Tightening up my sentences?

by David Castanho
18th November 2013

Hi everyone, Recently I was thinking off returning to my unfinished book and continue writing again as I really enjoyed it the last time. The main problem I have is the way I write. I have been reading some off the comments that a lot of you have wrote stating that my sentances need tightening up. I would appriciate it if you could explain how i'm meant to do this?

Replies

Nice points. Also worth mentioning: read authors you like and pay attention to what they do / don't do. Learn from the masters, as it were.

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Simon P.
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Simon P. Clark
19/11/2013

Hi David,

I read most of your shared work. What I found was that the sentences were hanging loose. Sort of , they had the emotions and expressions but there were a bit vague, if you see. You have a nice style of writing, a nice flow of thoughts but sometimes your choice of words and verbs , well , baffles me.

To be honest , I guess you have to improve upon your grammatical/ presentation part a bit(formation of sentences)

I can suggest few method which I have always found effective while dealing with such kind of problems of others :-

1. Do avoid using long descriptive verbs..

2. Write , maybe 100 words and then read it again, you will be able to correct your sentences then - It is hard to find the mistakes from a load of words - it fuzzes you out!

3. Use only one tense - Somewhere in the middle, I glimpsed use of two tenses!

4. Write slowly and steadily, some mistakes in the story seem to be just as if you were in a torrential hurry!

But things said, I would like to add that you are too descriptive! And that is really awesome ! ! Some may find it boring, but I am really surprised that you managed to add so many minute , atomic details and even so managed to keep the flow of the story intact!

Well, hope you find the methods helpful! Good Luck in further writing!

"Goes back to continuing Nanowrimo pleasure - completing today's target!"

--- Neeraj

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Neeraj
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Neeraj V Murali
18/11/2013

You could read it aloud and see which word jar or seem superfluous. And there's the golden rule of 'show don't tell', using actions, dialogue etc to set the scene & emotions instead of a block of descriptive writing.

I find it tough - good luck!

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susan Russell
18/11/2013