Lucky Dip

Useful information No. 8: Try this challenge

In 2019, Benjamin Dreyer, vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House US, published Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.

Reading Dreyer’s book will not infuse the vapid prose of your planned romantic novella with pizzazz. His aim is more prosaic: to give his readers all that they need to write clearly and to present their material in accordance with the established conventions of proofreaders and copy editors.

He opens his book with a challenge: a simple exercise that will help you to improve your writing style in the wider sense:

Go a week without writing:
• very
• rather
• really
• quite
• in fact

Unless you are already a very skilled writer – rather like Dreyer, in fact – you’ll find that this is really quite hard to do. Try it.