The Art of Pruning Modifiers

When I am line editing, I employ a grab bag of techniques in order to polish an author’s prose. You need to edit as well during the revision process, and when you are paying attention to economy of expression, you will find that the number of words you need to convey an idea can be pared back quite a bit. Here are a few of the common guidelines I use.

The first is paying attention to redundant modifiers. Are you using an adjective that is implied in another part of that sentence? For instance, “She recognized the familiar image she had seen many times before.” The first thing I think is: if she’s seen it many times, isn’t the familiarity implicit? Take out the adjective: “She recognized the image she had seen many times before.”

Okay, you’re thinking, that’s easy. I picked that out myself. Let’s try an example of a double adjective. “Steve gave him several backhand blows to the face that left him reeling and senseless.” That makes me wonder: isn’t a person senseless when he’s reeling? Take out the extra adjective. “Steve gave him several backhand blows to the face that left him reeling.”

This same impulse to parse common ideas too finely also applies to prepositional phrases. Remember, they are modifiers as well. “At one point in her daze, a shadowy figure appeared in her mind’s eye.” I’m thinking, when a person is dazed, does it matter when something happens? Usually not: “In her daze, a shadowy figure appeared in her mind’s eye.”

This tendency toward piling on modifying phrases can grow more prolix. Let’s take this example: “He countered her efforts to keep him at a distance, roping his arms around her back and pulling her inward.” Why is this sentence so belabored? You could just write: “He countered her efforts to escape, roping his arms around her back.”

Sometimes a phrase should be cut in order to better feature an expressive word. Let’s consider: “The silhouettes of their long spears were visible in the night sky.” I look at that and I think, couldn’t “silhouette” be used more forcefully? It can if you take out the modifying clause: “Their long spears were silhouetted against the night sky.”

Check your modifiers first when you are trimming prose. Are you saving planet Earth when you knock out two or three words? No, but verbiage adds up. I regularly cut 10 percent of a manuscript’s length when I line edit. That’s a lot of extra brush.

Exercise: One common fallacy I see might be called the on/off switch. “His knife grated on the stone wall as he scraped the blood off the metal.” Do you really want two prepositional phrases using on and off to end both clauses in the sentence? Please spare your reader: “His knife grated on the stone wall as he scraped off the blood.” 

“Adjectives are clothes . . . When you don't have any clothes on, it's just you, raw, and you can't hide.”  —Padma Lakshmi

Copyright @ 2026, John Paine