If you’re knee deep in your essay, or knee deep in thinking about writing your essay, here’s a heads up once you’ve got a first draft. It’s a way of making sure that you haven’t slipped into lazy writing, which basically means not thinking about your word choices. You should be choosing a filet mignon of the English lexicon and instead you’ve slapped down Salisbury steak. Which is barely meat, let alone steak.
Don’t do that.
Go through the whole thing and check for words like this: very, little, small, big, really ( when used like very) and circle them in a red pen. They must go. Pick them off like lice on a schoolboy.
Here’s why. Let’s use very, the dark lord of crap words. Very is cheap runny catchup on a bad burger.
How is that not clear?
Ok, you’re eating some overcooked sawdust beef patty and there’s nothing you can do. So you desperately reach for a packet of the off brand, runny, flavorless catsup. Did it help? Not really.
If you look behind every very you might well see your overcooked sawdust adjective or adverb. You chose a crappy, lazy word — little, small, big, fast, loud, quiet. In desperation you slapped ‘very’ on it to save it. That’s a bullsh*t move. Just pick a great word in the first place.
Here’s an example: Loud. Loud? Seriously? You’re better than that. And here’s a hint and a half — if you could say the word when you were four, maybe you should up the vocab stakes. Show those college folks you went to…English class.
Why would you say ‘very loud’? If it’s important to the story that some moment was loud, put some decent clothes on that moment. Maybe it boomed, crashed, exploded? Was it deafening, obliterating? You’re familiar with the SAT, yes?
Oh, look — ‘very deafening’ is redundant. See? If you are good to your words they will be good to you. In fact, if you use a word that just sounds weird with very — like very enormous (what would that look like, exactly?), chances are high that you have chosen a nice quality descriptor.
So use good words. And by good (another likely sawdust contender), I mean dynamic, emotive, evocative, soulful words that come with their own zing and flavor and don’t need a crappy catsup word like very to prop them up.
You get the idea.
Ok. Back to Instagram.