Simple Edit

Sometimes we come across a sentence structured like this:

There/It (subject)
was/were (verb)
someone/something (direct object)
who/which/that (relative pronoun)
did something (relative pronoun clause)

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.

It was a face that only a mother could love.

This creates a slight wordiness and relegates the impact ideas to a dependent structural position in the sentence. Fix it by killing the flat subject/verb, cutting the relative pronoun, and rearranging the remaining words into a simple sentence.

An old woman lived in a shoe.

Only a mother could love that face.

You see how that works? It's not all-purpose, but it will yield a stronger sentence in the majority of cases.

Theresa