Too many blog commentaries and internet pieces sound the same, whether they talk about how to landscape your yard, lose weight, lease an apartment, conduct a successful job interview or design a website for your new business.
Each one represents a weak, passive opening. They make your sentence sound as if the reader has wandered into the middle of a conversation; but that’s obviously not the case, because the reader is looking at the first words below the headline, at the top of the browser window.
So, avoid these openings. Instead, try to recast every sentence that begins with “There are” or “There is” — whether in the intro or well into the piece — to erase what so often leads into a passive verb — and weak writing.
In fact, if “There” is the first word of any sentence, you can almost invariably improve it by rewriting … unless it has an antecedent, i.e., “there” refers directly to something in the previous sentence or paragraph (as in “There’s your problem”), rather than a floating “There is … [something, somewhere in the universe that I want to talk about right now].”
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