By Diana Hamilton
My best arguments have been marred by the creeping-in of qualifying language. Everything seems or suggests, implies or might be—or, worst of all, offers the unforgivable apology of a passive, conditional claim: The repetition of a certain word could be understood to mean X; Reflection on a work’s historical context could be said to offer some insight into Y. It’s clear I don’t believe myself; why would my reader suspend her own disbelief?
For me, growing up as a writer meant learning to state things directly more often (Even here, I’m qualifying: not always stating, not even most of the time, simply more).
Hence my editing move, the last step before proofreading. I always use the search function (Ctrl+F) to find unnecessary hesitation. The first time I did this, I found 50 counts of “seems” in a 16 page paper. I only kept four.
I’ve asked other writers what tics they edit out of their writing, and the list itself is always revealing: one writer hates the phrase “ways in which,” but writes it unconsciously; another undermines his own insights by beginning them with “obviously;” another cannot help but put in parentheticals ideas that she will later delete. My own list is, sadly, ever growing. I’ve come to look forward to this final stage in editing, though, where I am given the chance to make the text resemble me a little less.
Published February 17, 2015
