

It seemed…

There are…

There seemed to be…

Blecchh. Gag. Choke. Vomit. These subjects are vague. These verbs are weak. The sentences are practically doomed. (Don’t get me wrong, such sentences can work. But in general, try to avoid them.) In fact, try to use “to be” verbs as little as possible. (If you have forgotten what “to be” verbs are, go read my post about passive voice.)

If I am in a hard core editing mood, I’ve been known to count the “to be” verbs over a series of pages and challenge myself to cut the number in half. (I only do this on my own material.) You’d be surprised what a difference it can make to the specificity and energy of the writing.

Verbs are power. Weak verbs have no power. They might move an East German Trabant 601, but they won’t move any readers. To move readers, you need active, vivid verbs. Here’s an example of what I mean, based on a real sentence from a real writer (used with permission).

It was always about all the little things that made great impacts. It seemed to start with normal conversations, relationships, and friendships.

Notice those silly, little indefinite “it” at the beginning of both sentences. They aren’t renaming any specific noun. They are just taking up space, adding a vague and meaningless rhetorical frame around the sentence.

It was always about all the little things that made great impacts. It seemed to start with normal conversations, relationships, and friendships.

Take a closer look at the first sentence, and you’ll see where the real meat is—hidden inside an unnecessary adjective clause! Like this:

It was always about all the little things that made great impacts.

The second sentence buries its power in a similar way. Only it uses an infinitive phrase instead:

It seemed to start with normal conversations, relationships, and friendships.

Again, there is nothing wrong with adjective clauses or infinitive phrases or even impersonal constructions like this very sentence. If nothing else, all of these tools help us create good sentence variety. But they can also make our sentences unnecessarily bloated and swollen and wordy.

To stay true to the author’s words, I suggested combining the two sentences. Like this:

All the little things in my work life made great impacts, starting with normal conversations, relationships, and friendships.

It’s a little more direct. It’s a little tighter. Out of context, the ideas still seem vague, but in context they worked fine.

First a question: How would you have changed the sentences?

And second, for those of you who never saw the beautiful graffiti art from the Berlin Wall or experienced the joy of the Trabbi 601, I offer you this vintage commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQwj0EqOQJw


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