: Re: What methods can I use to revise my writing? Background I am finding it challenging to transform an early draft into a finished product. My biggest challenges are putting the prose in the

@Dunderdale623

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Just speaking for myself, I have found it most helpful and useful to

be merciless to eliminate all of the words that I can, including especially those pesky adjectival embellishments;
locate and expunge all of the multisyllabic Latinate words, replacing them with their Anglo-Saxon equivalents.

To apply those rules to the lines above, I do a first pass to yield:

"I write better when I throw away words I don't need; and when I write plain English."

And a second pass might give:

"I use the fewest and the plainest words possible."

And I keep iterating on those principles

"And I go over it again and again until it's right."

This refining process clarifies my thought so that leading the reader as I wish becomes almost automatic.

I'm a software engineer and a lot of my writing is technical description or software proposals. The more I apply these rules, the clearer it becomes to the reader. And to me!

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