« Right Brain Workouts

How Not to Impact Your Writing

By Peter Lloyd

Creative writers find ways to express themselves in forms and styles that surpass the ordinary. Surpassing the ordinary defines excellence in any art, sport, science, business, craft, or other creative activity. Everybody writes, right? So why not do it better? Everybody can and everybody needs to.

Anyone with an ounce of creativity can begin to write more expressively and communicate more effectively simply by trying harder. And trying harder doesn’t necessarily have to hurt. When I watch musicians blow blizzards of notes from their instruments, I know they have climbed to such heights of virtuosity one tedious step at a time. Yet each step demanded just a bit of work and a lot of patient practice.

Here are two steps anyone can take to elevate their writing virtuosity:

Avoid all forms of the verb to be
The verb you use to tell your readers something exists offers little but redundancy. It tells your readers nothing they don’t already know. If you’re writing about something, your reader already knows it exists. When I write, “the cat is black,” as soon as you read “The cat...” you know the cat exists.

Avoiding to be simply forces you to work a little harder to tell your readers what the cat does, what it resembles, where it wants to go, how it got there. Don’t waste words and time telling your reader what they already know. “The cat, covered in a thick, black coat...”

Of course, you don‘t want to slavishly abandon to be. Where would Hamlet be without it? Rather, consider every time you write it whether or not you can express yourself more definitively with a stronger, more active, or more descriptive verb.

Abandon all forms of impact as a verb
You may find the noun impact defined also as a verb in your dictionary, but only because, in the English language, repeated misuse eventually breeds acceptance.

Nevertheless, anyone can begin to write more powerfully by removing impact from their valise of verbs. Not because this wimpy verb commits to nothing other than having some sort of effect. Not because it also means something painful, such as an impacted tooth, a can of sardines, or commuters on the subway. Not because it reeks of jargon and lackluster business writing. And not because usage panels of language experts despise it.

Avoid impact because:

1. It’s the lazy way out of deciding between affect and effect

2. You can do better. For example, you can use affect when appropriate, when you really don’t know the effect. Go ahead and write, “Temperature affects the environment” unless you’re sure that, “Rising global temperatures melt glaciers.”

3. You can do even better and come up with creative alternatives. “Impact sales” fails to commit whether sales go up or down. But too often writers stop at impact rather than promising a benefit from their product or service. Tell us what kind of impact happens!

Just one day of subscribing to these two rules will impact… Oops! Follow these two rules and you will be… Obey these two rules and make yourself a more interesting and creative writer.

See also: E-Prime

Peter Lloyd hitchhiked across the United States and Canada several times in the 60s entertaining folks from Ogunquit, Maine, to Haight-Asbury with his own songs.

Right Brain Workouts Explained