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10 Things You Should Eliminate When Editing and Rewriting
Good writing comes from what’s left out of the first draft
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Editing is where you clean, paint, polish, and furnish the bare concrete structure of a first draft so people can move in.
“It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.”
~ C. J. Cherryh
It what separates good writing from great writing, and a fundamental part of it is ruthlessly eliminating anything that weakens it.
Like Mark Twain once said, “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”
Here is a list of things that you should find and eliminate when editing your writing.
1. Redundancies
Redundancies are words or phrases saying the same thing twice. Some examples are:
Close proximity — proximity
Past history — history
Each and every — each or every
End result — result
Sometimes entire sentences repeat the same message. Cut one of the two.
