Write On!

By Kellie Underhill

Whether you write for business purposes or whether you’ve decided you want to join in the fiction collaboration we’re doing in the Bread ‘n Molasses Blog, you can improve you’re writing skill. This month’s tip:

I’ve had it with that!

I think that the worse thing that any writer can do is to clutter sentences with a lot of unnecessary ‘that’s.’

‘That’ is one of the most overused words in English language writing.

Sometimes a sentence doesn’t make any sense without it, but most times we add ‘that’ to our sentences for no real reason. It serves no grammatical purpose but to add clutter.

Look at the introductory sentence to this tip as an example — Yikes! But fixing it is easy, just delete the ‘that’s.’

“I think the worse thing any writer can do is to clutter sentences with a lot of unnecessary ‘that’s.’”

Everyone knows proofreading is an excellent habit to adopt. And if you didn’t know, take it from me — Good writing doesn’t automatically flow off everyone’s fingertips. Good concepts and ideas might, but good writing usually results from proofing, editing and rewriting.

One exercise to encourage better writing to flow from your fingertips the first time is to devote one proofreading just to the word ‘that’.

Read through your work and circle every ‘that’ in every sentence. The first time you do it, you’ll probably be surprised by how many there are.

Read each sentence written with ‘that’ out loud. Would the sentence make sense without it? If so, delete it. More often than not you will find yourself deleting ‘that’ because it isn’t necessary to the sentence structure.

Complete this exercise a couple of times and you’ll find yourself pausing to think about every ‘that’ you’re tempted to use when you’re writing something new.

Soon, you’ll be producing cleaner tighter first drafts and you’ll be one step closer to having good writing flow from your fingertips.

Kellie Underhill is the editor of Bread 'n Molasses. Her writing credits include The Moncton Times-Transcript, The Brunswick Business Journal, The Atlantic Chamber Journal and The Reader magazine. Send comments about this article to editor@breadnmolasses.com.