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| Strengthening Your Language |
Next, tighten and clean up your language. The hardest work is done now. You have a newly written draft that says what you want to say in the right order. Nevertheless it is liable to be imprecise, wordy, and awkward. You need to stop being the writer and read over your draft with the fresh eyes of a reader. The best way is to put it aside for a while and then to read it over out loud.
Next, tighten and clean up your language. The hardest work is done now. You have a newly written draft that says what you want to say in the right order. Nevertheless it is liable to be imprecise, wordy, and awkward. You need to stop being the writer and read over your draft with the fresh eyes of a reader. The best way is to put it aside for a while and then to read it over out loud. In cleaning up your language you have two goals: precision and energy. The more you zero in on the precise meaning you have in mind, the more you can strip away unnecessary words and thereby energize your language. The key activity is crossing out words and sentences. Your new draft may have large chunks from your raw first-draft writing, rearranged with scissors and staples. These sections may need extensive cutting. When you wrote them during the producing process you were permitting yourself to write without necessarily making up your mind what you were saying. You were hurrying and allowing for ambiguity and ambivalence -- driving a small crowd of horses down the road without making up your mind which one to ride on. It's natural to end up with too many meanings, too many words, too many strands -- sometimes in one sentence. But now you have forced yourself to choose among strands and decide exactly what you mean; you must ruthlessly throw away all the words that were part of abandoned strands. Some may feel very precious to you. And even your new writing probably needs cutting. Although you were engaged in saying, as it were, only one thing instead of allowing for multiple possibilities, you probably didn't say it as clearly and economically as you can now when you look back as a reader instead of as a writer. Remember that every word you throw away means another unit of energy preserved, another reader who may hang in there a bit longer before giving up. The psychological transaction that helps most in cutting is to read your words out loud. Look for places where you stumble or get lost in the middle of a sentence. These are obvious awkwardnesses that need fixing. Look for places where you get distracted or even bored -- where you cannot concentrate. These are places where you probably lost focus or concentration in your writing. Cut through the extra words or vagueness or digression; get back to the energy. Listen even for the tiniest jerk or stumble in your reading, the tiniest lessening of your energy or focus or concentration as you say the words. Can you remember listening to someone read a story out loud and how you could tell when the reader got the tiniest bit bored or distracted and stopped giving full attention to the words? Listen for that when you read your own words. Listen for places where the words themselves seem to stop paying full attention to their own meaning. These are all places where you need to increase the precision and energy in your language. You don't have to know what the problem is. No need for sophisticated diagnosis. It doesn't matter whether it is a modifier or a conjunction that is acting up. Just grab yourself by the shoulders, shake yourself, and insist that you mean business: "Stop beating around the bush. Just tell me what you mean to say. Stop explaining things or talking in 'essay' or translating what you have on your mind into 'writing' language: just say it!" Pretend someone is being this firm with you because he cares about you and wants to know what's on your mind. A sentence should be alive. Does it sag in the middle or trail off at the end? Is it fog or mush? Sentences need energy to make the meaning jump off the page into the reader's head. As writer you must embed that energy in the sentence -- coil the spring, set the trap. The meanings should spring up when the reader steps on the first word. If you just leave your meanings lying around on the ground, readers will have to stoop over to pick them up. You won't have many readers except those who are doing you a favor or already want to know what you have to say -- and even those readers won't get experiences from your words, only meanings.The best sentence is the kind that comes out during the best moments of raw first-draft writing. You are warmed up, writing fast, excited, but not worried. You are fully involved in your meaning, not conscious of anything else. The sentence flows out alive and loud so the reader hears it. Obviously much of your raw writing won't be that way, and it's harder still to achieve that kind of language as you revise -- when you are using language slowly, carefully, and consciously. Revising is like constructing a difficult mathematical equation: continually you must stop in the middle of sentences to ponder the right word, to search your memory for alternatives, to wonder whether this sentence fits what came before and comes after. Instead of the producing consciousness where you bend all your efforts singlemindedly toward making contact with what you are writing about -- toward full participation with your meaning -- in revising you must necessarily be thinking about the reader, about the structure of the whole, about whether your words are true. In good raw writing you give birth to sentences, in revising you have to construct them.Ideal revising, perhaps, would consist only of crossing out and rearranging live words born in the producing process so that every word in the final draft has psychic energy invested in it. (I am exaggerating the value of your raw writing. Not all is alive. Much of it, rightly enough, is produced by slogging onwards when the spirit is dead. One of the main reasons for learning freewriting is so that you can keep on writing even when you are not in the mood.)But if your raw writing doesn't contain the sentences you need ready-made or uncoverable, there's nothing for it but to construct the best sentences you can. Here are a few suggestions:
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