The Copy Editor's Method: Five Small Fixes for Wooden Sentences

Wooden sentences aren't wrong, they're just stiff

A sentence can pass every grammar check and still land flat. Nothing is misspelled, the subject and verb agree, there are no comma splices - and it still reads like it came out of a committee meeting. That's what AI drafts, corporate memos, and tired first drafts tend to have in common: technically fine, hard to actually enjoy reading.

This isn't a checklist for spotting AI markers or scrubbing telltale phrases - that's a different job, and a different post. This is about line editing: the specific, repeatable moves a good copy editor makes on a sentence to give it weight and shape, no matter who or what wrote the first draft. Five of those moves are below, each shown as a real before-and-after rewrite, so the difference is visible on the page instead of just asserted.

None of these require a style guide memorized cover to cover. They're small, mechanical checks you can run on any paragraph in a few minutes, and they stack - a sentence that gets all five usually reads like a different sentence entirely.

Five edits, side by side

Why denominalization does the most work

Of the five, denominalizing is the one people skip because it's the hardest to spot. A nominalization is a verb wearing a noun costume - usually ending in -tion, -ment, -ance, or -ing. "Implementation" instead of "implement." "Announcement" instead of "announce." Each one buries an action inside an abstract noun, which forces the sentence to invent a weaker verb to carry it: "made," "conducted," "underwent."

Take: "There was a reduction in customer complaints following the update." The real verb is hiding inside "reduction." Pull it out: "Complaints dropped after the update." Same fact, four fewer words, and a subject that actually does something.

A rough diagnostic: count the -tion/-ment/-ance words in a paragraph. More than one per sentence on average, and the paragraph is probably carrying dead weight it doesn't need.

A five-minute edit pass

1. 1
   Read it out loud

   Anything you stumble over, reread, or run out of breath on is a candidate for a rewrite. Your ear catches problems your eye reads past.

2. 2
   Circle every filler phrase

   "It is important to note," "basically," "in order to," "the fact that." Delete each one and check whether the sentence still means the same thing. It almost always does.

3. 3
   Hunt the nominalizations

   Scan for -tion, -ment, and -ance endings. For each one, ask what verb is hiding inside it, and whether the sentence can just use that verb directly.

4. 4
   Find every passive construction

   Look for "was/were + past participle." Ask who or what actually did the action, and put that word in the subject slot.

5. 5
   Check the rhythm

   Read the paragraph again and notice where each sentence ends. If they're all roughly the same length, break the pattern - combine two short ones or split a long one.

Practice on your worst paragraph first

Don't start this on a sentence you like. Open whatever document has been sitting half-finished because it feels clunky, and run the five-minute pass on just the first paragraph. Cut the filler, chase down the nominalizations, flip the passive voice, fix the one list that isn't parallel, and read it aloud one more time to check the rhythm. Most people are surprised by how much shorter and more direct that paragraph gets without losing a single fact.

These five moves won't fix a badly organized argument or a missing point - that's a structural problem, not a sentence-level one. But they will take a paragraph that's correct-but-forgettable and make it one a reader actually finishes. If you want a second pass on grammar and phrasing once you've done the line editing yourself, AI Humanizer Lab's grammar checker and humanizer tool are built for exactly that kind of cleanup - worth running your draft through once you've made the big cuts by hand.