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Feedback: How to Cut Unnecessary Words in 48 hours

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plkphoto View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote plkphoto Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 20 Nov 2015 at 11:26pm
Bumping back up for people who want a prompt to help them remember the suggested search terms this weekend as they madly cut back their stories...
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Ch1 Gr62 -- The Other Side of the Coin (Thriller)
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote nixie Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 25 Nov 2015 at 11:55pm
Originally posted by patsy patsy wrote:

A really easy way to find pesky adverbs, passive voice and hard to understand sentences is to paste your work into the below app.  It finds all those things for you so you can eliminate them, plus it grades your work on how easy to understand it is by giving it a grade reading level :)
 

This!! excellent tool!
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote nixie Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 26 Nov 2015 at 12:01am
Noe that I have read them all - the one thing I didn't see here:  When I have 'way too many' words to cut - I stop what I am doing and write an outline.  

Outlining the story let's you see its bones - it essentially forces you to look at what the story is rather than what the words are. 

Once I  really think about *why* those three paragraphs exist, I can often either eliminate that item from the outline and take them away - or figure out what in them is flab, and make that go away.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote cricket Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17 Jan 2016 at 7:46pm
really helpful, polishing the old and weary skills after incalcuble number of years in academic writing, but I must disagree on a distance POV, as I reflect on some of the most beautiful fiction that relies on it- think of Oscar Wilde without it!
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote mrjaywilson Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 20 Jan 2016 at 1:35pm
The California Chainsaw Massacre: Prose Edition

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