Some days you don’t want to have an in-depth revision session. You just want to make a few easy changes to your manuscript and call it a day. I get it. Here are a handful of straightforward changes you can make today.
- “I thought to myself” can be changed to “I thought”. The only person who can hear your thoughts is you, so cut the redundancy.
- “I shrugged my shoulders” can be changed to “I shrugged” (or “he/she/they shrugged)”. There aren’t really any other body parts that you can shrug.
- “I nodded my head” can be changed to “I nodded”. Like shrugging shoulders, you can’t nod much other than your head.
- Search for “thing” and “things” and see which ones you can swap out with more specific words. (I have a whole article about things.)
- Search for “decide” and see if you need to decide to take an action, or if you can just do the action. (Also have an article about “decide”.)
- Search for common adverbs like “quickly”, “slowly”, “quietly”, “very” and swap them out for stronger verbs. (If you need a hand, Word Hippo is my go-to thesaurus. And I’ve got a blog about adverbs too.)
Search for these in your manuscript and grab yourself a few quick wins!
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