Writing sensibly and repeating words
Town and Country station wagon driven into town by the out-of-towners from another town.
I actually wrote a small paragraph that said (I’m paraphrasing here), ‘…this town won’t support it…but there’s a new business coming to town…that will bring out-of-towners…’ Damn. It sounded good the first five times I read it.
Okay, time to pull my head out. I must have read this small excerpt half a dozen times before it caught my eye. I’m sure an editor or agent would have read that, rolled his or her eyes and put the manuscript back into the S.A.S.E. I might as well have put the out-of-towners in a Town and Country station wagon. Or called them the out-of-towners from another town out of town.
That oversight makes me realize no matter how highly I consider my own grammatical skills, even I, the boy genius, am not infallible. The paragraph was grammatically okay; I just hated the way the words repeated. The millions of fans who read the book wouldn’t have liked it either. I sometimes tend to overuse words or phrases I like. Not that I like the word ‘town’ all that much. I’m just glad I caught that before we proudly sent it off to its first round of rejections. Obviously, it’s better to catch mistakes now. No doubt there will be plenty we don’t catch.
Guess I better make a new rule for myself:
Be critical when you proofread. Do it with a critical eye. Don’t repeat critical words, or even non-critical words, when they’re in close, critical proximity to each other. Or something like that.