Four Simple Practices to Help You Write Tight

 

By Candyce Carden

 

To keep an audience reading our words, we must write with clarity, crispness, and concision. Our goal is to write tight and make every word count. 

Tight writing moves our audience along in our story or article. Wordy writing with meandering sentences loses readers. They don’t have the time or patience to wander through miles of prose to find the point.

These four simple practices will help you write tight by trimming away the fat.

1. Avoid Adverbs

The smallest dab of adverbs is plenty, just like with perfume. Here’s a couple of successful writers on adverbs:

• “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Stephen King
• “Adverbs are the tool of the lazy writer.” Mark Twain

Adverbs modify verbs. But they can also modify adjectives and other adverbs. They often end with ly, though not always. Adverbs are weak. Instead of adding depth, meaning, or action to a sentence, they slow it down. Tight writers find a strong verb to show the reader what is going on. Strong verbs pull the reader into our writing like a magnet. Adverbs push them away.

Compare these sentences with and without the adverbs. One tells, the other shows.

• When the mouse slowly walked from behind the bookcase, the cat swiftly ran after it.
• When the mouse edged from behind the bookcase, the cat pounced on it.

Never Say Never: You can’t always avoid adverbs. Sometimes no amount of verb-searching gets you where you want to go. But use them sparingly.

2. Deflate the Inflated

Add crispness to your writing by converting inflated phrases into shorter ones that convey the same meaning and activate the writing. The following sentence pairs provide a few before and after examples:

• Next month, the interns will do a study on the declining bee population.
• Next month, the interns will study the declining bee population.

• Tim provided a summary of the survey results.
• Tim summarized the survey results.

• He refuses to attend practice in spite of the fact that it would be good for him.
• He refuses to attend practice although it would be good for him.

• In the event that Ms. Jones cannot attend the meeting, mail her a copy of the plan.
• If Ms. Jones cannot attend the meeting, mail her a copy of the plan.

3. Eradicate Meaningless Words

I overuse the word that when I write. Because it’s often unnecessary, I search for the word in any document I create and eliminate it when possible. Evaluate your writing for other common meaningless words like:

• just, really, quite, perhaps, over, very, like, so, such, some, at all, etc.

Shun Redundancies: new innovations, unexpected surprise, absolutely certain, actual experience, ask a question, consensus of opinion, false pretense, protest against, unintended mistake, stand to your feet, free gift, etc.

Beware Acronyms: Don’t use words that are part of an acronym: Automated Teller Machine (ATM, not ATM machine); Blood Sugar Level (BSL, not level of my BSL); Self-contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, (SCUBA, not SCUBA Apparatus).

4. Eliminate (or Replace) Cliches

Don’t be unoriginal. Cliches are expressions that have been used so often they’ve lost originality or impact. Chances are you’ve heard these examples:

Fly in the face of (replacement: defy); goes to show (replacement: proves); par for the course (replacement: typical); in a timely fashion (replacement: promptly); A leopard can’t change its spots; Turn over a new leaf; Change is in the air; A chip off the old block; In a nutshell; Food for thought.

Before You Submit

Trim the fat from your manuscripts before you hit submit. This is something we have to work at throughout our writing lives. Consider William Strunk, Jr.’s advice about writing with concision in his book, The Elements of Style. “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tells.”

 Photo courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net and Stuart Miles.

 Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com and Brett Jordan.

 

Candyce Carden is a writer, educator, and nature lover whose teaching experience ranges from preschool to college. She’s written for a variety of magazines, devotionals, and compilations. Her beach devotional, Immersed in God’s Love, releases sometime in 2026. Candyce and her husband divide time between north Georgia and Destin, Fla. The answer may not be at the beach, but should we not at least check?

Find more about her at CandyceCarden.com.