Day 231: Change -ness words into adjectives.

Words such as happiness, usefulness, and hardness are nouns made from adjectives. By adding –ness, a writer complicates his or her writing by changing a simple, easy-to-understand adjective into a vague, undefined concept or idea, e.g., the concept of being happy, the concept of being hard.

Changing the concept word back into an adjective will typically force the writer to revise the sentence, but the result will be a sentence that directly states what the writer intends. Consider this sentence.

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“The looseness of the dress made me uncomfortable.”

When we revise this, and change “looseness” into “loose,” we get

“The dress was loose and made me uncomfortable.”

Another possible revision is

“The loose dress made me uncomfortable.”

When considering revisions to remove -ness, you might find that you can completely change the sentence to express your idea better:

“I feared the loose dress would reveal more than I intended.”

While this revision has more words than the original, it more accurately expresses the writer’s meaning.