Jim's Tip o' the Month

LARGE... BUT NOT IN CHARGE. “LARGE” is the world’s laziest and most meaningless adjective. We all overuse it without even thinking about it. Well, think about it. “Large” usually tells us nothing that we couldn’t have figured out on our own simply by mentioning the item described as “large.” More importantly, using “large” all the time tells people you are not scrutinizing your prose for the punchiest way to say things. Search and replace them out. If you do need to describe the size of something, compare it to something else. For example, instead of “a large cockroach,” which could mean anything from a 2-inch water bug to one 150-feet tall, say, “a cockroach the size of a VW bus.”