It’s true that the simplest revision is deletion. But there’s often a fine sentence lurking within a bad sentence, A better sentence hiding under a good sentence. Work word by word until you discover it. Don’t try to fix an existing sentence with minimal effort, Without reimagining it. You can almost never fix a sentence— Or find the better sentence within it— By using only the words it already contains. If they were the right words already, the sentence probably wouldn’t need fixing. And yet writers sit staring at a flawed sentence as if it were a Rubik’s Cube, Trying to shift the same words
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