The Writer's Diet

Skilful writers can set a scene, paint a character or convey emotions using remarkably few adjectives.

Ad-words cannot stand on their own; an adjective always modifies a noun or a pronoun (a beautiful day; I was happy), while an adverb modifies either a verb (to play gently), an adjective (painfully shy) or another adverb (blissfully slowly). Ad-words lend colour and flavour to our writing; they help us express emotions, describe appearances and define character. Sometimes, however, they sugar-coat weak sentences that lack active verbs and concrete nouns.

Ad-dictions
Key principles in this chapter:

• Let concrete nouns and active verbs do most of your descriptive work.

• Employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute new information to a sentence.

• Avoid overuse of ‘academic ad-words’, especially those with the following suffixes: able, ac, al, ant, ary, ent, ful, ible, ic, ive, less, ous

Although nouns and verbs can communicate with each other across wide distances, they function most harmoniously at close range. Choose a paragraph or two of your writing and identify the subject of each sentence, along with its accompanying verb. Do you find any sentences in which the subject and verb are separated by more than about twelve words? If so, try rephrasing them so that noun and verb walk hand in hand.

Play around with ways of making your prose glide more smoothly. For example, what happens when you cut long strings of prepositions down to size, or when you replace static prepositions with dynamic ones, or when you ensure the word of occurs no more than two or three times in a single paragraph?

Prepositions with pep
Choose a page or two of your own writing and highlight all the prepositions. Next, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you ever use more than three or four prepositional phrases in a row? (e.g. ‘a book of case studies about the efficacy of involving multiple stakeholders in discussions about health care’)

• Are your prepositions dynamic or static? That is, do they suggest action and motion (through, onto, from), or do they reinforce the status quo (in, of, by)?

• Do you vary your prepositions, or do you tend to use the same two or three over and over again?

Prepositions add motion and direction to otherwise static language; they position our nouns (a bug in the rug, a cat on the mat) and shift the meaning of our verbs (shut in, shut out, shut off, shut up).

leanness of style does not necessarily guarantee elegance and eloquence. Indeed, excessively economical prose may signal verbal anorexia.

To avoid such strung-out syntax, many authors stick to the ‘dynamic dozen’ rule: avoid separating subject and verb by more than about twelve words, unless you have a very good reason for doing so.

Try writing a preposition-free sentence, like the one you are reading right now, and you will feel handcuffed, shackled, frustrated. Why? Because prepositions expand the horizons of our sentences; they lasso new nouns and supply our verbs with directional thrust.