Getting it Right (part 1)
You've spent hours gathering material and writing your story. Now it is time for the third step in the process—rewriting. To illustrate the value of rewriting, imagine that you are suddenly asked to play third base for the Baltimore Orioles. You have no training or experience in baseball, so the experiment is likely to be a disaster. But suppose you have expert instruction and one month to prepare. Suppose someone hits you 1,000 grounders a day for that month. No doubt, after this kind of practice, you will be much more successful.
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So it is with writing. Writing takes practice. Your first draft will never be as good as your second draft, and the second will never be as good as the third. Remember, there is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. Or, as Roscoe Born, former Wall Street Journal editor, said, "What you have written is only preparation for what you are going to write." Here are some ways to improve your first draft:
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Read your story aloud. Reading aloud is a great way to test for clarity and grace. Are your sentences too long? Is a paragraph confusing? Is your work conversational or stilted? "I read aloud so I can hear every word, can discover where the little words bump into each other and destroy the rhythm," said Don Murray of The Boston Globe. Or as historian Barbara Tuchman said, "After seven years' apprenticeship in journalism, I have discovered that an essential element for good writing is a good ear. One must listen to one's own prose."
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Check to make sure your sentences are not too long. Sentence length should vary, but the average should be below 25 words. Reader comprehension decreases as sentence length increases. Paula LaRocque of The Dallas Morning News said, "The period is one of the clear writer's best friends." And Robert Gunning wrote, "I know of no author addressing a general audience today who averages much more than 20 words per sentence and still succeeds in getting published."
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Check your writing for clutter. Is your work full of twisted phrases, jargon, redundancies, long words where short ones will do, unnecessary qualifiers and modifiers? The disease of American writing is clutter, said William Zinsser. Strip every sentence to its cleanest components. The gardener knows that he must thin his plants after the first seedlings appear. Otherwise, his entire crop will suffer. The same holds true for writing.
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Make sure that you have used the subject-verb-object construction in most of your sentences. Avoid backing into sentences with long dependent clauses, especially introductory ones. Roy Peter Clark calls this "throat-clearing." Get to it.
To improve your story:
- Read it aloud
- Use short, simple sentences
- Remove clutter
Source:Getting it Right (part 1).