Last week I talked about easy ways to add energy to your writing. This week, I’ll give you five easy ways to tighten your writing.

Keep in mind, anything that doesn’t contribute to a piece of writing detracts from it. To create the strongest possible prose, eliminate everything that isn’t essential.

1. Question every word. Read slowly through your draft questioning every word, phrase, and clause. Will cutting a word sacrifice the sentence’s meaning? If not, cut it. If cutting a word sacrifices only a tad of meaning unessential to your main point, cut that, too. Pay attention to the words or phrases on either side of conjunctions such as and, or, and but. Do you really need “strong” and “sturdy”?

2. Make your modifiers specific. Instead of writing that the car was “old,” say it was “dilapidated.” Drop modifiers that are already conveyed by their nouns or verbs. Do you need to write that your character “slowly ambled” down the aisle, or does “ambled” do the job?

3. Don’t crowd. Limit your sentences to one or two main ideas. Overloading your writing intimidates readers and adds unnecessary length.

4. Keep it concise. Never use two nouns when one will do. It’s not a “sales event,” it’s a “sale.” And a “crisis” is much more urgent than a “crisis situation.”

5. Heave the verb anchors. Simple action verbs can drive most writing. Auxiliary verbs bog the action down. Why write “he was skiing down the hill” when “he skied down the hill” does the job?

Reference: Hart, J. A Writer’s Coach, 2006, New York: Pantheon Books.

What do physics and writing have in common? In physics, the bigger and faster a moving object, the harder it hits. Same thing with words. The more energy they carry, the more response they get.

Do you want the world to take notice of your writing? Here are five ways to add energy:

1. Find action verbs. Describe your surroundings. Verbs such as “to be,” “looked,” “appeared,” and “felt” merely define. There’s no action.

The grass is green.
The grass looked green.
The grass felt good.

Action verbs capture movement.

The lightning bolt splintered the elm, crashing it into the house.

2. Avoid unnecessary suffixes. Word endings such as “-able,” “-tion,” and “-ance” turn action words into anchors.

Flabby: He gained entrance into the residence.
Svelte: He broke into the house.

3. Use the active voice. The voice of the verb determines the way action flows in a sentence. The strongest sentences start with the action then flow from the subject through the verb to the object.

Example:If Tom has a baseball and he hammers it into deep left field, then the active way of describing that act is:

Tom hit the ball.

The passive voice, on the other hand, begins with the object of the action, follows with the verb, and tacks the subject onto the end of the sentence.

The ball was hit by Tom.

4. Watch your expletives. An expletive is not just a curse word, but any term that merely fills a hole in a sentence without carrying any meaning. Common expletives include “there are,” “there were,” and “it is.” Expletives waste space and drain energy; eliminate them when you can.

Weak: There were six geese on the pond.
Better: Six geese paddled across the pond.
Weak: It was dawn.
Better: The sun rose.

5. Be bold. Confident writers take charge of their writing. Don’t be vague by using little qualifiers such as “somewhat,” “rather,” and “a little bit.”

The sun was somewhat hot.
The sun was rather hot.

There is no somewhat or rather. Be confident; was the sun hot or not?

Reference: Hart, J. The Writer’s Coach, 2006, New York: Pantheon Books