Improve Your Writing - Coral Russell (top 10 best books of all time .txt) 📗

While you're writing keep these three things in mind:

1) accuracy
2) clarity
3) brevity

You need to accurately pick the right word in order to clearly describe what you are writing about. Be brief without sacrificing accuracy or clarity.

Finish your story.

Now comes the fun part. Editing your story. I thought I would hate editing. It seemed tedious and not as much fun as writing the story in the first place. Now that I'm going through yet another round of edits on my stories, I've found some tricks that have made it a lot of fun while improving my writing.

With the list of words below, type each one into the search function of your word processor. As you edit you may find that there are other words that you misuse. I know I did! The goal is to trim 10%.

Ken Rand offers explanations in his book The 10% Solution

as to why you would want to trim these words from your writing and the book is only $1.59 - cheap!

If you don't understand the touch/taste/smell/hear/see and why you should not rely on these words try, Word Painting

by Rebecca McClanahan. That book will be my constant writing companion for a while. You can find it used and it's worth every penny.

Once you find a word that is being over-used in your writing make a decision using these three suggestions:

1) keep it
2) change it
3) delete it

List of words:

could
feel/feeling/felt
had
have
hear/heard
But
And
-ing
it/there
just/then
knew/know
look
-ly
maybe
see/saw
smell/taste
that
was/were
of
said
was/were
by
his
her
very
about
like
-ion
smell
taste
touch
aloud

There's an app for that! The AutoCrit Editing Wizard on the internet also helps weed out over used words/phrases/cliches/etc. It's free to try parts of the program, but you need to buy a membership for the whole thing. Very reasonable and again - worth every penny!

Links to the resources I've mentioned here are listed in the dedication at the beginning of this book.

Happy writing!

Text: CC
Publication Date: 03-11-2011

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
AutoCrit Editing Wizard http://www.autocrit.com/ The 10% Solution http://tinyurl.com/4u8a3sp Word Painting http://tinyurl.com/4wzzo84 And Chryse for pointing these things out to me.