Editing Rant: Variation

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Variation is the spice to take words out of the bland.

  1. Vary the people. Don’t have them all sound alike. Did they have different educations? Did they grow up in different parts of the country? Do they come from different income stratus? Fix the dialog – don’t let it be stale.
  2. Vary the sentence length. Make Music! (See this previous post about the Music of Words.)
  3. Vary sentence structure. Don’t be all “noun verb noun”. Break out some prepositions. After that, maybe add some sentences clauses to the beginning and end. Have conjunctions, but don’t put one in every sentence.

VARY!!!!!!!!