Monday, November 30, 2009
Tips on Writing Concisely by Raphael Costa
Conciseness makes a difference in your writing, especially when the message you are transmitting is complex and the receptor is uninformed about the subject. Many people confuse conciseness with brevity, which are not the same concept. As I said on my past posts about writing correctly and clearly, being concise, also defines whether your writing is going to be reliable or not.
I understand that when you are writing a text you want to emphasize the most important parts of it, using words such as VERY, A LOT, ABSOLUTELY, DEFINITELY, GREAT, LITERALLY, MAJOR, REALLY and many more. For you, passionate, that likes to use these words, I have a bad news for you! They are meaningless modifiers, which means that there is no need to use them in your text. I am going to give you more examples of words that can ruin the conciseness of your writing.
Avoid saying the same thing twice ( redundancy):
Redundancy Vs The Lean Version
12 midnight-------------------- midnight
12 noon ----------------------- noon
3 am in the morning ----------- 3 am
a person who is honest -------- an honest person
a total of 14 birds------------ 14 birds
biography of her life --------- biography
circle around ---------------- circle
Cut vague words such as: area, ASPECT, case, character, factor, field, kind, manner, nature, SITUATION, THING, type.
Cut or reduce wordy phrases such as: at the present time, at this point in time, for the purpose of, in order to, DUE TO THE FACT THAT, in my opinion, in spite of the fact that.
References:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5nw6-wIwmk
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/concise.htm
write.oid.ucla.edu/handouts/WritingConcisely.rtf
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I really liked your post. I have to admit that I add many of those words into my writing. Now that I watched your video and read your blog I will have to be careful not to add too many A LOT's or GREAT's in my writing.
ReplyDeleteJamie
That was a good post! I actually write like that to put extra words in sometimes. Guess i should start avoiding that because fillers are just a wasted space
ReplyDeleteRaphael,
ReplyDeleteI like how you tied this post into the posts you have done for the ECB project so far. In your last post, I would like to see you watch your comma usage. Review the comma usage video in the week 5 folder. Other than that, I liked your post. I liked how you gave examples of redundancy, so that the reader can use these examples to spot this problem in their own writing. I look forward to your last blog post next week.
Heather
Wow, I use those words regularly in my writing. I just wanted to use one there. These are good things to consider when writing. More information that i did not know before the post. Good job!
ReplyDelete