Breaking Up with That Changed Everything
It's amazing how becoming conscious of how you overuse something opens the door to doing things differently (and better).
“I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.”
― David Ogilvy
Mrs. Ingraham, my fifth grade English teacher, was a stickler about grammar. Every sentence must be structured a certain way, there were things you could do here, but not there, and all those labels — participles, prepositions, parataxis. Oh, my!
If you’ve been reading my writing for any time, you probably know Mrs. Ingraham and I were not close. My casual (she would say careless, or perhaps atrocious) style of writing, my love of the ellipsis to help you see the idea about to be shared is at best half-baked, my obsession with the em dash — all things she’d likely find beyond annoying.
But, harsh as it may sound (and you probably already know this), I’ve never cared much about the correctness of my writing style. I’ve cared about whether it would sound right when you said the words in your mind as you read them on the page. No doubt because I hear words in my mind when I read, so I assume everyone else does.
So, I recently owned up to one of my lazy habits and decided to change it. For far too long, I’ve had a serious love affair with the word that. Reviewing some of my writing from the past couple of years for a new project revealed just how abusive I’ve been, dropping that into almost every sentence, often multiple times. It had become my form of “it’s like, we were like, he was like, she was like. “ And I didn’t like that.
So we broke up about three months ago.
I decided to pay close attention to how often I was using that in my writing and vowed to reduce its appearances. To find better ways to say what I wanted. To select a different word or phrase to use so that would be less frequent in my writing.
And it worked.
Sure, you’ll still find one here and there, but I’ve been amazed at how this simple decision has changed my writing process. Just recognizing the times when I’m about to drop that into a sentence makes me think more about what I want to say. It makes me more aware of how many unnecessary words I tend to insert into my writing. And I become much more intrigued, and over time better, at finding the right phrasing to convey my intended meaning.
No, I’m not claiming that Mrs. Ingraham would be proud. I’m confident there are many grammatical crimes within all of my writing (including this message). But I realize I’m getting better at leaving out the words writing coaches and colleagues have long encouraged me to remove.
Simply stated: The end of my affair with that has opened new doors and made me happier with the stuff I create. It takes less time to complete the first drafts, it requires fewer edits to get it to the point where I’m comfortable sharing, and I’m saying what I wanted to say more clearly.
I’ll put all of that in the win column. BOOM!
Action Encouragement — Take a look at your writing for the past 4-6 weeks, longer if you don’t write very often. What words are you over-using? Pick a section of the work and edit with one thing in mind — replace those overused words. Then just keep leaving them out as you write more. You might be surprised where that leads you.