There are sentences that move like race cars, and sentences that move like molasses. If you want your sentences to move more quickly and convey more information to the reader, prune the excess words out. Unless you're a Russian novelist from two hundred years ago, less is more these days, right? So, let's take three words for example today and see what makes them not tick so well.
Really?
Really? No, not really. I mean really get rid of Really. Let's start with an example sentence.
The tea in the kettle was really hot.
Really. It is used as a cheap reinforcement here of the temperature of the kettle. Instead of telling us something of interest about the temperature of the kettle, the author lays back and tells us it was really hot. I think the author is better off not even including the sentence, perhaps.
Alternate examples:
The tea in the kettle sent steamy wisps toward the ceiling, the bubbles rattling in its bottom.
The tea in the kettle was boiling, plaintively wailing through the whistle in the spout.
Don't make a simple statement! Show the reader how hot it is.
Very.
The tea in the kettle was very hot.
Really? Was it very hot? How much hot is that? Much the same argument for really can be used for very. Neither word is descriptive by itself, and is a crutch for a potentially more descriptive passage.
That.
I find few occasions where a sentence is helped by the word that. Sometimes you need it to reference something clearly already indicated, but many times it can be omitted with a reworking of the sentence.
This is the swing set that the children were injured on.
This rusty swing set is where the children injured themselves.
This swing set injured my children when they were playing on it.
I built this swing set twenty years ago, but the neighbor's children injured themselves on the rusty legs and cross beams.
So, my conclusion for today is that it is really an interesting challenge to do a search and replace and find all of these very unnecessary words. And how is that done? I often have a list of words in a simple text file on my computer desktop. When I'm done I use the Find feature in my word processor to identify the main culprits, and I weed them out like crabgrass in the lawn.
Hrmm. Did they catch what I did there? We'll see.
