Dear IAC Friends,
Offered here are a set writing exercises from notable, American editor, Jack Hart - that appear in Nicole Bianchi's column. The exercise goes beyond fiction writing, especially in its lessons on "empty words."
With all good wishes ! -Mary
-Some know that I edited a volume on Scholarly Writing and Publishing !The Jack Hart Exercise for Crafting Concise and Powerful Sentences
Finally, let’s conclude with a quick little editing exercise that will help you make your writing more precise and your sentences easier to read.
In award-winning journalist Jack Hart’s wonderful book Storycraft that I recently reviewed, he shares this editing advice,
Any word that doesn’t advance a story slows it down. Which is reason enough to avoid expletives. Contrary to popular misconception, the term “expletive” refers to a whole class of empty words, not just gratuitous profanities. Most expletives simply fill out the syntax of sentences. The most common are “there are,” “there is,” “there was,” “it is,” “it was,” and so on.
Think about a sentence like “there were two airplanes on the runway.” What’s the “there” refer to, anyway? Nada. It just serves to turn “two airplanes on the runway” into a complete sentence.
You don’t violate any grammatical rule when you use an expletive, and each expletive is of no great consequence. But they pile up, and eventually they slow your storytelling.
Why not introduce a real verb that generates an image by writing, “two airplanes taxied on the runway” or “two airplanes idled on the runway,” or even “two airplanes sat on the runway”? …
Here’s how to turn this into an exercise: Take one of your recent drafts and go on a hunt to see how many empty words you can eliminate from your writing.
Hart observes that even a word like “began” might not be necessary to a sentence when describing action. For example, instead of writing “He began to walk around the room”, you could just write, “He walked around the room.”
You can often find empty words in phrases that use connecting words like at, by, for, in, it, of, to, and with. Here are some more examples
