It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it. That’s the difference between grammar and style.
Here are a few principles that go beyond what you may have learned in English classes.
Specific Action
Abstract conditions have less impact than a specific action. Saying that Dad would play with Johnny every evening after work gives a general condition. Watch for “would” and instead describe what happened at a particular moment in the story. That evening, Dad set aside the newspaper and sat on the floor to play checkers with Johnny.
Watch for “could.” Delete it, and you will strengthen the action. For example, “Billy could see the monkeys swinging through the trees.” Technically, all that statement tells us is that Billy wasn’t blind. We know he could see the monkeys. But how would we know if he did see the monkeys? Leave out “could.” So “Billy saw the monkeys swinging through the trees.”
“Began” can usually be deleted in favor of the action itself. We keep the word when the focus is on the beginning and we don’t know whether the action continues. “Johnny began to button his shirt.” Really? He didn’t finish? Of course he did, so we should write, “Johnny buttoned his shirt.”
Two-Word Adjectives
An adjective cannot modify an adjective. We can have two adjectives together, each modifying the noun, such as a tall handsome salesman. Delete “tall” or “handsome,” and we still have a true statement about the salesman.
But if we have an orange juice salesman, we have a problem. He is a juice salesman, but he isn’t an orange salesman. The adjective “orange” must be attached to “juice” with a hyphen, making a single-word modifier, an orange-juice salesman.
Quoting Song Lyrics
For anything written after 1922, the words of a song cannot be quoted without written permission, and that’s often difficult to get, maybe impossible, and sometimes expensive. One workable approach is to give the title and paraphrase the words so readers get the message idea without copyright infringement.
