5 Writing Rules to Energize Your Prose

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.”