"Prose, energize!"
Helen Sword, professor and director of the Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland, authored the book The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
She offers five rules to improve your prose:
1. Verbal verve: use active verbs whenever possible.
Favor strong, specific, robust action verbs (scrutinize, dissect, recount, capture) over weak, vague, lazy ones (have, do, show).
Limit your use of be-verbs (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been).
2. Noun density: favor concrete language over vague abstractions.
Anchor abstract ideas in concrete language and images.
Illustrate abstract concepts using real-life examples (“Show, don’t tell”).
Limit your use of abstract nouns, especially nominationalizations (nouns that have been formed from verbs, adjectives, or other nouns).
3. Prepositional podge: avoid long strings of prepositional phrases.
Avoid using more than three prepositional phrases in a row (e.g., in a letter to the author of a book about birds”) unless you do so to achieve a specific rhetorical effect.
Vary your prepositions.
As a general rule, do not allow a noun and its accompanying verb to become separated by more than about twelve words.
4. Ad-dictions: employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence.
Let concrete nouns and active verbs do most of your descriptive work.
Employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute new information to a sentence.
Avoid overuse of “academic ad-words,” especially those with the following suffixes: able, ac, al, ant, ary, ent, ful, ible, ic, ive, less, ous.
5. Waste words: reduce your dependence on four pernicious “waste words”: it, this, that, and there.
Use it and this only when you can state explicitly which noun each word refers to.
As a general rule, avoid using that more than once in a single sentence or three times in a paragraph, expect to achieve a specific stylistic effect.
Beware of sweeping generalizations that begin with “There.”
Watch Helen Sword’s TED-Ed lecture on one of the points in #2, on avoiding nominalizations:
You can test your own prose for free using her WritersDiet Test, an automated feedback tool that “identifies some of the sentence-level grammatical features that most frequently weigh down academic prose.”
https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/justintaylor/2016/04/26/5-writing-rules-to-energize-your-prose/
