Trim the Flab in Your Writing

We all want our writing to carry some weight. We hope our ideas have some heft. But we want the good muscle weight, not flab.

I found an online tool this week that helps spot the flab so we can cut down on some common sources of extra flab. The Writer's Diet helps by pointing out these sources of extra rolls around the middle:

• "Be" verbs, such as be, were, was, and is.
• Abstract nouns and nouns formed from verbs
• Excessive prepositions
• Too many adjectives and adverbs
• It, this, that, and there

There's nothing wrong with having these kinds of words in our manuscript--just like there's nothing wrong with the occasional slab o' cheesecake-- but the Writer's Diet highlights them so you can see if you rely on them too much.

The way it works is you paste a sample of your writing, up to 1000 words, into a text box and click a button, and a few seconds later your text is highlighted with a bunch of colors. Here's what it looks like when I paste in part of something I'm working on:

Overall, it's not too bad, but I need to go in and replace as many of those be verbs as I can with stronger verbs. That change alone will greatly improve this opening.

Also, even though it says my prepositions are healthy, I see more than I want, especially when there are strings of two or more prepositions, or the same one appears too often close together.

I'm finding this site so useful that I now want to go out and buy the book the site promotes. But even if you don't want the book, if you're a writer you'll find the site useful.