During the first twelve days of December I'll be posting twelve ways to self-edit.
Today's Tip: Remove Extraneous Words
While it's usually best to show and not tell, sometimes it's okay to do a little telling, like when you want to get info passed along quickly. But for those other times, here are some telling words to remove from your MS: heard, saw, wondered, noticed, thought, watched, realized, knew, understood, just, that, then, when, and but. For example, if you have the line, "I noticed that the fridge was open and used its light to pour a glass of juice." you could update that to showing by making it, "The light from the open fridge was bright enough for me to pour my glass of juice."
