Fix This - 9.1.24

In a sea of scripts, good writing stands out. Strive to make your sentences clear, compelling, and concise. Compelling means powerful, interesting, and vivid. 

There’s an easy trick for going through your script and finding places to strengthen your writing. Can you figure out what it is in the excerpt below?

At first glance, this paragraph may seem fine. But fine isn’t great. You want your writing to be great.

One way to strengthen your sentences is to pay attention to adverbs. Often (but not always) adverbs are an indicator that there’s a better way to say the same thing. Let’s work through the example…

First up, “extremely clean” paints a clear picture, but if you can lose the adverb by using a stronger adjective, we recommend giving it a try. 

Here’s a tip to make that process easier… Spot adverbs in your screenplay by using the Find function (CTRL+F) to search for “ly.” Go through your whole script and see how many adverbs you can replace.  

To find more places you might make your writing stronger, search your script for the words “very” and “really.” While you might want to keep them in dialogue, you can usually replace them with a stronger word in your scene description. Pretend “very” and “really” actually mean “improve me!”.

For example, “very excited” could be thrilled, exhilarated, overjoyed, electrified, exuberant… or it might be enough to just say, “excited.” The choice is yours.

One adverb left. “Raucously.” 

Should we cut it?

Actually, we’d keep "raucously.” Losing it would take away a lot of the emotion from how Amanda is laughing. 

Some people will tell you all adverbs are bad. We’re not those people. The right adverb used in the right place can be wonderfully effective!

For a list of words you can remove or replace to strengthen your writing, download our free copy of the 7 Deadly Sins of Writing List. (Spoiler alert: There are more than seven.)