From the course: Ninja Writing: The Four Levels of Writing Mastery

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Tighten sentences

Tighten sentences

From the course: Ninja Writing: The Four Levels of Writing Mastery

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Tighten sentences

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- I've talked about economy and the importance of it in another course, and so you already know a lot of tactics for recognizing redundant words, hedging words, and so on. But we can go a bit further with this and think about taking hot air out of sentences that you have. And this means putting your editor hat on and thinking about things, thinking about tightening, tightening, tightening, tightening. That's how editors in top newspapers would think, you know, this is tight, this is as tight as this sentence can be. And so that means recognizing a few more things which can lead to this looseness, and then being able to fix that by recognizing what's there. So there are some little things that creep in that sound okay, that, when you just look at them more closely, they're not as tight as they could be. So take this for example. There are many people worldwide who don't eat bread. Now, that sounds perfectly fine, right? But really, the tighter way of saying that, and have a go first…

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