🍴The Oregon Trail

“Ughhhhh…not again!!!”

I whisper yelled to myself.

My wagon sank while crossing the river.

I was so close, but the “Start Over” prompt made it clear that my shopping spree at the General Store was my downfall.

I vividly remember playing The Oregon Trail in my grade school computer class and being weirdly aware of dysentery and other horrible ailments that plagued those poor people.

Though this alley of Memory Lane was fun to go down, there’s a reason for it.

I want to talk about why keeping only what’s necessary in your writing is important.

It’s easy to throw in extra words here and a clever saying there.

We all do it. I know I do.

But, the real work starts when you unapologetically hit the backspace on them.

Like a heavy wagon in The Oregon Trail, you have to decide what you’re keeping and what’s getting left behind so you can safely cross the river.

AKA, get your audience to read your content from start to finish.

Here are some tips to lighten your load and only keep what’s necessary in your writing:

• Remove redundancies. In school, we were conditioned to hit certain words or page counts, which led us to write the same thing five different times. Stop doing that. Redundancies in our writing make our readers waste valuable energy. Say it once with clarity.

• “Kill your darlings.” It sounds violent, but it’s necessary. “Kill your darlings” means eliminating sentences that don’t serve a purpose, even if you love them. The goal is to keep what’s necessary and weed out any razzle-dazzle that doesn’t add to your content.

• “So what?” test. Maybe do this exercise privately because you’ll be reading your content aloud and repeatedly asking, “So what?” Heads might turn if you do this in public. The goal of this exercise is to only share content that backs up your main point. If you can't easily explain the significance of the sentence or paragraph, that's likely a sign to get rid of it.

Try these tips to balance the weight of your wagon and get across that river in one piece!

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