From the course: Writing with Flair: How to Become an Exceptional Writer

Create variety: Exercises

From the course: Writing with Flair: How to Become an Exceptional Writer

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Create variety: Exercises

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- Change the sentence structure and words in this passage to create more variety. Standard & Poor's said Australia's top credit rating was largely safe from any future disruption to the world economy. Standard & Poor's said that, with its extremely low debt levels, the country would have time on its side to deal with any such disruption to the world economy. In the latest potential disruption to global financial markets, China said its economic growth had come in weaker than expected. In terms of sentence structure, I've moved the attributions, Standard & Poor's to the end of the second sentence instead of at the start of it, like in the first sentence, I've also referred to is as the rating agency so as not to repeat Standard & Poor's. Okay as far as the words go, I omitted the second mention of world economy, which was too samey, and I used alternative words for disruption throughout, specifically blow and jolt, I could also have used shocks or bumps or plenty of other words as alternatives too. Speaking of which, when it comes to words, it can be handy to keep an inventory of alternative words for the most common scenarios that you can use for variety in whatever you write, often you can consult a thesaurus but you can also as I say, keep an inventory, especially if you find that in the type of writing that you mostly do, you're constantly repeating the same sorts of words. So for instance instead of repeating delta, delta, delta, all the time, you could switch it up with descriptions like the company, the firm, the carrier, the airline, so that's if you were writing a lot about the company delta for example, or with Australia's Qantas airline, you could refer to it at different times to Australia's biggest airline, Australia's flag carrier, the Sydney-based company and various other descriptions or even just as it, because, it, can often be used for a company. So let's say you write about financial markets or business performance a lot, at work, and you find that you keep having to repeat the words, rose, or fell, in your writing, you know, the stock rose, and that stock fell, or this company's profit rose and that one's fell or whatever, if you're doing writing where you have to use those words a lot, for rose, you've got various alternatives, of varying strength, which you have to use in a measured way, but you've got increased, climbed, gained, added, advanced, surged, jumped and soared, can be alternatives for rose, at different levels, or instead of fell, you have these options of varying intensity, decreased, declined, dropped, dipped, slipped, sank, plunged, tumbled. If you're talking about the earnings of a company and you find that you're saying, the earnings were boosted by various things, a bit too often you could vary it to say instead of that earnings were boosted by something, you could that they were lifted, or that they were helped, or they were bolstered, or driven, or fuelled, or pushed higher, so don't feel that you have to use an alternative word every time though, I mean, just consider whether it might be better to have a bit of distance between the various times that you use the word rose or fell, or whatever. Having variety makes your writing less dry and dull, I hope you've seen that, so I encourage you to experiment with the concept and witness how much flare it can add to your writing.

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