After some revealing comments about parts of speech following a recent post, I pondered my early education and why it is that I rarely am stumped about the function of a word in a sentence. Answer: I learned sentence diagramming. When a sentence is deconstructed and then reconstructed within a framework of lines that clearly delineate word function, “many things are made clear that else lie hidden in darkness.” (Profound apologies to Longfellow and Evangeline for my repurposing this wonderful line.) It seems, however, that not all people (even in my age group) were taught this occasionally challenging but definitely enlightening sentence-structure tool. In the 1980s, when I spent several years working in the language arts departments of five elementary, middle, and high schools, I found even teachers seemed to have little understanding of its practicality in helping students to recognize parts of speech. This puzzled me. Is not a picture worth a thousand words? I decided to explore...

This post by Patricia Stoltey appeared on September 11, 2009. Why revisit it? Excessive wordiness draws a distinct line between ordinary writing and extraordinary writing. Of course, other factors contribute to taking a manuscript from mundane to magnificent, but this is so essential that it bears repeating. (Original post has been edited/condensed to respect time constraints this time of year.) We often mention overuse of adjectives and adverbs. Why? We don't need to tell readers every detail. A minor male character, for example, may be described as 60ish with long black hair, bronze skin, and a leathery, weathered face. Or you can say he's an Arapahoe elder. The reader will form a similar mental picture. Anything from a palace tower room to a battle scene may require description, but pay close attention to what is important. Unnecessary repetition—telling the reader the same thing in different ways—doesn’t move the story forward. Adverbs, even more than adjectives, ar...

It might seem as though we mention overuse of adjectives and adverbs a lot. See Maryann Miller’s posts Adverbs Revisited back in June and Those Pesky Adverbs Again in July. The truth is, we don't need to tell smart, intuitive readers every detail about a character’s appearance or clothing. They’ll fill in the blanks as long as the blanks are not critical to the story. You can describe a minor character (male) as 60ish with long black hair, bronze skin, and a leathery, weathered face, and the reader will know what your American Indian looks like. But if you say he's an Arapahoe elder, won't the reader form a similar mental picture without all the extra words? Similarly, anything from a palace tower room to a battle scene may require description, but pay close attention to what is important to your story and what is not. Keep your eye out for unnecessary repetition—telling the reader the same thing in two or three different ways, using even more adjectives in the proce...