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Reducing Syllables per Word in Your Writing
There is a problem. It is an unassailable conundrum of literary wordsmithing. A characteristic common to any real writer worth his or her lexical dictionary is that we love lexicons and the collections of derivational morphemes and words in a thesaurus. In short we have great large vocabularies which we love to demonstrate.
It’s a good thing there are no real writers here! Just us poor folks trying to teach by writing how to books.
Okay, so far we’ve talked about reducing the number of words. By keeping your sentences short and simple, you keep your writing readable. Cool.
Same thing applies to word use. Keep your words simple and your writing is easier to read. For Flesch-Kincaid that means the lower the average number of syllables per word the easier it is to read. For us, that means use real words not sophisticated expressions of vocabulary. By real, I mean the type of words you’d use when talking to a friend over a coffee.
But in practical terms there’s two tricks you can try….
Have a KISS over Coffee …
Remember the advice “write like you speak”? Imagine your audience representative (you do have one, don’t you?) is sitting across the table from you in Tim Hortons. Okay, for you poor folks in the U.S. make that a Dunkin’ Donuts. Unless you’re lucky and have a local Timmy’s. Starbucks is too swish for our example.
Would you speak to him or her in deep erudite phraseology or just plain street level talk? Okay, now get rid of all the swear words. Now you’ve got the appropriate way to write to your target market. Easy huh?
In more practical terms, read through your writing. Anywhere you’ve used a complex representative of erudite discussion, replace it with a simple word. It sounds silly but your readers will love you for it. And hey, if you just absolutely must show off your vocabulary, you can always use words like erudite. It’s shorter than educated anyway. But limit yourself. You can lose your reader with short words too!
Lose weight – get active!
One of the indicators of overly educated speech is the use of passive voice. What is passive voice? It’s using phrases in place of verbs. It’s having your subject acted upon rather than your subject acting. Having been rewritten, the sentence is now being presented in passive voice. It’s quite common when trying to sound formal.
However, using passive voice tends to increase both the length of the words and the number of words. Additionally the quality of the writing is reduced. In this case, quality means the ability to draw in your reader and keep their interest. A characteristic sometimes described as powerful writing.
So find all those examples of you having used passive voice. And replace them. Use the active voice. Rewrite the sentence to use the active version. Your writing will be more powerful and more easily read.
Of course, being easier and faster to read isn’t the end all and be all. Next post, I’ll talk about when you don’t want to follow my advice.
