REVISING-POLISHING

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
-- Samuel Johnson

Writers must write their first draft quickly, passionately, not caring whether it is accurate, complete or memorable. Then comes the hard part: pruning, polishing, making it better. When you edit and rewrite your second draft, first scrutinize your words for coverage. Have you told the whole story? Are all the important details there? Is the order logical and understandable?

 Your third draft is for serious pruning, plucking and condensing. One of the great truths about writing is that less is more. Once you're sure you've included all the necessary facts and details, you must begin stripping away the unnecessary words. Often you'll discover a morass pooled in your paragraphs -- choking your writing like weeds crowding a flowerbed. Our main job as writers is to pare down our work to its most basic components before we build it back up again.

As you begin cleaning up your sentences, take Gary Provost's advice (Making Your Words Work) and make sure that every word in every sentence has a job to do. If not, get rid of it.

First, look at your modifiers.

Many of us invite trouble with modifiers, recklessly tossing them into sentences, sure of their necessity, unaware of how they bury our ideas and smother our voice. Modifiers are words that change or limit other words. We (wrongly) believe that we need them for emphasis, that writing without modifiers is naked. Stark. Without music.

But often inserting modifiers in our writing means that we're adding props or decorations, shoring up wimpy words and weak concepts with our last gasp of imagination, when instead we need a few lean, clean words to make a clear sentence.

Begin your third draft by examining every adjective and adverb and asking yourself whether they truly add to the meaning and voice. Let's talk about adjectives first. Adjectives modify nouns, pronouns, and gerunds (verbs with an -ing suffix that work as nouns). First, get rid of obvious and often redundant modifiers: green grass, tall trees, blue sky, little babies, sweet puppies, cheerful grins. Instead, choose adjectives that are unusual, extraordinary, that make the subject come closer, add to voice and meaning. For instance, if the grass were withered, brown or brittle, that would give the reader information about climate. We expect green grass, but harsh or burned grass makes the reader notice that you're describing the end of the summer or drought conditions.

Then examine those adjectives that lead to what's called purple prose. Too many adjectives make our writing wordy, overwrought, melodramatic, even silly. Nouns and verbs are the workhorses or engines of every sentence. They, not modifiers, get top billing. But imagine a sentence with a bunch of adjectives clustered before the noun: The sickly sweet, redolent _____ What? Perfume? Jam? The terrifying, dark, dank, stifling _____What? Basement? Jail cell? The brooding, morose, uncommunicative ______ What? Hypochondriac? Murderer? When we string modifiers in front of the noun, the reader is forced to add and separate each adjective, waiting until the noun arrives, and by that time the noun's arrival, and thus its meaning, is anticlimactic.

A student once accused me of having a pathological dislike of adverbs. He's right. Adverbs are almost never needed in a sentence. Notice I didn't say never use them. Adverbs, like adjectives, have a place in our writing, but they shouldn't be the first words we reach for when strong nouns and verbs will do. Adverbs modify anything except nouns and pronouns, so they are dangerous creatures -- they can sneak in anywhere. The worst adverbs are attached as an afterthought to wimpy verbs, usually with an -ly suffix. Instead of writing Alice ate quickly, Alice ate hungrily, Alice ate slowly, how about Alice devoured the pie, Alice wolfed the pie, Alice gobbled the pie, Alice dawdled over her pie? Instead of move quickly: race, lope, bolt, scurry, hustle, scramble, dash. The best verbs paint a picture and sound like what they mean.

Another adverb problem is found in our attributions. Attributions are the "he said, she said" parts of writing that place the dialogue. But therein lies the problem. Adverbs should not place the dialogue -- its tone, meaning and vigor should be contained within the exchange, not explained in the attribution. Adverbs (as in the phrase "she said menacingly," or "he said haltingly") bog down dialogue and are awkward. Qualifiers and intensifiers are two more categories of adverbs that demand weeding. Here is a list of intensifiers: very, quite, absolutely, completely, truly, basically, really, extremely, totally, naturally, so, particularly, perfectly, actually. Intensifiers are sown into sentences to give weight, importance. You're trying to express that something is extraordinary or unusual, but again, intensifiers rob our sentences of freshness and power. For instance we write that someone is "very weak," when we could describe him as "fragile," "feeble," or "frail." We write "really hungry" when "ravenous" is the appropriate word.

Qualifiers are adverbs that qualify how we feel about the subject. They give writers wiggle room, but good writing isn't slippery. It's definite, clear, rich. Intensifiers include: somewhat, rather, often, mostly, pretty, a little, sort of, kind of, quite, very, a bit, too, usually, probably, ordinarily, mostly, mainly, generally, as a rule. Why does this matter? Because as writers we're delivering a lush and vivid world, not a place that's kind of nice or sort of real. Don't write about a character who is "rather" handsome or "kind of" smart. Either a man is attractive or he isn't. He's intelligent or he's not. Don't hide behind vagueness. Be specific, be sure, be powerful. It's the only way to write.