So much turns on word choice. That thought came to me as I looked at different ways to say 'crushed' and 'line'. The search begins and ends with a good thesaurus. There you can find all sorts of atlernatives for the word that you want to change. The changes are usually motivated by a repetition of a word close together in a paragraph. For example:
" ... line after line until she delivered the final line with a cuff..."
Too many lines. The line refers to a line in a psalm so I needed to use a word that had a similar meaning. The Thesaurus( I use Oxford Canadian) suggested with the guidance phrase "He couldn't remember his lines" the following choices: words, part, script, and speech. Another possible guidance phrase read "the opening line of a poem." This is more in tune with the intention of my original line. The choices here were sentence, phrase, clause, utterance, passage, extract, quotation, quote, and citation.
With these choices, I look at my intention. It truly is a the final line that is being delivered so words like quotation, extract, quote, and citation don't work for me. Clause, utterance, part, and script don't seem to fit. I'm left with words, sentence, or passage. Sentence isn't snappy enough for me.
When I first looked at this I decided on 'words': 'line after line until she delivered the final words with a cuff" but now with more reflection I like "line after line until she delivered the final passage with a cuff." My reason for this final version (for now at least) is that passage reflects the nature of a line rather than words.
This is the process I go through for each change I make. It takes a lot longer to write it than do it. It's really an intuitive thing for the most part, done within seconds of scanning the entiries in the Thesaurus. As well, I chose 'smashed' as an alternative to 'crushed.'
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