I Made A Folder On Googledrive For Poetry&relevant Literature That I Find Myself Coming Back To When

i made a folder on googledrive for poetry&relevant literature that i find myself coming back to when i need to ground myself again. most are fairly well known so it’s also a good place to dive into literature if you haven’t already. all should be free to download but let me know & i’ll try to do something about it. hope some of you get just as much from these authors as i have. 

Hi! So I recently discovered removing the word 'that' from 90% of my writing actually made it more fluid and hardly impacted the readability. Tiny achievement but very proud of myself as a novice writer ^.^ I was wondering if (other than the up/down one) there were any other tiny tricks for removing superfluous words? Thanks!

Great question! Honestly, there are hundreds, but here are a few to get you started.

Words You Can (Usually) Safely Cut from Your Writing

That

Then

Start

Begin

Suddenly

Down

Up

Kind of

Really

Just

Basically

In general, look out for adverbs (actually, really), “hedging” words (kind of, sometimes), and ambiguous words (nothing, everything, someone). Some can be cut; others will need to be revised or swapped out. “That” is a classic offender. “Then” can usually be changed to “and.” It’s only necessary to qualify that an action was “started” if the action gets interrupted, otherwise it can be cut. (”She started to cry” becomes “She cried”).

I have a detailed, exhaustive list of words like this (with explanations!) in my book The Complete Guide to Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, which will be done soon :)

Nice to hear from you & hope this helps!

//////////////

The Literary Architect is a writing advice blog run by me, Bucket Siler. For more writing help, check out my Free Resource Library, peruse my Tumblr Post Guide, or get The Complete Guide to Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. xoxo

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if you have your textbooks on pdf also I would love to read those!!

great! ok so here is a link to a dropbox i made, some of these are textbooks i used for class and some of them are textbooks i just like found online at some point :-) enjoy

and while we’re at it you didn’t ask but i also have a dropbox with a bunch of language textbooks for various languages which can be found here !! :-) (includes: ASL, arabic, chinese, croation, czech, danish, dutch, estonian, french, german, hebrew, hungarian, icelandic, italian, lithuanian, norwegian, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish, swedish, tagalog, and turkish)

ASL Masterpost

A collection of links for ASL learning

If you find an error or have a suggestion, feel free to comment here or in the doc