Weasel Hunting

One particularly efficacious way to tighten prose is via the systematic removal of the so-called weasel words that tend to infest one’s writing. Digressions that add little to no new meaning should be avoided. Be clear and concise, rather than cluttering your page with rambling verbiage, and cut out extraneous and superfluous modifiers.

Every author has their own bad habits of wordiness. Could be stating and then restating ideas. Could be tacking on cliché figures of speech to puff things up with faux-authoritative air. Could be excess jargon. Could be lists that go on too long.

For us it’s qualifiers. It’s been a sickness, honestly. We made a list of specific crutch words, and we use the software’s search function to comb through looking at them. It used to be, in our first drafts, nothing ever quite actually was anything. It was “almost” or “seemingly” something. All. The. Damn. Time. Our other bad habit was redundant modifiers. “Crept slowly” was a favorite, as if there is any other way to creep.

We do a much better job these days of keeping that stuff out of the prose from the start. Not that we’re completely cured, just that we see it when it’s happening now and rein it in. But that doesn’t mean our first drafts are perfect. We still need to revise them and tighten things up, it’s just that there’s less low-hanging fruit to be harvested. It used to be we could count on about a 5% reduction in word count from weasels alone. But not these days.

It’s a good problem to have. We’re feeding a higher grade of ore into the smelter, so the purity of the metal coming out is that much greater. (On our planet, low-grade ore is that which contains too many weasels.) A writing partner is someone who’ll take a turn pumping the bellows on your weasel smelter.