12 Tips and Tricks for Tighter Sentences
Here’s the thing: you need tight sentences.
In genres like thriller and nonfiction, short sentences are what readers expect. They want taut writing, dense with information that moves swiftly from one topic to the next.
Even in more flowery genres, loose sentences aren’t the way to go. Instead you want longer sentences that are just as packed with information as the short sentences of other work.
Just like an athlete’s body, you want to trim your sentences down so they’re full of only what makes them move well and look good. This is a challenge for many beginning authors, so we recommend running your next bit of writing through this 12-point checklist of common loose sentence culprits.
12 Sentence Tightening Techniques
1. Simplify Dialog Tags
“I’m out of here,” John exclaimed, his voice tense.
“I’m out of here,” John said.
The two sentences above convey the same information, and one is much tighter. It’s not just 30% shorter, but the word “said” is generally invisible to readers, so it seems even tighter than it actually is.
I blame your middle school teacher for this. At some point in middle school, each and every one of us had that lesson in language arts where they showed us umpteen alternatives for “said” when we attribute dialogue in our writing. Whether it was explicitly stated or just sort of implied, the lesson also told us we should use words other than “said” when writing dialogue.
Those lessons were wrong. Use no dialogue tags when the reader can still tell who’s speaking, and use “said” 95% of the rest of the time.
2. Start Late, Leave Early
Most writers, myself included in my rough drafts, enter their writing before the important action really starts. We also have a habit of writing more epilogue and consequence than the story needs. Instead, we can tighten up our writing by cutting out the beginning and the end, paring both until just the most vital heart of the writing remains.
Don’t just do this for the whole story. Look at each chapter, each scene, each paragraph and sentence, to see if you’ve fallen victim to a smaller version of this far-too-common mistake.
3. Reduce Qualifiers
Consider the following list of common qualifiers in english:
- maybe
- possibly
- with luck
- I believe
- might
- quite
- rather
- somewhat
- could be
Each of these weakens your writing in two ways. First, it softens the impact of the sentence it occupies. Second, it adds words that don’t need to be there. The result is a soft and weak sentence that needs some serious shaping up.
4. Eliminate Adverbs With Prejudice
Stephen King wrote “the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” and he’s right. Adverbs weaken writing.
Adjectives (descriptive words that modify nouns) add color and flair to a world, better immersing the reader in the scene and world you create. It’s tempting to think that adverbs (descriptive words that modify verbs) are the same, but that’s rarely the case.
Instead, they create a looser sentence. Most of the time you use an adverb, you can tighten and empower the sentence by instead choosing better words for the rest of the sentence. “He ran quickly” isn’t nearly as powerful or as tight as “he sprinted.” “She asked pointedly” is weak compared to “she interrogated.”
While you’re at it, be leery of using the word “very.” Half the time it’s another qualifier. The other half, you can replace it by choosing a better adjective. Things aren’t very expensive; they’re exorbitant. The villain isn’t very strong; he’s mighty.
5. Watch for Redundancy
Unless you’re doing it to make a point, avoid repeating information. This happens in more ways than you’re thinking:
- Saying the same thing multiple times, either in the same words or in different ways
- Using the same word too frequently in a paragraph or on the same page
- Using the same phrase too frequently in a work
- Choosing two-word phrases that are themselves redundancies, like “brand new”, “anonymous stranger”, and “final outcome”
Every writer I’ve met has at least one of these in their initial drafts. Watch for them in general and look for which of these you fall prey to most often. Create a checklist in your editing process that tracks that down in particular.
6. Look Out for Excursions
You’ve seen this in conversation. Your buddy is telling you what happened at the game last night, but partway through he veers off into something that happened to a guy he went with, which then turns into a story about that guy’s dog. If told well, it can be fun in and of itself. Most of the time, it’s not told well.
Writers (and yes, this means you) do this in their craft, too. It’s not always that obvious. For example, instead of moving from what a character is doing, to what they think about what they’re doing, to general philosophizing.
Sometimes those excursions add depth to characters and emotion to actions. Those times are rare exceptions. When it happens in your writing, be suspicious and without remorse.
7. Examine Your Extra Punctuation
Ellipses, parenthesis, and dashes are problematic for two reasons. First, they break the flow of a sentence making it lag. Even if the words are tight, the pause that punctuation creates makes it feel looser and flabbier than it needs to be.
Second, those pieces of punctuation are warning signs that you’re taking an excursion. We only put them in when we’re making side points and tangential remarks. If the idea is important, it deserves its own full sentence. If it’s not important enough to do that, your work will be better off without it.
Watch commas for the same reasons. Long sentences with commas usually end up tighter when broken into multiple sentences.
8. Check Your Three Word Constructions
We touched on this briefly with redundant two-word phrases, but three word constructions can often be replaced with a single word. Consider “In order to,” “of the day”, or “point in time.” It’s tighter and means the same to say “so”, “today’s” and “point”.
While you’re at it, consider every prepositional phrase in your work in progress*. Half of them take up three to six words, and can be eliminated altogether by choosing the right descriptive adjective.
*”Work in progress” is another three word construction that could be replaced with “work.”
9. Be Wary of -ing
About one third of the time, a word that ends with “ing” is the right word for the job. It shows a character in the process of doing things, which is action, which is good for manuscripts and a sign of tight writing.
The other two thirds of the time, though, it’s a sign of passive voice. Passive voice makes for saggy writing because it removes the reader from the action by one degree and adds unnecessary words to the sentence. The trick is to look for specificity.
“I’m doing my homework” is good. “My homework is being done” is bad. Whenever you catch an -ing word in your writing, make sure it’s in active voice.
10. Write Positive, Not Negative
Consider “he ran fast” vs. “he didn’t run slow”. Or “she’s smart” vs. “she isn’t dumb”. See how in both cases the negative writing adds 33% to the total word count? In those sentences it’s just one word, but that can add up in a longer manuscript.
It gets even worse when you consider the tortured pathways of double negatives and strained comparisons you risk when your default mode is to describe things in the negative. When in doubt, write about what is there instead of what isn’t.
11.Find Your Filler Words
Every writer and speaker I’ve ever met has a handful of filler words they use (a) too often, and (b) without realizing it. Some common examples include just, really, very, and even. Sometimes they balloon into longer phrases like “needless to say”, or “it seems clear to me.”
I’m personally terrible about “even” when I write, and closing too many statements with “does that make sense?” when I speak. Your filler words might be the same, but probably won’t be. But you definitely have some.
Make a list of your filler words. When you finish a draft of your manuscript, use your word processor’s find function to search for each. When it finds them, and after you’ve recovered from the surprise of how many instances there are, work them out of the piece to tighten things up.
12. Read it Out Loud
This will take you a lot of extra time to do, but not much time to read and understand here. Simply put: read everything you write out loud.
You will find phrases you stumble over, and others you’re tempted to skip, because the language doesn’t feel natural and easy. Those phrases will benefit from tightening up, often using one or more of the rules we talked about today.
Your Homework for This Week
Okay. You have your checklist. Take a piece of writing and run these items through it one at a time. See what happens. By the end, you will have identified and found a solution for at least one place your writing can tighten.
Once you’re finished, you know what comes next…do it for your whole WIP!
