I do my writing in two passes, with the second devoted almost entirely to removing unnecessary words. Sometimes I go a step further, and change tenses to eliminate unnecessary affixes. It makes a big difference, even though readers don’t often recognize what they’re responding to.
Ugh, thanks for pointing out my latest linguistic crutch. I’ll try and eradicate that ASAP.
I do my writing in two passes, with the second devoted almost entirely to removing unnecessary words. Sometimes I go a step further, and change tenses to eliminate unnecessary affixes. It makes a big difference, even though readers don’t often recognize what they’re responding to.