100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019
Keep related words together
Ten ways to develop style
Words that are part of the same information package are related, and they should be clustered together to avoid confusion. Adjectives should be placed near the nouns they describe so they don’t appear to be describing some other noun. Likewise, adverbs should be close to the verbs they modify, and dependent clauses should be near the words on which they depend for meaning.
Bad |
Better |
The boy rode his horse through the winter woods, strong and proud as could be. |
The strong, proud boy rode his horse through the winter woods. |
Garonovitch saw a small cut on the dog that was on his left front paw. |
Garonovitch saw a small cut on the left front paw of the dog. |
Nushka’s Roumanian pistol misfired when she tried to catch the Chinese bandits, which doesn’t happen often. |
When Nushka tried to catch the Chinese bandits, her Roumanian pistol misfired, which doesn’t happen often. |