Tightening Up Your Writing

Manifest What you Want, Whenever you Want....

Regardless of whether you are a high school student, a college student, someone looking for a job, someone who has to write for their job, or even someone who writes for a living, everyone can use some extra tips to make sure their writing is as tight as possible. After all, tight writing is absorbing writing - and when your words are needing to convey something to the audience, you need these words to be as absorbing as you can make them.

Extra words: When you start to pay attention to your writing, you will find that there are often ways to say "what you want to say" using fewer words than what you usually use. While "fewer words" is not the hard and fast rule to tighter writing, it is certainly a big key; you should make sure that every word in your writing serves a purpose, as this will help you to make your sentences "pop" off the page.

Passive voice: In every possible instance, you need to write in the active voice, instead of in the passive voice; most readers will not even notice what you are doing differently, but it will definitely stand out to them that something is different.

Adverbs: There is nearly nothing that weighs a sentence or a paragraph down more than the overuse of adverbs; the rule to keep in mind, when it comes to using adverbs, is this: avoid adverbs as best you can, unless you absolutely have to use them!

Study: Finally, studying and practicing are the best ways to truly tighten your writing. Here is the best book to use for study: Elements of Style was written by William Strunk, Jr - who was a professor of EB White's (author of "Charlotte's Web") - and it was coauthored by White himself; it is the definitive piece of literature on the craft of concise and straightforward writing, and is a necessity for any student or professional writer!

When you put all these things together, you will be that much closer to writing in a tight manner - which is to say, you will be that much closer to writing in a truly effective manner!