How many titles have you seen that start with ‘The’? (The Grand Escape, The Greatest Showman, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Girl Who Owned A City, etc.) How often and how easy is it to start our descriptive sentences with The?
Obviously, there are plenty of things that don’t start off with The, and it's fine to use The now and then. But growing up it sometimes felt like this word was everywhere, beginning so many titles and, as I began to notice, starting a lot of my written sentences.
After a while, the overabundance of The started to get grating, primarily since it made many of my sentences sound repetitive. So, here came the self imposed challenge: Use The when need be, but otherwise, try to avoid using it to start sentences and titles.
Simply reducing the use of that one word had some interesting results. My titles became more interesting and creative, my prose less repetitive, and ideas expressed in my stories started coming through more vividly. Being unable to use The very often made it necessary to learn and adapt, or even completely rethink scene descriptions and sentence structures.
So, for those looking to improve their writing, avoiding The as often as possible may be a useful exercise. Or, for those already using The only on rare occasions, they can consider finding one or two other words that are repeated a lot in their writing and try to avoid using them. Ultimately, exercises like these encourage authors to dig deeper and find titles/prose that are more unique and meaningful to the story.
So yeah, just a little something that’s helped me.
Have you tried something like this at some point? What words do you repeat the most? Are there any writing quirks, mistakes, or too often used words that have become a pet peeve of yours?
Feel free to comment, or subscribe to this blog for more posts. Thank you for reading :)
