Are implied words unnecessary? — Judging by his face… / By his face…

I would say this is a thing for which there is no general rule. It's entirely a matter of style and context. If you really want to chop words out, go ahead and chop. Readers will call you on it if they don't like the result.

There's some filtering there. You can say, "His father's tone of voice shifted," and then have the topic change. Or you can have some kind of cue. For instance, I have a character with a habitual cough, which he often uses to change the subject. Or just have the father change the topic; you don't necessarily have to have the POV character announce the change of topic to us.

Agree with both responses above.

H7TM4N said:

My third less specific question, is whether you could point to other common constructions/examples where implied words might be left out, so that I as a novice writer may learn? This all started because I want to trim, especially unneeded filter words.

Thanks in advance to you all!

Click to expand...

She raised her eyes.

^^That's a not uncommon one. She didn't actually raise her eyes. She tipped her head upward and her gaze met his gaze. (Or something.) There are a fair number of these kinds of shortcuts. FWIW, in my own writing I only tend to hear the overwriting when I read pages out of sequence in short chunks. It's highly iterative to me, to get to a draft I'm happy with. But the end result is usually better.

For me, even though the word "judging" may be unneccesary, it completes the sentence. I prefer it. If you want to/need to chop - maybe take out sentences....?

Once you've established the point of view, you don't need to keep saying "he judged..." "he supposed..." "he saw that..." etc. That would be excessive filtering. You can leave out mentioning sensory organs and mental processes that follow observing/sensing something, because the reader knows that the character is doing that.

For example:

He looked out of the window and noticed that the sky was blue. He realised that this meant the weather would be good for the picnic.

versus

He drew the curtains. The sky was clear blue, not a cloud in sight. Perfect picnic weather.


In the second one, the reader infers that the person who drew the curtains looked at the sky, observed the colour and the lack of clouds and deduced it would be good picnic weather. You don't need to say that, once you have established the point of view.

There is a place for filtering, it's one of those things where the advice is to avoid excessive filtering. In my experience, excessive filtering comes from not realising (or maybe realising but not remembering) how much the reader can infer by themselves.

Your sentence "by his tone..." would be perfectly fine. But sometimes you don't even need to say that much. Sometimes the emotion is shown by the dialogue itself.