Monday, April 13, 2015

Breaking the Habit

Happy Monday Everyone!

Hope you're all having a productive start to the week. As for myself, I find that for the past week now I've been working on breaking my habit of writing in passive voice. I'm currently editing a manuscript that could be (cross your fingers!) considered by Decadent Publishing if I can weed out this habit of mine. The first step I think was the easiest, all I had to do was identify and find all the to-be verbs. Little did I know that my manuscript would soon look something like this:



Not sure if you can see it very clearly, but the blue and pink highlights are what I'm talking about. They're pretty much everywhere! It was like a plague of 'was and had' all over the place. But like I said, identifying it was the easy part. Editing the words out and restructuring the sentences is what's been taking the longest. I can happily say that I'm more than 3/4 of the way there and I thought this would be a fun learning experience to share.

Anyone else have the same problem with to-be verbs? Or do you find yourself relying on a certain word too much, or repeating phrases or descriptions? I think I'm guilty of all of it. I'm very much a visual learner and seeing all the highlights really helped me identify what I can focus on and hopefully fix, that way my manuscripts can become stronger. What tricks do you guys have to help with editing?

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