I've been an editor for many years (don't get me to admit how many) and a writer even longer. After even a few years in the game, each editor is developing their own list of pet peeves (translation: pet peeves) - the mistakes or missteps that really stick in the crawl (translation: boring the pants). I work with many different writers, and since I share these tips privately all the time, I figured it was time to take them out of the shadow of Track Changes comments and make them a public record.
Most people reading this blog are marketers and cell phone number list business owners, so I wrote this article with you in mind. These self-publishing tips will be especially useful for writers who write for business (i.e. writing for blogs and corporate websites, lead generation magnets like white papers, etc. ) – but really, these tips can improve almost any type of writing.
Lazy Writing Crutches and Bad Habits to Avoid
Inexperienced writers often make the mistake of thinking that "good writing" is sophisticated writing . They confuse clarity with boredom. If this is your attitude, you usually end up with too much writing. It may sound ridiculous and it is uncomfortable to read. These seven bad habits mess up your writing, slow your reader down, and obscure what you're trying to communicate. Relentlessly seek them out and destroy them in your content editing phase.
The so-called elegant variant
"The elegant variation" is an old term (coined by usage expert Henry Watson Fowler) that refers to an overuse of rare or poetic synonyms for more common words. The term is meant to be ironic - the effect isn't exactly elegant. Instead, stylish variations usually feel overworked (or, as the kids say, “try hard”).
The elegant variant is common in journalistic writing, where writers often try to avoid repeating a name – so you'll see Google called “the search giant” on second mention. But it comes up everywhere - when people say an author "wrote a volume" rather than writing a book, for example. It's cute to a point, but it's really easy to overdo it. A related bad habit is "dit-bookism", when writers feel the need to avoid the word "dit", so that people "exclaim" and "proclaim" and "reply" instead. There was actually a “said book” at one point, a sort of thesaurus of speaking terms that writers could use to vary their dialogue tags. But at the end of the day, most of the time, the simple “saying” works best, and repetition draws less attention to itself than endless variations.