Diagnosis: Your writing has a tumor

A swollen, unnecessary mass of words has invaded your otherwise healthy body of text.

It’s subtle. It’s small. You might not even feel it. But it’s there, and it has to go.

“But it’s not cancerous,” you say. “It’s benign.”

Cancerous prose is so much easier, isn’t it? Easy to spot, easy to remove, no doubts or rationalizations: just snip, and it’s teatime. Cancerous prose is rowdy; it gets in your face. It incites you to kill it.

Benign prose is quiet. It murmurs. It hides its eyes. A benign writing tumor is harder to recognize, harder to pinpoint, easier to rationalize, easier to defend.

Maybe you can live with it. Maybe no one will notice.

Don’t fool yourself. Benign writing tumors are just as damaging as malignant ones. That growth of clichés is ugly. Those awkward phrasings impede your text’s movement. Those extraneous adjectives press on a nerve. Excess begets excess: the longer you let that word tumor live, the more it will grow, spawning more glut and circumlocution until it paralyzes the rest of your text. You can manipulate it, massage it, or tie it up in pretty ribbons, but without surgery the prognosis is poor.

I know you’re scared. You wish you didn’t have to deal with this: you just want things to be all right. But you don’t have to go it alone. If you cannot identify and remove the offending text yourself, you can rely on a friend or family member to help. You can also hire a writing professional who will examine your text, identify the problem, and perform the extraction for you. He or she will even offer suggestions and alternative strategies on how to stitch your work back together and prevent further infection.

Counseling services may be available.

These decisions are never easy to make, but they cannot be ignored. Your writing must be free to jump and dance and twist without hindrance, to sing without obstruction. You must do whatever it takes to help your writing glide. Once these word tumors have been eradicated and expunged, your text body can return to a happy, healthy, productive life.

Both you and your work will breathe easier for it.

* * * * *

I won’t be around for a few days: I’m having some excess adverbs extracted from my neck.

Everyone have a good week, and be well.

Kellie

Tagged as: editing, writing