Month: November 2014

“Where’s he at?”…and Other Sentence Clutter

Man with Binoculars
“I can’t see him. Where is he at?”
photo credit: Boston Public Library via photopin cc

Have you agreed to stop hoarding and clean up your writing? In my previous post, I told you what to get rid of (These are actually just a start!):

  1. redundancy
  2. wordiness
  3. pretension
  4. circumlocution
  5. modifiers
  6. empty openers and phrases
  7. clichés
  8. passive verbs
  9. vague nouns
  10. noun forms of verbs

I had you look for redundancies such as “woke up out of sleep.” The George Carlin piece suggested “Duh!”s like “honest truth.” My all-time favorite duh! “Where’s he at?”  Continue reading “Where’s he at?”…and Other Sentence Clutter

Call 1-800-GOT-JUNK?

A hoarder's apartment
A hoarder’s apartment
By Grap (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
Are you a hoarder? Maybe not in your home, but what about in your writing? Is it so cluttered with verbiage—wordiness, circumlocution, redundancy, modifiers, empty openers and phrases, pretension, clichés—that your readers stumble and rummage through it?

It’s time to purge. Even if you’re a creative writer.

If your writing is non-fiction or business, of course you want it to be clear and direct. But flowery embellishments and long, tangled descriptions don’t work now in creative writing, either. Maybe during the Victorian era that was the style, but today’s creative writing is clear and direct. All writers, then, need to use the “power” skill of writing concisely.  Continue reading Call 1-800-GOT-JUNK?

Real-life Non-fiction Metaphors

Kinky Boots
Cyndi Lauper’s Kinky Boots wins 2013 Best Musical Tony award

In my last post, I encouraged you to incorporate metaphor into your writing. In case you’re still not convinced how it will work in non-fiction writing, here are some examples. Note in each case how the metaphor immediately created a visual image for the reader, bringing the concept into focus and making further explanation unnecessary. You may recognize a couple of the metaphors as similes, a specific type of metaphor that compares two items using “like” or “as.”  Continue reading Real-life Non-fiction Metaphors

Life is a Beach!

Caneel_Bay
Caneel Bay, St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands

Metaphor—it’s not just for poems any more. Metaphor is one of those techniques all writers should grab from creative writers to add creative power to their writing.

At its most basic, metaphor is a comparison in image form, and how effective are comparison—and creating an image in your reader’s mind—in making any type of point? A description, an explanation, an argument—all are enriched through comparison and imagery.  Continue reading Life is a Beach!