Be Your Own Editor

I recently posted on the overuse of the word “that,” and I could feel the vibes of excitement coming from readers across the land. Now it’s time for another one that jumps off the page (I wish): “would.”

A memoir I proofread last month used “would” in nearly every sentence. I do not exaggerate (much). Only three explanations presented themselves: (1) the book was too short and the author figured “would” would inconspicuously help inflate the page count, (2) the author thought “would” was a necessary part of the past tense, or (3) the author thought adding “would” to every past-tense verb gave the entire book a sort of ongoing, timeless quality.

It doesn’t matter what the purpose—it didn’t work. The excessive use of a word that, plucked from its context, is essentially meaningless did nothing but dull otherwise sharp writing. I’ll paraphrase, to protect the identity of the not-so-innocent:

Every day when I would come home from school, my mother would always have a drink in her hand. She would look right through me.

You get the idea. (Yup, it was one of those memoirs. If only my mother had been an alcoholic.) As with any word, try to use “would” only when its removal would change the meaning of the sentence, as in the sentence you’re currently reading. Or in other subjunctive constructions, such as this one:

If I were a wooly mammoth, I would have tusks.

Can it be effectively used in the past tense to express action that was customary or habitual (the intent, I think, of my aforementioned author)? Sure. But, like everything, in moderation. Seeing a word in every sentence makes that word disappear. Compare:

Every day when I came home from school, my mother would have a drink in her hand and look right through me.

In this case, “would” does convey the sad sense that the author’s unhappy relationship with her mother just went on and on the same way, day after day. That the drink in her hand was somehow inevitable. The sentence would be subtly different without it. I don’t get that sense from the first example: using the word three times dilutes its power and the power of the words around it, since readers’ eyes have to skip over meaningless wordy junk to get to the meat of the writing.

Every word has its place, but when editing your manuscript, be sure you haven’t placed too many boring words in too many unnecessary places.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Writing/Editing Tips: Nuts and Bolts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.