Modify your writing at your own risk

We’ve all been warned about them. They’re called “modifiers” and are also known as “qualifiers.”

Strunk & White put it bluntly in their time-honored writing guide The Elements of Style when they called them “the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.”

Some common modifiers are:

• Rather
• Very
• Quite
• Too
• Kind of

They clutter and sap the energy from all types of writing. Here’s an example using the above modifiers. The second graph is stripped free of the modifiers to illustrate the difference.

Rosenthal found the negotiators RATHER pretentious. He was QUITE annoyed by their attitudes and had a VERY strong urge to flee the boardroom. But that would have been TOO rude even by Rosenthal’s brusque standards. He felt KIND OF contrite for entertaining such a notion.

Rosenthal found the negotiators pretentious. He was annoyed by their attitudes and had an urge to flee the boardroom. But that would have been rude even by Rosenthal’s brusque standards. He felt contrite for entertaining such a notion.

Notice the second graph is a more compact, direct and faster read.

That’s the effect on just one paragraph, mind you. Imagine the impact to be had by eradicating unnecessary modifiers from 10 or 30 graphs of copy.

That is why I urge you to follow this blog post’s dictum to modify your writing at your own risk.

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