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Five Words You Can Cut to Improve Your Copywriting

Posted by TimSlavin at April 10, 2008

"One of the best ways to make your writing stronger is to cut unnecessary words. Many people tend to over-write, often in a similar way to how they would speak. Words creep in that add no meaning and can make a piece of writing sound vague and woolly rather than confidence and precise."

From Daily Writing Tips.

As a writer, this is one of my all time favorite topics. In the same way you have to learn grammar and spelling to write, you also need to learn rhetorical techniques (different ways to shape sentences and phrases) and some number of short cuts to help you edit quickly. One of my shortcuts is to convert gerunds, to change "Jack was running" to "Jack ran." Another trick I use is to look for the same word repeated in two concurrent sentences. For some reason, I often use a word 3-5 times within the space of 2-3 sentences, as if I'm auditioning the word. In those cases, I have to find where the word works best then convert the duplicates.

There's also a class of short cuts that deal with the process of editing. For example, someone recently told me she edits by reading the text backwards, from the last period and sentence to the first word. She finds this makes the text new and different and let's her see all sorts of things reading this way.