Whenever I’ve finished writing something, it’s time for the ‘that’ check. Find every ‘that’ in the document and decide whether it is strictly necessary. If it isn’t, remove it. And then search for all the ‘and then’s to see if they can be replaced with ‘and’s or ‘then’s or can be removed altogether.
Then check for double blank spaces; find ‘ ’, replace ‘ ’. Then check for two full stops – you do this by finding and replacing all the ellipses with something like ‘***BANANA’, then find ‘..’, replace ‘.’ to get rid of all the double full stops, before doing a find ‘***BANANA’ and replace ‘...’ to get all your ellipses back.
There, that’s a top writing tip for you. What else? Well, rewrite all the sentences which I’ve started with ‘well’, for a start. And all the ones I’ve ended with ‘for a start’. Seek, locate and destroy other useless linking words and phrases like ‘however’, ‘though’ and ‘of course’. If I’m writing prose, I'll also get rid of as many adverbs as possible and delete words like ‘almost’, ‘fairly’, ‘nearly’ and ‘quite’ – things either are a thing, or they are not a thing, there’s no such thing as 'almost'.
But what I really want is a gizmo on Word which checks for the accidental over-use of certain words. For example, if you were writing a scary story, you could end up using the word ‘dark’ three or four times a page without realising it. It shouldn’t be too difficult to make such a gizmo.
So why doesn’t it exist?
