Words and thoughts. – Editing nightmares.
Good afternoon readers. Isn’t this weather fantastic. I should be sitting outside reading a book or just contemplating my existance. Not going to happen anytime soon. In the process of final edit for two manuscripts. Contract Rouge and The Road to Tarascon, I’m finished with the Slash and Burn stage. This process has reduced my word count by hundreds of nasty little fillers. For example. My Navigation panel on word is empty of the following.-
was, then, were, they, in order to, – only two of them.
I have also addressed the ‘Thought verbs’ My favourites are-
Thinks, Knows, Understands, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Desires, and the big ones, love and hate.
So if you think about understanding what you believe and want and remember to take all your desires away you will either love or hate your writing. Hopefully its the former.
Getting rid of passive and replacing it with action reduces the feeling you have been there before.
Words ending in- ing. The defination of the ING word ending sounds like a small nasty animal in distress. The dreaded Gerunds.
‘A traditional grammatical term for a verbal that ends in -ing and functions as a noun. Adjective: gerundial.’
However you understand the verb, I was observed trying to work out how many of these little darlings exist. On a webpage I googled, I found the first 4,000. Okay, seems reasonable to me. Enough of my prattle, back to the editing.
