by C.K. MacLeod
Want to tighten your prose and make your writing easier to understand? Here are four ways and four tools to help you do that — all for free!
1. Omit needless phrases.
Authors sometimes use phrases such as “owing to the fact that” or “in order to” like condiments. Often, your meaning won’t change if you trim these phrases. For example, “owing to the fact that” can become “because,” and “in order to” can become “to.”
Refer to this list of offenders and some solutions for fixing them. Use the search and replace function in your word processing software to find these phrases in your writing.
2. Omit needless words.
Authors tend to pepper their prose with filler words. If you use Microsoft Word, you can run the NeedlessWords macro, and the macro will highlight potentially unnecessary words. In this macros for beginners post, Carla Douglas offers suggestions for what to do with those highlighted words.
Never used a macro before? This 20-Minute Macro Course will have you up and running with Macros in no time.
If macros scare you, or you don’t have Microsoft Word, try the Hemingway Editor. It’ll help you to hunt down adverbs, another kind of needless word.
3. Shorten your sentences.
Long sentences make sentences harder to read. The solution? Create two short sentences from the long one, when it makes sense to do so.
The Hemingway Editor will spot long sentences by identifying them as “hard to read” and “very hard to read.” It also provides you with readability statistics on your writing. You can buy the downloadable version of the Hemingway Editor for under $10 USD. Try the online version for free.
4. Use easy-to-understand words.
You can use the PlainLanguage macro to identify hard-to-understand words so you can swap them out with a reader-friendly word. The Hemingway Editor will also highlight words that are difficult for many readers to understand, and it will suggest a replacement!
There are many ways to make your writing more readable. A handful of tools will help you to accomplish this task quickly.
Adapted from a post from Beyond Paper Editing.
Image by Joshua Crauswell