Saturday, September 3, 2011

TO THAT, OR NOT TO THAT...THAT IS THE QUESTION.

          Since I joined a local Lynchburg critique group two years ago,  our leader has made a point of pounding a few golden tid-bits into us to help improve our writing.   One of these tid-bits concerns the word "THAT."
         I never gave much thought to the word that. I used it casually in my writing--perhaps a little too often. For me, it was such a good word for emphasis or specificity as in "I want that one!"
        But on the other sideof the coin of good writing, there lurked the "bad" that that had no business weakening my sentences as in these samples: "Give me the flashllight so that I an see where I'm going." Or, "She was surprised that he was not there."
         If you remove the that words in each sample sentaence above, you'll see that the sentences become tighter and cetainly more professional.
        I actually never noticed that I used so many thats. They were simply words that spilled from my stream of consciousness and that hid in plain sight among the "good" necessary words on the page.
        In our group, we argued and complained that a particular that our leader suggested be deleted was indeed very necessary."It emphasizes the meaning!" or "It highlights the author's intent!" etc.etc. were some of our points about overusing the word that and soon I was truly treating "that" as a 4-letter word (which, of course, it is.).       
        Now, whenever I finish a page, I go to FIND in the MicroWord Tool Bar and type in "that" in the FIND WHAT space. All my "thats"come up highlighted. All I need to do  is cull the unnecessary thats from my page with a tap on the Delete key
        Try this on something you've already written or use my overuse of the word in his posting to get my point.
       You'll see an immediate improvement of your word flow, tighter sentence structure and a cleaner manuscript, query or synopsis that you can send out in the submission process.
        Have fun deleting  the unnecessary thats in this posting. It's worth the effort.
        And, for now, that's all I have to say about "that."

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