It is often said that writing is rewriting, but what is less commonly realized is what this implies: that we should keep what we’ve first written and reshape it—rewrite it—into a better form, rather than try over and over to begin again. That should come as good news, because too many of us, maybe all of us, try to write under that grueling taskmaster named Instant Perfection. No such person exists.
Here’s an example of what I’m pointing to: A difficulty in meeting online was that the screen would often freeze. Repeating myself, my client would get frustrated. There is here really only one grammatical problem to complain about (we’ll get to that in a moment), and anyone reading these two sentences would understand what they were trying to say. But it’s the fact that the writer is trying to say something that marks the passage for revision, because it is not for the reader to puzzle out the writer’s thoughts. Well-written sentences bring a reader to the same vista from which the writer originally saw the idea, with few matters of form to obstruct one’s vision. That takes time, and it’s better to clear the path of bramble rather than scramble down and back up again a different way.
The first sentence takes the long way home to its idea. Rewriting begins with understanding the form of what we’ve first written, and one excellent technique (really not a technique but an essential requirement) is to identify the clauses, both independent and subordinate, which a sentence comprises. Here there are two clauses, an independent whose verb is was, and a subordinate whose verb is would freeze. This quick analysis lets us see and hold firmly the form, or shape, of what we wrote; concentrating on form gives us the distance we need to look objectively and change decisively (sometimes even radically) our first arrangement of thoughts.
The verb was in the first clause is asserting an equation between the subject and what is named in the predicate. When any form of the verb to be is used in this way, it is called a copulative verb, what many of us learned as a linking verb (a copula in Latin is a link or band). Here, the difficulty in meeting online is being identified with the fact that the screen would often freeze; that was the difficulty, and the writer has merely announced that there was a difficulty and then named it. But rather than point and say, one might just cut to the chase and say: the screen would often freeze when we met online. That revision, then, would assert action in both clauses, keeping the reader’s attention on what was happening, not just on what was.
In the second sentence, though, we meet not a stylistic problem but a real grammatical error. The opening word, repeating, is a participle, and a participle is an adjective. Adjectives modify nouns or pronouns, and so the question is, who is repeating? Logically, of course, it is the unstated I who is apparently having to say the same thing over and over again, the same I to whom the pronoun myself refers. But English sentence construction requires that an opening participle agree with the subject of the independent clause which immediately follows it, and that subject here is my client. Thus, repeating is modifying my client, and that’s just not true. Rather, I would frustrate my client by constantly repeating myself. (This revision suggests that the writer might have originally been thinking that repeating was naming an action rather than modifying a pronoun, employing it as a gerund rather than as a participle. If so, that gerund, not my client, would have to stand as the subject of the clause: Repeating myself only frustrated my client.)
The lesson, then? Stick with what you’ve written, analyze it, and find your natural written voice, the one that sees clearly and says simply—and realize, too, that it can often take some effort to be simple and forthright.
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