Fluffy cruft
Write to the point!
Hey, everyone!
I want to pick on myself again today because I'm an easy target. For example, I write sentences like, "As the driver stomped on the brakes, bringing the car to a stop at a red light, Joe hurriedly flung his door open and quickly bolted from his seat to escape the onslaught of his overly chatty Uber driver's anecdotes," all the time. I'm sure this causes my readers to look like the girl in this image.
Cruft
While this sentence does convey my message, it does so while wearing oversized shoes and pantaloons, "Honk, honk!" What's the problem? Cruft!
Cruft is plaque buildup in the arteries of our writing, and if we're not careful, it can give our readers a heart attack. OK, that last bit was overdramatic, but our readers will stop reading, which is essentially the same thing.
Give your writing a laxative
In my post, "Squinting modifiers," we discussed some of the hazards of adverbs. Cruft is another hazard. Overusing adverbs will clot your writing like a lard sundae topped with bacon. With adverbs, a little goes a long way.
Adverbs aren't the only cause of cruft, though. As I mentioned in my first post on proofreading, when we speak, our bad grammar is forgotten almost before we say it. Because we never proof-speak, those mistakes propagate and become part of our everyday vernacular. Then, as we write, we let those colloquialisms sneak into our writing.
Let's work through my original sentence and see what cruft we can eliminate without affecting the message.
"As the driver stomped on the brakes, bringing the car to a stop at a red light, Joe hurriedly flung his door open and quickly bolted from his seat to escape the onslaught of his overly chatty Uber driver's anecdotes."
First, let's eliminate all the adverbs we don't need. For example, the verb bolted is already a strong verb that means "to run away suddenly." We don't need the word quickly leeching off it. Another verb we can delouse is chatty. Chatty implies excessive talking, so we should remove the word overly from its itchy scalp.
Next, let's look for extraneous speech patterns damming the flow of the sentence. For example, we often hear patterns like "onslaught of his," which sneak by verbally but are awkward on paper. A more potent way to convey the same meaning is to remove all the of and the type detritus and say, "...escape the chatty Uber driver's onslaught of anecdotes." You'll also note I changed "escape his" to "escape the" since the possessive is unnecessary.
Finally, look for details that don't matter. For example, do readers need to know it was an Uber driver? Do readers need to know that Joe was sitting in the car, or is that implied? Do they need to know that the driver stopped at a red light? Readers may not need any of these things, depending on the rest of the story.
Using what we've learned, let's break out the chocolate Ex-Lax and let our sentence flow.
"As the driver stomped the brakes, bringing the car to a halt, Joe flung his door open and bolted to escape the chatty rideshare driver's anecdotes."
This sentence flows much better. It loses some unnecessary details, but the essential parts of the sentence are present and easier to see. Clear sentences let your readers' imaginations fly. Crufty sentences confuse them.
The challenge
Blaise Pascal, amongst others, is attributed to the quote:
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
It takes time to cure constipation in our writing, but your readers will love you for it.
Try placing stents in my clogged sentence for today's challenge and see what you create. Feel free to find stronger verbs and adjectives and rearrange the sentence structure however you'd like. The goal is clarity.