{"id":1870,"date":"2024-07-22T07:30:50","date_gmt":"2024-07-22T11:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/?p=1870"},"modified":"2024-07-22T07:30:50","modified_gmt":"2024-07-22T11:30:50","slug":"guidelines-for-smooth-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/22\/guidelines-for-smooth-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Guidelines for Smooth Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>These will help you delight your readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>In prose\u2014including fiction, reports, essays, papers, newspaper articles\u2014clarity is more important than anything else. Readers won\u2019t enjoy our exciting plots and fascinating characters if they don\u2019t understand what we\u2019re saying.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>The most powerful parts of speech in English are nouns (people, places, and things) and verbs (action words). We sometimes need adjectives (modifying nouns) and adverbs (modifying verbs and adjectives), but they\u2019re weaker. If you start to put one in, read your sentence with it and without it to see which way is better.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Look for word repetition and substitute synonyms if you notice that you\u2019re using a particular word too much.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Vary our paragraph beginnings. We don\u2019t want to start more than two paragraphs in a row with the same word.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Vary our sentence structures. We don\u2019t want to repeat two parts of a sentence connected by <em>and <\/em>or <em>but<\/em> over and over or to have all our sentences be very short. We want to mix it up. For <em>but<\/em>, we can use <em>though, although<\/em>, or <em>however<\/em>; for <em>and<\/em> we can use <em>what\u2019s more<\/em> or <em>plus<\/em> or <em>also<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Long paragraph blocks make readers tired and worried that they\u2019re not up to the job of reading through them. We can break our long paragraphs up wherever there\u2019s an opportunity\u2014a change in focus, in character, in what\u2019s happening. Bits of white space on the page are relaxing to the eyes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>These will help you delight your readers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[291],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1870"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1872,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions\/1872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}