With my editor's cap on, it's Grammar Time!

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And we're off! Beginning with an "And". We will joyously split our infinitives with healthy gusto. Leave your prepositions where you found them because this is where the rubber hits the road.

This is to be the first in a series of brief tips on English writing: style tips, grammar, usage, spelling traps and generally how to write well. This introductory one is not so brief, though.

I'm inspired by work I did recently for a client - the effervescent Camielle of Follow Me Media asked me to edit a blog post. She knew what she wanted to say and had written the post already. The question was, did it read well? Were there any mistakes? Plus, could I improve some of the wording and give more punch to the ending?

These are all questions of editing. A well written and edited post makes you look competent and professional. It will read better and communicate more effectively. That means it's more likely to be understood and the message passed on. Which all lends weight to your professional reputation. Good stuff. Everyone should have all their professional work edited, professionally. Even me. This is a "do as I say" moment.

Camielle followed up my work by asking me for advice on how to write better in the future (her writing is very good already, don't get me wrong, but like many people whose main job is not writing, there is always room for improvement. Hell, my work has plenty of room too. Nobody's perfect!)

I was happy to give advice. There's no danger of revealing state secrets or somehow giving the game away and finding myself destitute. English is English. I did not make the rules - they're out there for everyone. However, there's a bit of "art" to editing that is hard to explain.

Concise is good, but it's not the last word. 

Let's start with my first piece of advice to Camielle, taken directly from that steadfast tome of mavens the world over (even outside its US home, believe it or not), "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jnr. and EB White:

"Omit needless words."

Ah. Simple. Just make it short!

NO.

That's not how this rule works.

It means you should make sure all the words in a sentence are pulling their weight; "that every word tell."

So, how can you use this advice in the real world?

A major enemy of concise writing is repetition. In their insecurity-fueled attempts to include every single thought they want to convey, many writers repeat themselves. Say it twice, three times! Once more with feeling!

Take a paragraph that contains an idea. Carefully read the sentences and look at their meaning. Do they say the same thing as each other? Does one say it better? Be brutal: delete the repetitious sentences.

I mean brutal. Even if they're only close, try the paragraph without one of those sentences. I almost guarantee it won't suffer - your reader will still understand you.

Now that you have that one good sentence, feel free to add more detail back into that sentence. That sentence is now carrying the big idea - there's no harm in a bit of necessary detail - after all, Strunk and White are happy with your extra detail, as long as it is doing work, as long as it is needed.

Whoa. That last para needs work.

Here:

Now that you have that one good sentence, feel free to add more detail back into that sentence  if you like.  That sentence is It's now carrying the big idea - there's no harm in a bit of necessary detail. After all, Strunk and White are happy with your extra detail, as long as it is doing work does work; as long as it is needed.

Now you have one good sentence, add detail if you like. It's carrying the big idea. After all, Strunk and White are happy with extra detail, as long as it is needed.

60 words down to 32. I could go further, but I'm happy there.

Dangerous Constructions.

There are some sentence constructions that are hazardous to concise writing. Watch out for "thats" and "hads".

"I remember I had been in grade school and we had had a great time mucking up in the classroom that had been our home room and that had been where we learned English. Our teacher had been most upset."

Yuck. All those hads and thats.

"I remember grade school shenanigans fondly. We were always mucking around in English class. Our teacher nearly cried one day."

Sure, I made some word choice changes there too, but you can see what's going on. Each sentence does its work and we move on. I made a late addition of "one day" to "Our teacher nearly cried" because, to me, that seems like something someone would say. It is honest.

Sentences are like picnic baskets - they hold the whole feast.

A common mistake is to take a series of ideas and give each of them its own sentence. Instead, try adding a few ideas into one sentence. Make each sentence do more work.

Taking the above example again:

"I remember grade school shenanigans fondly. We were always mucking around in English class. Our teacher nearly cried one day."

Could be rewritten as:

"One hilarious day we nearly made our English teacher cry."

There's a bit of detail gone, but this new sentence almost begs for us to read on to find out exactly what made the teacher nearly cry. That's better writing.

Study each word. Take it out if you can. But stop before you destroy the sentence's power and beauty. William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway had very different styles. Faulkner of the Baroque, Rococo, Byzantine bent, Hemingway more agricultural. Both brilliant.

People do not associate Faulkner with brevity, quite the opposite, and yet, would you be so brave as to start slicing and dicing his prose? Probably not. Why? Because despite his incredible flourish with words, they all add up to something brilliant. I suspect even Strunk and White would be happy to leave Faulkner alone.

So, like all writing advice, try it out and practice. You'll find that even just having a go will make it read better.

Until next time...