Analyze Your Style - The Writing Life

Print your story out and read it out loud:

____Do you stumble on convoluted sentences or awkward constructions?

_____Are you writing in the active voice?

_____Is the voice original & authentic? Does it sound like you're talking on the page?

_____Have you used specific nouns and examples? Or are you relying on modifiers?

_____Are the verbs vivid or are the verbs propped up with adverbs?

_____Do your sentences contain parallel construction, noun-verb agreement?

_____Are your quotations tight and vivid?

_____Can your sentences be streamlined? Or do you pile on prepositional phrases?

_____Have you chosen fresh similes, metaphors and figures of speech or phrases that you've not read somewhere else?

_____How about pacing? Does it move along at a good clip?

_____Is there a mixture of sentence structures and sentence lengths?

_____Check transitions--does the writing flow easily between paragraphs and ideas?

_____Have you used acronyms and abbreviations sparingly?

_____Can you spot any obvious redundancies (past history, small kittens)?

_____Have you described the obviousÖgreen grass, hard rocks, empty vacuums?

_____Is there a unity of tone, especially between the lead and ending?