The Editor's Eye

The way people write says a lot about them. Some writers are minimalists; they use no more words than necessary to get their point across. Others use lots of adjectives, adverbs and intensifiers to express themselves. I’m of the opinion that our writing style is a reflection who we are as individuals, but the bottom line for all of us is this: clear, concise writing is more impactful and easier to read than wordy, redundant fluff.

I’ll never forget the first time I had an article picked up by a newspaper. When the editor told me how much she liked it, I was thrilled! Then she asked if I could edit it from 1200 words to 500 and my excitement turned to indignation. How dare she ask me to cut precious words out of my perfect story? When I politely suggested that she might want to loosen her word count restrictions to accommodate my brilliant piece, she gave me a patient chuckle and some of the best writing advice I’ve ever heard. “Don’t worry, Elizabeth, you’re the only one who will know what’s not there.”

In retrospect, editing that article was one of the best writing lessons I’ve had in my career; a Zen writing experience if there ever was one. Now, I’m not suggesting that you need to go to such extremes to improve your writing, but using an “editor’s eye” is rarely a bad thing. Take the following sentence for example:

It can really be very annoying when writers use way too many more words than absolutely necessary to get their basic message across to their readers.

If that sentence reads like something you could have written, you might want to consider simplifying your message. Imagine a whole document of sentences like that. After a while, the reader’s eyes start to glaze over and they miss the key points of the document because there are too many unnecessary words piled on top of each other. How about something like this instead?

It can be annoying when writers use more words than necessary to get their message across.

Clearer, simpler, easier to read, right? I’m not saying that you should avoid using modifiers and intensifiers altogether, just reminding you to be careful with them. They are like the words that "cried wolf." Using them strategically throughout your document can help you highlight important points and add emphasis, guiding your reader’s attention to the truly important stuff. But overusing them bogs your readers down and makes them wonder why they are reading in the first place. And that’s a bad thing.

Try this on your next important project: pretend that you have to cut out one-third of the words. (The word count is in the lower, left-hand corner of your Word document.) Go through the piece and omit any extraneous intensifiers, adverbs, redundancies, slang – anything that doesn’t need to be there. I’ll bet you find a lot of extra words covering up your core message. (Hint: The ones I see most often are very, really, so, absolutely and totally; so keep yourself on high alert for these.) And don’t worry, when you’re done, you’ll be the only one who will know what’s not there.

Here’s another exercise for you. In the name of, “we teach what we need to learn,” I skipped the editing phase of this composition completely. As I look over this post, I’m finding many words and phrases that I would normally delete. How many can you find?

Write on and on and on! ;o)