6/19 WIP Tip: Editing Out the Words I Hate, part 4
Woohoo! Another Friday and a tighter manuscript, if you’ve been cutting.
Today’s WORDS I HATE is another group: CONJUNCTIONS. Now, before you begin revolting by throwing your old Schoolhouse Rock cassettes at me, let me explain.
Conjunctions are very important in a writing sense. They either join two like sentences/phrases (AND, OR) or they create opposition (BUT). Yeah, there are more conjunctions, but in my experience of reading published works, these are the biggest offenders.
Here’s the problem: in writing, it’s very easy–too easy–in the draft stages to continue a thought, a description or narrative (remember, these rules don’t necessarily apply in dialogue, unless you have a character spewing out conjunctions just to hear herself talk) on and on until we find the meat of our meaning. I’d actually encourage overuse of conjunctions in the draft stages as it helps to keep going on a tangent to get down to the real story.
However, at the publishing level, that doesn’t fly. If a reader reads and needs to take a breath to finish a sentence, or has to look back to the start of the sentence to remember who’s talking and what the conversation is about, you’ve got too many conjunctions.
Again, the simplest way to eliminate unnecessary conjunctions is to read and read aloud your manuscript. Doing a find and replace search will lead to a headache because many conjunctions fill a need and move story along. You’ll have more conjunctions that you leave in than you take out, but the ones you take out will make the most difference to your story.
How’d it go this week? How much did you change, chop and learn about your story?
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It's pretty simple, really. I'm a writer who loves writing about writing, and sharing all the tricks of the trade with other writers. And when I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing. I have a hunch you know what I mean :)