Ways to correct common writing mistakes
By Mindy Ward, AAEA Vice President, Missouri Ruralist
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In my small town, high school students feared Mrs. Early. She taught 10th grade English. Every student had to pass her class to graduate, which meant learning how to diagram a sentence.
Mrs. Early started with simple subject-verb-object construction. When she added indirect objects, direct objects, conjunctions, and prepositional phrases, well, my lines ran off the page. If you don’t know how a diagramed sentence looks, a simple Google search offers a snapshot.
While I despised her process, Mrs. Early taught me how to construct sentences. Do I get every word order right every time? No. Honestly, the most important lesson she taught me was to love words and how they flow together on a page.
I still make sentence structure mistakes. However, learning from those mistakes and creating new habits helps me grow as a writer. So, here are three mistakes I made as a young writer and a few ways to correct them.
Stop being passive. I don’t mean this as a personal character quality, rather a writing style. Journalism 101 points out two voices—passive and active. The passive voice stresses the action performed on by the subject. Example: The tractor was driven by Ronda. An active voice is when the subject performs the verb. Example: Ronda drove the tractor. The active voice brings readers into the story. Our readers are busy. A passive voice often slows down the story delivery. Active voice offers tight, direct, and strong copy. Choose active.
Remedy: Search your story for helping or auxiliary verbs. “Readability Statistics” in Word also provides the passive sentences percentage after spell-checking a document. This article 1.9% passive sentences.
Find a period. Run-on sentences are a problem. So are sentences with too many commas. If I must come up for air more than twice while reading a sentence, it needs a period. If there are so many subjects in a sentence that I cannot tell which is the main one, it needs a period. A comma or semicolon can fix a run-on sentence, but so can a period.
Remedy: Read your story aloud. If you find yourself gasping for air, put in a period. Most computers have a “read aloud” function and while the computer-generated voice does not run out of breath, it can drone on. Stop it mid-sentence and add a period. This punctuation mark is your friend.
Use strong quotes. Every word out of a source’s mouth is not quote material. Too often writers fill articles with quote upon quote. Honestly, anyone can pick up an entire quote from a transcription and place it in the copy; it takes a writer to find the right one to draw in a reader or drive home a point. Quotes need to be robust.
Remedy: Strike a balance between paraphrasing and quoting a source. If you paraphrase the general information, the quotes make a larger impact on the reader.
Mrs. Early taught me there are technicalities to the written word. Still, there is a need for creativity. The key is merging the two to create great stories.