Kill Zombie Words And Stop Circling Vultures
Improve Your Writing In Two Steps — Author Magazine
Writers, before submitting your fiction and nonfiction for feedback or publication, check your work for two common issues.
Zombie Words Must Die
While wonderful phrases exist in most writers’ prose, an infestation of dead words may be lurking as WHIT (Was, Had, It, and That).
Early drafts may include grammatically correct and acceptable WHITs in small doses, but most writing becomes burdened by dozens if not hundreds of vague words per chapter, essay, and entire manuscripts. The opportunity arises to amplify and develop tone, mood, plot, setting, and characters by replacing WHIT vague placeholders with concrete and visual verbs and nouns within active sentence structures.
Use the Find or Search function within your document to count and consider each WHIT word as a target for possible revision or omission.
(Overuse of pronouns, including “I” and “Me,” other redundant words, and passive sentence structures are also culprits.)
