Welcome to “Putrid Prose,” a regular feature we’re kicking off today.

As editors, proofreaders, and avid pleasure readers, Jim and I come across a lot of truly stinky writing (some of it, our own). In this column, we’ll share snippets that make our noses wrinkle in disgust. Of course, we’ll disguise the writer’s name and title of the piece, so as not to cause undue embarrassment.

Our goals:

• To add levity to the blogosphere (bloggers who dish out advice about marketing, writing, and blogging tend to take themselves entirely too seriously).
• To help you recognize common writing errors.
• To offer tips for how to fix bloopers in your own writing.
• To encourage you to collect and submit your own Putrid Prose examples, so we can all laugh (or grimace) together.

Let’s start with a whopping bad example from a direct mail piece Laura received last week. The following sentence is an amendment to a Custodial Account Agreement for Laura’s retirement fund:

The Custodian shall vote all shares that are held in the Participant’s custodial Account on the applicable record date for which proper instructions have not been timely received from the Participant in the same proportion as the Custodian has been instructed to vote the shares in other custodial accounts for which it serves as custodian for which it has received timely instructions from depositors.

What’s wrong with this prose?

EVERYTHING!

The entire paragraph is one sentence. Bad, bad, bad. The above sentence is 64 words. Waaaay too long. When you draft prose, whether it’s an amendment to the Constitution or a sentence in a novel, keep your sentence lengths manageable. Try opening with an extremely short sentence (one-word, two-word or three-word sentences really pop), and following up with a lengthier sentence.

The sentence uses legalese. Pet peeve alert! Legalese – the “insider” jargon people use within a particular industry – drives me nuts. Why can’t they speak plain English? After all, the audience for this so-called information is me, the retirement fund owner. The company that mailed this piece to me put the amendment on a separate postcard, all by itself. They must have thought it was really, really important. I’ve read this piece at least five times, and cannot make heads or tails of it. If you can’t say it in plain, simple English, don’t say it at all.

Readers, please share your criticism about this piece. How would you rewrite it?

Now it’s your turn. Start collecting samples of Putrid Prose and send them to us. If we choose to feature your sample, we’ll include a short bio about you and a link to your site. Let’s have some fun with this!

Tags: direct mail, editing, HeBlogsSheBlogs.com, legalese, Putrid Prose, Writing

You’ve drafted a blog post, magazine article, non-fiction book, or novel. Now it’s time to weed out the “illegal” words – vague, filler words that clutter your story.

Here’s an exercise to help you cut the wordiness from your piece:

Choose an “illegal” word or phrase from the following list:

• very
• really
• rather
• just
• simply
• it
• that
• there was
• began to
• started to
• -ing words (when they’re the first word in a sentence)

Using your word processor’s “Find and Replace” function, change every instance of the “illegal” word to ALL CAPS.

Example:

Find “very” and replace it with VERY

When you change the word to ALL CAPS, it will jump out at you. If you prefer not to change the word to CAPS, do a “Find.” Each time your computer finds very, ask yourself, “Do I need to use very in this sentence? Ninety-nine percent of the time, you can axe very.

Four more words you can almost always chop are really, rather, just, and simply. They’re just filler. Did you notice my illegal use of just in the previous sentence? I can just delete just and the sentence will be stronger: They’re filler.

One of the most common illegal words is really. Experiment with this sentence:

The basketball player is really tall.

How tall is really tall? 5 feet? 6 feet? 7 feet?

Instead of the vague really tall, show us how tall the player is: The NBA player dunked the ball while standing flat-footed.

Now that’s tall! You can visualize the player in the revision, whereas in the original sentence, the player’s height is anyone’s guess.

The illegal word that plagues me is that. That mysteriously appears in far too many of my sentences. Of course, not every instance of that can be removed, but most of them can disappear and no one will be the wiser.

What illegal words and phrases invade your writing most often?

Related article:

• Good Writing is Tight Writing. Great Writing is Tighter.

Tags: editing, HeBlogsSheBlogs.com, self-editing, tight writing, wordiness, Writing