Brief, actionable and useful advice that you can use to improve your writing.
This sentence should be vaguely familiar to long-time Quick Writing Tips readers. If not, look at the upper right column under where it says "About this blog." Compare that sentence with the sentence above.
Hey, even blogs about writing contain bad sentences. However, it's embarrassing to admit that my "About" sentence sat there in a state of phrasal disrepair for some two years. What changes did I finally make to it? Let's take a look once again at the original version:
Brief, actionable and useful advice that you can use to improve your writing.
1) Kill that--it's a needless word.
2) useful and you can use are redundant. Kill one.
This leaves us with:
Brief, actionable advice to improve your writing.
A grammar purist might object to the word actionable, but I decided to leave it in. Part of the beauty of publishing your own stuff is you get to make the final decision on word choice.
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