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Do you ever wish your words had more oomph but don't know how to get there? In this section, you'll learn how to give your words more impact by using the active voice, losing filler words and adjectives, following your instinct, and focusing on delivering tones.
Be Bold
Be Bold
Many of us were taught business English in school. Many of us were also taught that we must speak a certain way to be polite and to sound friendly. Before you continue on to the technical advice in this article, do this first: forget those rules.
The rules of polite language won't work when you want to land an emotional hit. Don't pamper your audience by going round in circles and don't you dare soften your words by adding fillers to sound likable. When you write, you are in command. Do not be afraid to take the microphone.
Use the Active Voice
Use the Active Voice
If you remember your English classes, you would know that a sentence is in the active voice when a subject in a sentence does something. The opposite of which is the passive voice, wherein the subject is acted upon.
Active Voice: The dog bit Alice.
Passive Voice: Alice was bit by the dog.
Active Voice: I will never forget my favorite memory.
Passive Voice: My favorite memory is something I shall never forget.
Active Voice: The subject acts.
Passive Voice: The actions is done by a subject.
Above, you can find that the passive voice lengthens a sentence, lowering the sentence’s impact. There is no immediacy. The passive voice is great for formal papers, like business documents and essays, but not in a story where pacing is the name of the game.
Cut the Filler Words
Cut the Filler Words
From the first point of being bold, there are certain ways we speak that we accidentally adopt into our writing. There are two examples of this: using filler words and relying on object pronouns.
In writing, filler words are like... well, "like", "just", "I mean", "you know", “maybe”, and more, and you pepper them throughout your text without much thought… or when you’re not being careful. You'll notice them when you message friends, mostly to sound friendlier or less serious. If you're not careful, they can trickle into your serious writing and block the true message you're trying to send.
Another writing handicap is the over-reliance on "this" or "it" when you intend to discuss a certain subject. Remind your audience what "this" is. Put a name to it. Don't be general. Be specific so that they may understand you better.
Be wary and watch out for these habits. Catch yourself just in time and amend them as you write.
Lose the Descriptors
Lose the Descriptors
Often, shorter sentences mean more impact. That's because the action is immediately revealed. Putting too many words in a sentence or paragraph slows the momentum of an action.
Cutting back on the adjectives or adverbs — words that are meant to describe something — allows you to cut to the chase and use words that better describe your intention, upping the intensity.
"Katie walked slowly up the stairs sadly."
"Katie trudged up the stairs sadly.
"It quickly fell back into the well."
"It plummeted into the well."
"I quickly shut the door in fury."
"I slammed the door, furious."
Above, you can see that while some descriptor + subject pairings were changed, some descriptors got to stay. This tip is not meant to tell you to completely omit adjectives and adverbs from your toolkit. Words are there for a reason — use them. You only have to learn when to use them and how to use them well.
Use the Words That First Come to Mind
Use the Words That First Come to Mind
Using a thesaurus isn't a bad thing. Everyone wants to look for the perfect word, especially when it comes to the rule stated above. The perfect word brings impact but it doesn't always have to be long, polysyllabic, or anarchic.
As with the rule of Occam's Razor, sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer. As an author, your job is to tell a story in a way your reader understands what you intended. Don't stress out on whether the words you used sounded smart enough. Worry if they do the job effectively.
Listen to Your Tone
Listen to Your Tone
You may be thinking of a lot of imagined exceptions to the rules stated here. And that's the thing: there are a lot of exceptions. Things like the use of voice, word choice, and fillers all depend on one thing in the end: author's intent and the tone of the narrative.
On one hand, pacing is relevant to a story. If you want to slow down your work's pacing, consider adopting the passive voice or using adjectives to describe things. Use more words, because more words means slowing down the action. If you reach a climax and you want to show rapid, non-stop action, go for the active voice. Mince your words. Shorten your sentences.
On the other hand, you may need to fit the tone of the narrative. As stated previously, your job as a writer is to tell a story effectively. To do that, you may have to lose the sound of your own voice for a bit. You have to adopt the voice of your character or your narrator and that must reflect in your writing. This means forgetting the rules of grammar, using the slang you think they'd know, understanding which rules of language they follow and don't follow. Maybe your placid, calm, obedient narrator would prefer speaking in the passive over the active. Maybe your young peasant character only knows how to describe action in a simple way, struggling to describe things complexly.
Finding the right words is to know what your narrator would say if they wrote the story their way. Don't get self-conscious when you realize they have a different vocabulary than you do. You'll find that authors like Terry Pratchett, Mark Twain, Kelly Link, and Tamsyn Muir don't sound like the narrators of their novels. They became a conduit for their narrators to tell a story as it should be told, and there's no shame in that.
Conclusion
Conclusion
In this section, you were given tips on how to maximize impact in your written work. You learned that shorter phrases meant faster action while longer phrases meant delayed action. You learned the use of the active voice, filler words to watch out for, word choice, and contextualizing tone. Most of all, you were taught that there is nothing wrong with being bold.
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