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Delete These Four Words to Improve Your Writing Right Now

New writers struggle with writing, not because they don’t have a command of language. They do. Rather, they use a lot of needless words.

Yesterday’s blog post discussed E.B. White’s slight discomfort with the Strunk & White admonition, “Omit needless words,” and how it wasn’t necessary to omit words as long as they actually contributed to your narrative.Number four, as in four ways to improve your writing

When I work with new writers, there are certain words I try to get them to stop using. Eliminating them — the words, not the writers — improves their writing, and makes it much easier to read.

Here are four words you should delete right now to improve your own writing and make it flow, avoid being distracting, and sound more authoritative.

1. That

This is the first thing that I tell writers to get rid of. There are two kinds of thats — ones that you need, and ones that you don’t. When you delete a that, re-read the sentence and see if it still makes sense. If it does, you didn’t need it; if it doesn’t, you did.

Delete: This is the food that I ordered.
Keep: I want to eat that steak.

 

2. Anything that ends in -ly

You can get rid of almost any adverb in your writing; adverbs weaken writing because they detract from what’s being said. It’s one more unnecessary word that bogs down the narrative, and when it’s overused, can jolt a reader out of their reverie. You don’t want that. You want your reader to stay immersed in your work.

An adverb modifies a verb, but why would you need to? Never describe a verb, use a descriptive verb instead.

Delete: He ran quickly.
Keep: He raced.

Delete: The cannon fired loudly.
Keep: The cannon thundered.

Delete: She ate noisily.
Keep: She gulped down her food.

 

3. Any dialogue word other than “said”

A lot of new writers who learn how to write dialogue like to show off their newfound skills by using a lot of different conversational indicators. They think it makes them sound like they have a command of dialogue.

It doesn’t. It makes them sound like they have a thesaurus.

There are two words you should use for dialogue, said and asked. And you should use the latter sparingly. Also, if you say “asked,” you don’t need to respond with answered.

Delete: Sang, shouted, yelled, answered, queried, laughed, chuckled, snorted, cried, screamed, thundered, etc.
Keep: Said, asked.

It’s because the word “said” is a non-distracting word. We’re so used to seeing it, we don’t notice it. The only thing better than a well-turned phrase is one that’s never noticed. It’s like a good bass line to a song: you don’t notice it when it’s there, but you definitely notice when it’s wrong or missing.

Stick with said, and make that part of your writing go unnoticed so people can notice the brilliance of the rest of your dialogue.

 

4. I think, it seems, in my opinion

Unless you’re writing a news article, everything in your blog is your opinion. It’s not a fact, evidence, or an incontrovertible truth. So you don’t need to tell us it’s your opinion by littering it with “I think,” “in my opinion,” or “IMHO.”

If you want to be more authoritative and credible, remove all references to your opinion, unless it’s absolutely necessary to mention it. For example, if you’re writing a news article, but you have to add something you’re not sure of, then drop in a qualifier to to avoid confusing the reader who might mistake your opinion for a statement of fact. Otherwise, make it sound like your every utterance from the mountaintops should be heeded by all the land.

Delete: Anything that warns people you’re not absolutely sure of what you’re saying.
Keep: A quiet sense of confidence.

Start excising these words from your writing and make it a regular habit. Whether you’re writing a blog post, an article, or even just a series of emails, drop these words, and focus on avoiding them whenever you can.

I absolutely think that it will greatly improve your writing.

Photo credit: Leo Reynolds (Flickr, Creative Common)

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Brevity vs. Poetry: A Writer’s Dilemma

Writer E.B. White “was troubled by the absolutism of such rules” as set out in Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, says BrainPickings.org*.

White would respond to letter writers who had questions, comments, complaints, and compliments about the different rules and dictums set forth in the book that every college freshman buys, skims, and then never reads again.

“Avoid needless words,” was S&W’s admonishment to the blatherers in English Comp classes.

“Write down to the bones,” said every college journalism professor. “Scrape off all the fat.”

Problem is, this approach oftentimes results in the very life of the language being sucked right out of the piece. It’s the rhythm of the language that makes it enjoyable to read.

“I think that I shall never see/a lion as lovely as one shot by me.”

Would Ernest Hemingway Make a Good Poet?

I decided a long time ago that my writing style would be concise and simple. Hemingway-esque. Avoid adverbs, that sort of thing. (Although I’m still a sucker for a well-placed adjective.)

This contradicts the writing style students are being taught in colleges and universities: utilizing multi-syllabic, complex words that very few people, including the professor truly understood, but make you sound erudite; long, meandering sentences that endeavor to explain and clarify one’s thoughts with as many extraneous words as possible, which make you sound educated; and, whackingly long Faulkner-esque paragraphs that, when printed out on standard paper, can wipe out an entire rain forest, with bonus points being granted if you can use one sentence for a multi-line paragraph, like this sentence here.

This isn’t writing, it’s vocabulary vomiting. Students are being told that in order to communicate “effectively,” they have to use big words. As a result, when I meet a new graduate who wants to be a writer, this is the first habit I break them of, and teach them to use simpler, more vivid picturesque language. There’s a place for simplicity, but also a place for the beauty of the language.

This usually brings us to a different problem, where writers — especially nonfiction writers — are taught to avoid all adverbs and adjectives, even metaphors and similes, for the sake of simple, scientific, logical writing. (They are all then put into boxes and delivered by the truckload to the Creative Writing department, but that’s a different blog post.)

Use Language’s Natural Rhythm

The problem with this oversimple, journalistic-style writing is the language tends to be dry. Describe the facts, without hyperbole or exaggeration. Present them in the fewest words as possible to save on column inches and to keep readers involved as long as possible.

But, what about the poetry of language? Language has a natural rhythm that makes some words a better fit than others. Some writers are masters at this, and Hemingway was one of the few who could find the rhythm in his sparse style. Other people who do it well are speechwriters. Ted Sorensen, John F. Kennedy’s speechwriter, excelled at it, as did Reagan and Clinton’s speechwriters.

As White said in a letter in his book, The Letters of E.B. White:

It comes down to the meaning of ‘needless.’ Often a word can be removed without destroying the structure of a sentence, but that does not necessarily mean that the word is needless or that the sentence has gained by its removal.

If you were to put a narrow construction on the word ‘needless,’ you would have to remove tens of thousands of words from Shakespeare, who seldom said anything in six words that could be said in twenty. Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound. How about ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’*? One tomorrow would suffice, but it’s the other two that have made the thing immortal.

Writing is a “journey into sound.” That’s the natural rhythm of language. Tap into it, and people will read your work, long after they swore they would quit. Many times I’ve found myself promising to only read 10 pages before I go to sleep, only to look at the clock and see that two hours have passed.

Roger Angell, the baseball writer for The New Yorker, is a master at finding rhythm, but doing it in long sentences. He uses 80 words to weave an Appalachian Trail of a sentence to make you feel like you’re sitting at the ballpark with him. He still needs every word to do it though. There are very few “needless words” in a Roger Angell article.

Simple Writing is Not Stripped Down Writing

Simple writing is not just striking out everything but nouns and verbs. It means choosing the very best words.

It’s like how a minimalist decorates their house: they don’t have just a TV and a couch in the living room. They’ll also have books on a bookshelf, but only 50 of their most favorite books in all the world.

Simple writers may use only a few words, but they use the right words that convey exactly what they want to say. They don’t explain the words they use, they use the richest words that hold the most meaning.

The secret to writing poetically and with brevity is to find the most vivid words with the deepest meaning to properly convey the message, and tap into the their rhythm to carry your thoughts.

* If you’re a writer, or you care about words, read BrainPickings.org every day, and subscribe to the newsletter. Also, follow @BrainPicker on the Twitter.

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Google’s Changes Makes SEO Harder, Good Content Important

Doug Karr’s SEO Is Dead, Long Live Content talk at Blog Indiana last week was a good lesson in the importance of good content for companies that want to succeed online.

In the past, you could hire SEO firms that would use backlinking strategies, keyword stuffing strategies, and any other black hat or gray hat tactic you could think of. And for several years, they worked great. Spend more money, and the rankings go up. Abandon your SEO company, and your rankings would drop.

Google’s Panda and Penguin updates have all but killed the traditional SEO industry. It’s gotten so bad that small SEO companies have shut down completely, and the big SEO companies have laid off staff members as they retool and redefine themselves.

But the smart companies are retooling themselves into content factories. They finally got the message that they needed to produce words — lots and lots of words — and quit spending so much energy on on-page SEO, page sculpting, and all the other little tricks. Of course, they don’t always produce good content. . .

Why Should You Make Good Content?

Google wants you to make your stuff awesome. They want you to produce good quality content, and they’re not so worried about the old techniques..

This has really helped the social media savvy writers and content producers, because they’re the ones who 1) know how to produce the best content that people want to read, hear, and watch, and 2) they know how to share it to the biggest, but precisely targeted audience.

As Doug said during his talk, “You need to capture the scale of intent for the problems people are trying to solve online and talk to people the way they want to be talked to.”

In other words, speak to the dog, in the language of the dog, about the things that matter to the heart of the dog.

Content Marketing Just Got Harder

This has made marketing more difficult. It is requiring us to turn off Fast Eddie’s Super Fantastic Automatic Marketing Machine, and actually do some old-school marketing, crafted carefully by hand, and done by trained professionals.

It means you can’t automate. You can’t phone it in. You can’t ignore the quality of the writing. You can’t ignore the grammar and punctuation. And you can’t do a half-assed job in your writing.

It means you need to hire people who know how to write good stuff. Who can shoot good video. Who can record interesting podcasts. Who know how to build community online and effectively communicate to them.

It means you have to pay attention to your audience and what they want. You have to know what interests them. You have to know what they want. Basically, you have to listen to them.

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Why I Give Away the Good Stuff – What I Learned from Jay Baer at Blog Indiana

Jay Baer’s keynote at Blog Indiana 2012 reminded me why I always give talks about how to be a good blogger. It’s why I write blog posts about blogging technology. It’s why I teach customers to do what I do, so they can do it for themselves.

At his keynote, Jay talked about how Geek Squad shares all kinds of information through their videos, telling you how to remove viruses, or install something, or troubleshoot a problem.

Jay said that Geek Squad shows videos on how to fix computers, because “they make people think they can fix their own computer. Eventually, they need to bring their computer to a real professional.”

Me and Jay Baer. He makes me want to buy a used car from him.

What ends up happening is the customer runs into a problem they can’t fix, and so they take their video to the company whose videos they were just watching — with the Geek Squad logo — because they’ve learned to trust them.

If you can help customers out, you’ll earn their trust when they’re ready to buy.

Or, as Jay said, sell them something, and you make a customer today. Help someone, and you’ll make a customer for life.

Jay calls it Friend of Mine Awareness a variation of “frame of mind awareness” (being there when the customer needs a vendor). Frame of mind is the basic principle behind search engines and even the Yellow Pages.

But Friend of Mine Awareness says that if you help people out, you’ll earn their trust when they’re ready to buy. That means you have to be inherently useful. You have to be what Jay calls a YOUtility.

Jay said a lot of companies worry that if they give too much information away, their competitors will learn how to do what they do. Their customers will be able to do the thing themselves.

Bollocks!

As Jay said, a list of ingredients doesn’t make you a chef.

If I teach you how to write a blog post, all I’m really giving you is the list of ingredients. I’m not teaching you 24 years of writing experience. I’m not teaching you the insights I can gather based on doing keyword research. I’m not teaching you how to listen for the passion in the CEO’s voice, or to hear the frustration in the customer’s voice, or use the writing style that appeals directly to your customer.

One frequent source of potential clients for our company are people who have heard me speak, or who have read our blog. They decide they want to try it out for themselves, because I’ve shown them how easy it is.

But what happens is that they realize that blogging is harder than they thought. It’s not that they can’t write, or that they don’t know what their company does.

They realized that while they had the ingredients, and I even taught them how to mix them all together, they’re not chefs. They’re not writers. They’re not bloggers.

They’re accountants or operations directors or CEOs or attorneys or VPs of Marketing. They’re not going to take the time to learn it, because they have clients to take care of.

So they realize that if they want to be successful at their job, they need to stop doing the stuff that keeps them from doing their real work. Blogging is one of those things, which means they want to pass it off to the people who can do it well.

The people they trust. And how do they know who to trust?

They trust the guy who told them how to do it in the first place. The guy who gave them the good stuff.

Photo credit: Bob Burchfield of AroundIndy.com

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App.net Could Be a Twitter Killer

It could be the Twitter killer.

App.net, the open-source Twitter competitor, could be the thing that defeats and replaces Twitter, at least for those people who are starting to look at Twitter the same way a married couple begins to realize that the honeymoon ended 10 years ago.

We all assumed — at least those of us who have been on Twitter for a few years — that Twitter had the same do-no-evil attitude that Google did. That they were going to be cool.

But over the last 12 months, the sheen has come off and what were once cute little quirks have become full-blown annoyances.

  • Twitter bought Posterous for an talent acquisition, not a technology one. Expect your Posterous blog to go away one day.
  • They bought TweetDeck, and we all feared they were going to kill it, but instead, they made it suck.
  • Twitter has been shutting out third-party app and api developers, presumably to bring things in better alignment with their brand.
  • Twitter had a great relationship with Google where you could search for real-time tweets. That relationship was not renewed when it ended. Sort of like an actor whose contract isn’t renewed for the upcoming season.
  • They blocked off Instagram access, meaning you can’t find your Twitter friends on the photo sharing too.
  • Most recently, Twitter shut down the account of a British journalist who was critical of NBC’s crappy Olympic coverage. It was only after a huge outcry that they turned it back on.

Twitter keeps turning more and more into Facebook every day. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

Entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell, a rock star prodigy among the A-list tech entrepreneurs, told ReadWriteWeb that these are the “classic symptoms of an online media company failing to fly. ‘Media companies are starving,’ Caldwell says, ‘and that’s why they do crazy things.'”

So I was very excited to hear about App.net (app dot net) as a possible new Twitter alternative.

The best part? It costs 50 bucks a year to use.

50 bucks?! But Twitter is free!

Yes, Twitter is free. Yes, Twitter has more than 500 million accounts on it, and is the most widely accepted microblog on the planet.

But here’s what App.net has that Twitter does not.

  • It’s decentralized. That means no one person can control it or make unilateral decisions that piss everyone off. It’s like WordPress or Firefox.
  • It’s open-source, which means developers can make their own apps work with it any way they want.
  • It’s ad free. So no sponsored tweets. (I don’t find it to be such a big deal on Twitter, but I’m also willing to pay for ad-free.)
  • 50 bucks will keep the spammers away.
  • There will only be serious users of the tool. Imagine, no spam, no porn, no MLMers showing you how to make money in your spare time.

The problem is, these guys need $500,000 in order to launch. You pledge your $50 (or $100 for developers or $1,000, if you’re so inclined), and Caldwell will launch the app. But there are 4 days left — you have until next Monday — and App.net is at $295,500 as of this moment.

If you’re tired of Twitter and wish there was an alternative, check out App.net. If you like what you see, pledge your $50, send Dalton (@DaltonC) a tweet (yes, I’m aware of the irony of that), and once you’re in, start communicating. I’ll be at the Blog Indiana conference for the next two days, sharing what I learn on Twitter, but also on App.net.

Hope to see you there.

Background reading on App.net

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Our Content, Like Our Music, Sucks: Challenge Your Thinking

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but today’s music isn’t as good as it was when I was growing up. It lacks soul and depth and is not nearly as good as the stuff I grew up listening to.

My parents said the same thing about my music, only I have science to back me up.

According to a new study from Scientific Reports, researchers performed a quantitative analysis of nearly 500,000 songs. What they found is that since the 1960s, music has decreased in timbre (sound, color, texture, and tone) and pitch (chords, melody, and tonal arrangements). What it has increased in is loudness.

This is the Ouroroboros. It’s also how we’re coming up with new content ideas.

It’s understandable. Artists like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix were pioneers in music. What they did took real artistry. But as record companies decided what we would hear on the radio, and signed artists who are marketable rather than talented, music has become so homogenized, groups like Nickelback are considered “pretty good,” while songs like “Call Me Maybe” and “Baby” go gold.

If you’ve ever thought today’s music all sounds the same, you’re right. And it’s not because you’re getting old.

 

It’s Happening To Our Content Too

This sin of sameness is happening to the rest of our popular culture. Movies are predictable and identical — hell, they’re remaking movies that aren’t even 30 years old. Books are formulaic and characters are painted from the same palette (food-obsessed mysteries starring female detectives who are also chefs and have rich divorced friends overrun my library’s shelves). Every TV comedy tries to be Friends or Cheers.

Even the online content we create resembles each other’s.

Part of this is just the sheer coincidence of big numbers. If you and I each write a blog post about blogging lessons we’ve learned from watching Tennessee Tuxedo, that’s a pretty big coincidence. Until you realize that with a few million bloggers, it’s more surprising that two people don’t write about it.

A bigger part of this is laziness and a lack of creativity.

Too many of us draw inspiration from each other, like some Ouroboros. David writes something that Sheila likes, so she writes about it. Helen likes what Sheila wrote, so she responds to it. Meanwhile, Steve is inspired by Sheila and writes his own interpretation. Of course, David is a big fan of Steve’s, so. . .

Ouroboros. The snake that eats its tail.

Very few people are able to come up with a shiny new idea at all, whether it’s movies, books, TV shows, or blog posts. As Mark Twain said in his biography:

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.

 

Be Original. Everyone Else Is.

It’s not that we shouldn’t try. It’s not that we should give up. But we should be willing to experiment. We should be willing to break out of the rut so-o-o-o many of us are in. Stop trying to win readers and increase traffic. Start writing stuff that’s interesting to you and makes you happy.

Be a pioneer. Take the road less traveled. Boldly go where no one has yada yada yada.

For one week, stop reading other people’s stuff. Stop being inspired. Stop seeking new nuggets of wisdom in other people’s rivers. Turn on the creative faucets, put on your thinking socks, and come up with some of the wackiest shit you can, and see what you can do with it.

  • Everything I Needed to Know About Networking I Learned From a Banana
  • What Baseball and Corn Flakes Have in Common
  • What My Day Would Be Like if I Had No Personal Gravity

Turn your idea into a 300, 400, or 500 word blog post. Don’t write it to appeal to readers. Write it to stretch your thinking. Write it to find new connections and patterns where you’ve never seen them before. Write it so you don’t sound like every other blogger and content creator trying to jump on the latest Twitter hashtag, hoping to eke out a few extra readers.

Be yourself. Better yet, be someone you haven’t been yet. Come up with the weirdest idea, turn it into a blog post, and then leave a URL in the comments section.

Let’s see what you got.

Photo credit: Leo Reynolds (Flickr, Creative Commons