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What do dieting and writing have in common? They often travel together—and should. In writing, to diet means to determine what words, phrases, and extraneous content need to go. They represent the unwanted pounds that weigh down a manuscript.

Revision gives the writer an opportunity to go through her copy to tighten her sentences and rephrase passages for the most effective copy possible. According to best-selling author Roy Peter Clark, “…The concrete noun lets us see and the action verb helps us move. Experts on writing have always preferred strong nouns and verbs.”

For several years, writers have been urged to “trim the fat” of extraneous adverbs and adjectives. We’re encouraged to use lean, mean story construction for readers’ pleasure, while holding and expanding that pleasure with the ebb and flow of concrete detail and curiosity-generating abstract thought.

Purpose-driven writing takes time to conceive and deliver. Those in the writing business today have many recommendations for writers about their content. For instance, web content has specific parameters for the writer; length should run within 250-500 words, snappy headline titles grab a reader’s interest; copy should have plenty of pertinent links to other sites for more information.

When you stop to consider that readers of web content are, in general, looking for particular subjects, research material, etc., the standards derived are necessary and make sense. Keywords used within the copy help snag attention from search engines, while the organization of the copy finishes drawing in those engines.

Novels and magazines don’t have search engines, but searches are made. Readers talk to each other. The discoveries of one become shared knowledge and generate recommendations to other readers. Therefore, the same logic applies to novels.

Interest and reader staying-power is forfeited, if detailed descriptions bog down the reader’s quest to move with the story line. With non-fiction, writing rules for fiction can prevent an article from boring the reader to death. Poetry, too, uses some of fiction’s rules to keep the reader motivated and moving forward to the end.

The diet begins when the first draft is complete. Experienced writers know that by the time the first revision is finished, their stories have passed one hurdle of the editing process. Entire swathes of descriptive narrative lay on the editing floor. Subtext paths that went nowhere are removed. Most of all, the concrete feel of the piece has come to the foreground.

Parts and pieces of story line, description, character backstory, etc. have bitten the bullet, dying as they lived; in that brief twilight second from the writer’s hand.

With the second revision, more noun changes with precise action verbs bring paragraphs to attention. The few remaining adjectives are trade

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By Dennis Baron

Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It’s one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn’t quite fit the way we’re used to viewing things.

That’s exactly what happened to a student in Ohio when his English teacher decided to play the noun game. To the teacher, the noun game seemed a fun way to take the drudgery out of grammar. To the student it forced a metaphysical crisis. To me it shows what happens when cultures clash and children get lost in the tyranny of school. That’s a lot to get from a grammar game.

Anyway, here’s how you play. Every student gets a set of cards with nouns written on them. At the front of the classroom are three buckets, labeled “person,” “place,” and “thing.” The students take turns sorting their cards into the appropriate buckets. “Book” goes in the thing bucket. “city” goes in the place bucket. “Gandhi” goes in the person bucket.

Ganesh had a card with “horse” on it. Ganesh isn’t his real name, by the way. It’s actually my cousin’s name, so I’m going to use it here.

You might guess from his name that Ganesh is South Asian. In India, where he had been in school before coming to Ohio, Ganesh was taught that a noun named a person, place, thing, or animal. If he played the noun game in India he’d have four buckets and there would be no problem deciding what to do with “horse.” But in Ohio Ganesh had only three buckets, and it wasn’t clear to him which one he should put “horse” in.

In India, Ganesh’s religion taught him that all forms of life are continuous, interrelated parts of the universal plan. So when he surveyed the three buckets it never occurred to him that a horse, a living creature, could be a thing. He knew that horses weren’t people, but they had more in common with people than with places or things. Forced to choose, Ganesh put the horse card in the person bucket.

Blapp! Wrong! You lose. The teacher shook her head, and Ganesh sat down, mortified, with a C for his efforts. This was a game where you got a grade, and a C for a child from a South Asian family of overachievers is a disgrace. So his parents went to talk to the teacher.

It so happens that I’ve been in a similar situation. We spent a year in France some time back, and my oldest daughter did sixth grade in a French school. The teacher asked her, “How many continents are there?” and she replied, as she had been taught in the good old U.S. of A., “seven.” Blaap! Wrong! It turns out that in France there are only five.

So old dad goes to talk to the teacher about this. I may not be able to remember the seven dwarfs, but I rattled off Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, North America, and South America. The teacher calmly walked me over to the map of the world. Couldn’t I see that Antarctica was an uninhabited island? And couldn’t I see that North and South America were connected? Any fool could see as much.

At that point I decided not to press the observation that Europe and Asia were also connected. Some things are not worth fighting for when you’re fighting your child’s teacher.

Serious Word “age”

I love words.  They are fun, they come in all kinds of languages, you can rhyme them, say them for nothing, say them quietly or loudly or even not at all and, best of all, they are easy to exploit.  One word can have several meanings, and if you add  extra letters to them, they can mean even more.

One of my very favourite things, as a matter of fact, is to play the “age” game, I add those three letters to random words to see if it works.  Sometimes the “g” is soft, as in “massage”, and sometimes it is a hard “g” like the word “message”.  The words may end up as nouns or as verbs and once in a while you can turn a noun into a verb or vice versa.   Usually the hard “g” turns it into a noun type of word and the soft makes it a bit more verb “ish”.  

Bless is a good one, “blessage”  (hard “g”) is a word I use when someone sneezes, it means “bless you” in Binkdonk’s dictionary. 

Burp is interesting because it uses both types of “g”.  “Burpage” (soft “g”), is what you do with gassy infant.  Burpage (hard “g”) is usually what happens after guzzling a carbonated beverage much too fast.

Fail;  not what anybody wants to do, however, “failage” (hard “g”) happens when tests are not studied for or when there is a lack of focus and intent in whatever is attempted (nothing that some serious planning cannot overcome). 

Spank is my favourite! “Spankage”, (soft “g”)  is reminiscent of a spanking that relaxes you, it even sounds like it when said in a soft voice.  On the other hand, “spankage” (hard “g”) is what you get when you don’t obey.

Whip, as unlikely as it seems, makes sense.  “Whippage”, is what you get when going through dense forest undergrowth at any kind of rapid pace.  Especially if the person ahead of you is just letting the branches fling back at you.  Try to go first, in order  to prevent this calamity from happening to you .   

Oh! The possibilities are endless. There is also the option of changing the meanings of words that already have the “age” suffix.  Just by making it hard or soft. 

Do be careful with the soft “g’s” in case it sounds too pretentious but have fun and really enjoy that sound as it slides out of your mouth.

Serious Word “age”

I love words.  They are fun, they come in all kinds of languages, you can rhyme them, say them for nothing, say them quietly or loudly or even not at all and, best of all, they are easy to exploit.  One word can have several meanings, and if you add  extra letters to them, they can mean even more.

One of my very favourite things, as a matter of fact, is to play the “age” game, I add those three letters to random words to see if it works.  Sometimes the “g” is soft, as in “massage”, and sometimes it is a hard “g” like the word “message”.  The words may end up as nouns or as verbs and once in a while you can turn a noun into a verb or vice versa.   Usually the hard “g” turns it into a noun type of word and the soft makes it a bit more verb “ish”.  

Bless is a good one, “blessage”  (hard “g”) is a word I use when someone sneezes, it means “bless you” in Binkdonk’s dictionary. 

Burp is interesting because it uses both types of “g”.  “Burpage” (soft “g”), is what you do with gassy infant.  Burpage (hard “g”) is usually what happens after guzzling a carbonated beverage much too fast.

Fail;  not what anybody wants to do, however, “failage” (hard “g”) happens when tests are not studied for or when there is a lack of focus and intent in whatever is attempted (nothing that some serious planning cannot overcome). 

Spank is my favourite! “Spankage”, (soft “g”)  is reminiscent of a spanking that relaxes you, it even sounds like it when said in a soft voice.  On the other hand, “spankage” (hard “g”) is what you get when you don’t obey.

Whip, as unlikely as it seems, makes sense.  “Whippage”, is what you get when going through dense forest undergrowth at any kind of rapid pace.  Especially if the person ahead of you is just letting the branches fling back at you.  Try to go first, in order  to prevent this calamity from happening to you .   

Oh! The possibilities are endless. There is also the option of changing the meanings of words that already have the “age” suffix.  Just by making it hard or soft. 

Do be careful with the soft “g’s” in case it sounds too pretentious but have fun and really enjoy that sound as it slides out of your mouth.