Five Tricks To Improve Your Writing Style Now - Trick 1

Anybody can write. It’s just a matter of sitting down at a keyboard and whacking out some words. As I’ve heard Camy Tang say, it’s a matter of getting BIC (butt in chair) with regular consistency.

But—as millions of completely worthless and boring blogs attest—not just anybody can write well. Your local bookstore is probably well stocked with books on writing and inspiration and how-to-publish-your-book-idea-and-get-on-easy-street. A handful of those books may even be worth the trees that died to make their pulp.

But few books I’ve found really address the nuts and bolts of editing your own style. I’ve shared a few of these through my sentence tips in the past. Having just finished a particularly intense cycle of editing for TheHighCalling.org, I thought I’d share the five main tricks I used this past week to help professional writers improve their style.

Just so you know, these particular sentences are not from our writers, but they are exactly parallel grammatically to real sentences I edited.

Also, remember there is no shame in having awkward sentences in your drafts. That’s what the editing process is for. Some professional writers love to edit their own work. Others prefer to let an editor like me handle it. Both kinds of writers can have incredibly successful and prolific careers.

Let me say it again. There is no shame is either needing an editor or being your own editor.

On to the first trick:

1) Avoid unnecessary adjective clauses.

(Don’t know what an adjective clause is? Don’t feel dumb. Just go read this easy explanation.) 

Here are two awkward sentence structures I received from writers. 

A. And that is the hard part which is why my friend dubs it her personal vice.

B. My coworker, who knew something about values and the way people disagree about them, put it this way, “Just take a stand.” 

Adjective clauses, or any dependent clauses, make a sentence more complex. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but complex sentences can slow the reader down. And they can be a little wordy, like these two sentence structures.

So take a minute and write out some ideas to fix those sentences. Then come back to see what I recommended to the writers.

Are you done?

Good.

Here’s what I did.

A. That is the hardest part of our office dynamics, and the reason my friend talks about her personal vice.

B. My coworker knew something about values and the way people disagree about them. He put it this way, “Just take a stand.”

Obviously, there are lots of ways to change these sentences. So don’t feel like your answers should match mine. This isn’t a grammar lesson in exact punctuation after all. Style is more fluid than that.

Both of the original sentences are correct. They are just a little wordy and maybe a little vague. They could be improved with a round of editing.

In sentence A…

I turned the adjective clause into a predicate nominative. That sounds fancy, but it means the root sentence went from  

That is the part which my friend dubs…

to

That is the part and the reason my friend dubs…

Notice that the root sentences are almost identical. But in the final version, I think the parallel predicate nominatives are a little bit easier to read.

One note, the comma between the two predicate nominatives is optional in informal prose that is being published online. Using a comma in this way is bending the rules of grammar a bit, I admit. If you are a stickler for details, just use an emdash instead. Like this—

In sentence B…

I decided that the sentence was just trying to do too much. So I turned the dependent adjective clause into an independent clause (a complete sentence). Then used a pronoun to create a second simple sentence. Again, that may sound fancy, but it means the root sentence went from  

My coworker, who knew something, put it… 

to 

My coworker knew something… . He put it…

As I said before, complex sentences embed a dependent clause within an independent clause. These are generally harder to read than simple sentences. Sometimes they can get a little wordy and confusing. When they do, the easiest thing is to break everything down into simple sentences: subject + predicate.

More tricks these next two weeks. I have five of them cued up so the posts will keep coming even while I’m hiding away on the back side of Mt. Hood in Oregon (starting this Friday).

(Pssst. By the way, if you haven’t read Camy’s interview with Randy Ingermanson, run over there and read it right now!)