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Minor Victory! Those dreaded ‘ing’ words

December 13, 2010 by Nicole 8 Comments

I’ve gone through my manuscript and purged it of unnecessary ‘ing’ words. I tend to write very ‘present’ (may be due to my ‘method’ writing.. possibly) which is fine but I have a habit of doing that very naughty mistake. Here are a couple of examples



Example                                                        Which should actually be
‘I was riding really fast’                                ‘I rode really fast’
‘David was wishing she’d hurry up’            ‘David wished she’d hurry up’

So a minor victory! Yay. Now I just have to go back through it and check my use of the word ‘were’ and ‘grinned’. I noticed an over use of both in the document. That and I have put double spaces between sentences in dialogue and apparently you don’t so I need to fix that too. My friends are teasing me for being pedantic but after some of the horrid reviews I read on Amazon on other self-published work I’d rather be safe than sorry! Of course I know there will be people who won’t like it, I am prepared for that I’d just prefer that they can’t fault the workmanship too much *sigh*

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Filed Under: Pre 2016 posts Tagged With: Those dreaded ing words, Uncategorized

Comments

  1. Kerrin says

    December 14, 2010 at 1:18 am

    Good for you!

    Reply
  2. Ann says

    December 14, 2010 at 1:47 am

    Sounds like you are doing a top notch job of sorting and improving. Good luck!

    Reply
  3. Kelly Dexter says

    December 14, 2010 at 2:37 am

    Congratulations, sounds like a job well done!

    Reply
  4. Vicki Rocho says

    December 14, 2010 at 2:41 am

    I TOTALLY need to stop the double space thing. I heard about that years ago in a class I took for work. But that's how I learned to type. How do you undo 25 years of conditioning?

    Reply
  5. Old Kitty says

    December 14, 2010 at 12:00 pm

    Yay!! Good for you!!! Take care
    x

    Reply
  6. Bossy Betty says

    December 14, 2010 at 3:23 pm

    So many things to think about! I also double-click like crazy. My kids comment on it all the time.

    Reply
  7. B.E.T. says

    December 14, 2010 at 8:10 pm

    Hey, better safe than sorry, and it proves you're doing your research. Bravo!

    Reply
  8. Andrew Rosenberg says

    January 2, 2011 at 5:10 pm

    Thanks for commenting on my blog.
    I maintain a list of "banned words" that I try to avoid at all costs. But I always find those -ing words creeping into my writing:
    Painted women occupied those high walkways, waving down to the men, occasionally dropping a handkerchief if a man showed the least interest.
    Compare to:
    Painted women occupied those high walkways, waved down to the men, and occasionally dropped a handkerchief if a man showed the least interest.
    For some reason I get a better visual with the first. Maybe I'm wrong but I'm not convinced -ing is all bad.

    Reply

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