Thursday 4 August 2016

Editing - taking a knife to fluff

Image result for piece of fluff


When you come to edit a finished piece of work there are a couple of things you can do that will immediately sharpen your language and if necessary, reduce a word count.

1. Remove the following

Very
Really
Quite

Get rid of them and see if you can't improve the quality of the word they were supporting.

Very fast - fast - rapid/speedy/brisk/racing

Really hot - hot - scorching/sweltering/searing/blistering

Quite interesting - interesting - riveting/fascinating/enthralling/captivating



2. Reduce your use of the word 'and'. Make some of your sentences shorter and more meaningful.It varies the pace of the prose and makes for easier uderstanding.

3. Compress words in speech. It makes dialogue more realistic and can cut a hefty wordcount if this is your aim.

'You could have said. I would not mind.' - 'You could've said. I wouldn't mind.'


Very simple and ordinary edits like these can dramatically affect the feel of your work and there's hardly any effort involved. Getting rid of fluffy sentences makes the harder editing jobs such as restructuring or getting rid of superfluous characters much easier.