Your sentences are too long. Shorten your sentences! As an editor, I’m more descriptive instead of prescriptive. I know that audience, context and genre shape meaning. Language is a shifting beast–but more problematically than that, the so-called ‘rules’ of grammar and writing are arbitrary, classist, colonialist, even wrong. But I’m still going to tell youContinue reading “25 words”
Author Archives: Letitia Henville
Making paragraphs flow
We all know that good paragraphs cohere around a single topic and are book-ended by strong, analytical take-away sentences. But how can a disjointed, staccato-sounding paragraph be made to have flow? Flow is an elusive quality — it’s the sense that sentences move logically and seamlessly without repetition or heavy-handed transitioning. Sometimes this flow comesContinue reading “Making paragraphs flow”
Intensifiers don’t
Intensifiers — the adverbs and adjectives that writers include to add force to their expression — don’t have the effect that some imagine they might. Take these two examples: Dave is a trustworthy employee. Dave is a really trustworthy employee. In which of these examples might a reader be left wondering if Dave will beContinue reading “Intensifiers don’t”
Words to watch for: zombie nouns
“The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.” In her New York Times essay, the academic and writer Helen Sword terms “nominalizations” — that is, nouns that contains within them shorter verbs, adjectives, or other nouns — “zombie nouns” because they “cannibalize active verbs,Continue reading “Words to watch for: zombie nouns”
Words to watch for: the hollow verbs
“Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion“: TS Eliot’s eponymous “hollow men” are said to represent Western culture after the First World War. It’s obviously a dramatic overstatement for me to apply Eliot’s post-apocalyptic words to a list of hollow verbs. And yet …
Bring clarity by objectifying your language
The mental movie of a mouse cowering the corner of a cage that has another mouse in it gets chunked into ‘social avoidance.’ You can’t blame the neuroscientist for thinking this way. She’s seen the movie thousands of times; she doesn’t need to hit the PLAY button in her visual memory and watch the crittersContinue reading “Bring clarity by objectifying your language”
Cut “is”
This is a writing problem that is easy to correct. (10 words) This writing problem is easy to correct. (7 words) When editing your draft, search for the word “is.” In the two sentences above, searching for “is” and rephrasing the sentence enabled the writer to cut 30% of the original word count without losingContinue reading “Cut “is””
Structuring academic papers
Patrick Dunleavy of Writing for Research (@Write4Research) breaks down all well-structured academic journal articles into two types, with three sub-types: Conventional papers Designed papers The focus-down model The opening out model The compromise model