Ways to correct common writing mistakes
By Mindy Ward, AAEA Vice President, Missouri Ruralist
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.