Blog Post 1.2
“Is there any way to recognize clutter at a glance? Here’s a device my students at Yale found helpful. I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work. Often just one word got bracketed… Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful? Simplify, simplify.” (Zinsser 15-16).
This section of Zinsser really hits close to home with me. Since middle school I’ve been writing essays for class that had page requirements and because of that I wrote mostly to fill space once I ran out of anything to say. I took this advice to heart for the first draft and intend to always proofread my work and bracket off clutter and eliminate it.
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