George Orwell once said: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” Words that don’t contribute meaningfully simply dilute your story. How often do you consider every word you put on the page? What, in your opinion, makes a word worth keeping in or cutting?
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I have always struggled sticking to the word count. Cutting out words is so hard, in fact I have a note on my phone of all the phrases I cut out of works that I still love! I think a word worth keeping is one which provides
clarity, description, emotion, and progression. A word worth cutting out is one that makes the sentence awkward, confusing, or superfluous.
I also keep notes about sentences that I just love, but haven't been able to fit anywhere. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm ever going to be able to fit them anywhere; I've found that trying to fit a pre-existing sentence into a work doesn't work nearly as well as crafting a new sentence tailored to that work.
@John Kirian I totally agree!
If you're looking to keep your work under a word count, I've been taught it can be helpful to go through each sentence and try to eliminate one word if you can.
That's an interesting idea, and it's not a practice I've heard of before. How do you decide which word to cut from each sentence?
@John Kirian In school, I was taught to cut out unnecessary usage of the words "very", "that", "a lot", "like", etc. I hope this helps!
When I type up what I've written, I look at the way words sound and look together in that order. Sometimes they'll sound okay as-is but I'll swap a word if they don't also look beautiful on the page.