What is a glue word?

Glue words are also sometimes called ‘sticky words’. A glue word is a word that tends to be essential to a sentence. That is, many glue words are the connectives that hold it together, make it make sense. However, an overabundance can make the sentence slow and gloopy – in other words, sticky.

You can make your sentence more concise, while still making sense and flowing well, by removing some of these glue words.

Richard Wydick, writer of Plain English For Lawyers, says the following about glue words:

“In every English sentence are two kinds of words: working words and glue words. The working words carry the meaning of the sentence. In the preceding sentence, the working words are these: working, words, carry, meaning, and sentence. The others are glue words: the, the, of, and the.

The glue words do perform a vital service. They hold the working words together to form a proper, grammatical sentence. Without them, the sentence would read like a telegram. But if the proportion of glue words is too high, that is a symptom of a badly constructed sentence.

A well-constructed sentence is like fine cabinetwork. The pieces are cut and shaped to fit together with scarcely any glue. When you find too many glue words in a sentence, take it apart and reshape the pieces to fit together tighter.”

Wydick’s image of the fine cabinet is useful. If you can craft your sentence to hold together with minimal glue, you’re becoming a more efficient writer.
What are some examples of common glue words?

Some examples of glue words are:

In
Of
To
By
There
From
Was
For
Some
Much

Hopefully, you can see that whilst these words are useful, they can be used unnecessarily, creating a dithering tone.

Have you used the Readable readability analysis and had helpful feedback on very long sentences, but you don’t know where to start with shortening them? Well, looking for unnecessary glue words is a great start.

Readable flags many glue words as “lazy words,” a detector that also covers a range of words that might be harming your content.
What changes do I need to make to reduce glue words?

When trying to reduce glue words, it helps to view the words in your sentence as building blocks.

This way, you can pick out your nouns, verbs and adjectives – try not to overuse adverbs – and decide what’s essential for what you’re trying to say.

The words between the main points in your sentence hold them together, making them a structure rather than a string of nonsense. But how many of these connectives and connecting words are essential?