How to Make Your Writing Less Wordy (6 Easy Tips)

let's get right to the point because today i'm going to teach you how to make your writing less wordy this video was requested by a subscriber of mine she was struggling with wordiness in her writing she can't really wrangle down her sentences as much as she'd like to so today i have six tips that will hopefully help all you guys out with your writing and just making your sentences stronger by the way my name is brandon mcnulty i'm the author of bad parts also the author of entry wounds and welcome to my writing channel so as i mentioned today i have six tips for helping you cut down on the wordiness in your writing and the first of these tips is obvious it's one that a lot of writers however tend to ignore sometimes they avoid altogether and it's that you need to make large scale cuts to your writing before you worry about the sentence level stuff before you worry about the fine tuning and the thing is a lot of writers are uncomfortable with cutting things like chapters in their story or cutting full scenes or events or anything that matters to them that is maybe larger than a paragraph and you need to realize that if you're going to save time and you're going to cut down on words you have to accept that a lot of the things in your story are unnecessary and if it is unnecessary you might as well just cut the whole thing that'll save you from worrying about all the fine tuning that gets done later on so if you have something that you think maybe it doesn't belong in the story chances are it's something you can get rid of and then once you have everything that really needs to be there that's when you worry about the fine-tuning that's when you worry about my next five tips for today and the second tip for today is to drop any unnecessary words from dialogue especially if it makes your dialogue sound more natural now i have a couple of examples for you here when i give examples today i'm going to start with a wordy example and then i'm going to show a revised version that's stronger and shorter so let's say we're having a conversation between luke skywalker and obi-wan kenobi and luke says wait obi-wan did you fight in the clone wars now that line of dialogue is nine words long and it's also a little too formal sounding and if we rewrite this we can make it stronger and shorter and here's what we'll get you fought in the clone wars and that of course is from the actual movie the original star wars movie and we cut out three words here we take it from nine words to six we make it sound more natural in the process and of course it's stronger because of that tip number three is to avoid adverbs and instead use stronger verbs and stronger adjectives you've probably heard by now that adverbs are bad for your writing and that's because what they do is they usually prop up weaker verbs and weaker adjectives now i've got a couple examples for you the first example shows an adverb that is describing a verb and it goes she forcefully stepped on the gas pedal now this sentence is seven words and we can cut it down to five by simply adding a stronger verb to this sentence and our rewrite is she stomped the gas pedal so we actually instead of having forcefully stepped on we condense those three words into one and we just condense it into stomped which is not only just a stronger verb but it's also very visual now here's another example and the adverb in this sentence describes an adjective we bought a very large home now this sentence just sucks it's weak it's boring and the word very is just one of the weakest words you can use in your writing so let's rewrite it and we'll just say we bought a massive home that's a stronger adjective than large and it makes the sentence stronger we also take things a little further if you want to use a specific noun you can get rid of the adjective so we can rewrite the sentence and we can say we bought a mansion so instead of a large home or a massive home a mansion it's a specific noun that helps us cut down on word count tip number four is to cut down on prepositional phrases anytime you see a really long sentence typically there are a bunch of prepositional phrases sprinkled in there and usually you can cut one or two of them or maybe even more so here's a couple examples first example the old captain never saw a shark in all his years of sailing along the atlantic coast and this sentence ends with three consecutive prepositional phrases and we can cut out two of these we can rewrite the sentence the old captain never saw a shark along the atlantic coast so in all his years and of sailing we don't need those and you might say well brandon isn't that important information don't we need that and i would say no because when you open up the sentence by saying the old captain if you're saying the captain's old an old captain is going to be a captain who is experienced so we know that the captain has been sailing for years it's not necessary information along the atlantic coast however that is necessary to the sentence here's another example i hung the curtains above the window in the bedroom this one ends with two consecutive prepositional phrases we don't need either of them we can rewrite this sentence and we can say i hung the bedroom curtains so we took two prepositional phrases here and we condensed them into one adjective that describes curtains makes the sentence shorter to the point and stronger tip number five is to use active voice instead of passive voice i just did a video breaking down active voice versus passive voice if you're interested in it you can check it out up here but i'm not going to go into detail in this video about it just going to give you a quick overview active voice when we're talking about a sentence written in active voice it's a sentence that begins with the subject and then the subject is followed by the verb which acts upon the object of the sentence if we're writing a passive voice sentence however the sentence starts with the object which is acted upon by the subject and the subject is in the second part of the sentence so here's a quick example of a passive voice sentence and then i'm going to switch it to an active voice sentence now our passive sentence is food was served to us by robots so that's passive voice and it's seven words long and anytime you have a passive voice sentence it's going to be longer than an active voice sentence because you have to have was served or worse served or whatever it may be now when we rewrite it in the active voice here's what we get we take the we take the subject of the sentence which is robots and we put it right at the beginning and we say robots served us food so now instead of having a seven word sentence by switching it over to active voice we get a four word sentence and we move things along a little smoother now my sixth and final tip for today is to trim down your bloated phrases and this is going to vary from writer to writer different writers might have sentences that are full of bloated phrases you might have tons of bloat in your writing some writers on the other hand might have you know just a little bit of bloat going on but i think every writer out there if you're editing your story you can find some bloat going on and if you do find that bloat you need to find ways to either cut things out or trim things down now here's an example we need to make a decision on who will survive and who will die so that's a 14 word sentence and we can cut this down into six words here's the rewrite we should decide who will die now all i did with this this sentence follows the same idea from beginning to end i didn't switch anything around i didn't get crazy here i took need to i condensed it to the word should i took make a decision on i condensed it to decide and then i took who will survive and who will die and i just split the difference here i said okay we'll just say who will die because it doesn't matter either or you got to pick one or the other now here's our final example for today in order to enter the contest george had to send a text message with the word bosco to three friends he knew that sentence is 22 words long and we can cut this down because there's a lot of excess verbiage going on here a lot of bloat we can cut this down from 22 words to 12. here's the rewrite to enter the contest george had to text bosco to three friends in the rewrite we cut out in order right at the start in order adds nothing to the sentence just start it off with to enter the contest and then when we get into the main part of the sentence george had to send a text message with the word bosco no he didn't george had to text bosco and then at the end to three friends he knew if he has friends he knows them we don't need to add he knew so get rid of he knew at the end and then just say two three friends if you're just paying attention to your writing and you notice that different things can be cut down different things can be brought down from five words to three or from six words to two or whatever it is if you keep an eye out for these things and you make the changes that are necessary your sentences and your writing overall will get stronger so i hope this helps question of the day which one of these six tips do you think will help you the most going forward with your writing let us know in the comments section below thank you guys for watching if you want to support the channel please pick up a copy of either one of my novels also be sure to check out my other videos hit the like and subscribe buttons for me share this video with a friend and as always remember to keep on writing

Channel: Writer Brandon McNulty

Views: 7,664

Keywords: Writing, Writing advice, Writing Tips, Fiction, Creative Writing, How to write a book, How to write a novel, novel, book, wordy writing style, wordy, wordiness, redundant, writing style, active voice, passive voice, prepositional phrases, editing, edit, how to make your writing better, how to make your writing less wordy, words to cut from your novel, write better sentences, write better essays, story, essay, stories, wordiness and redundancy, wordiness exercises, examples, exercises, lesson

Id: NtnVuXbrMwQ

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2022