Clarity, Part 1

In this post I will be focusing on four topics that are present in the "Clarity" section of the book Rules for Writers. The four topics I have chose are variety, needed words, wordy sentences and shifts.

Variety

People have told me I have a very monotone voice and I think that reflects in my writing. I have a tendency to write all my sentences the same way with the same length. I think I could work on making my sentences more varied so that all of my sentences don't sound the same. I think the advice on "varying sentence openings" was helpful because that way I don't start off all my sentences the same way. Also the piece on "inverting sentences" was helpful in order to change how I write certain things.

Needed words

Sometimes when I type too fast I leave out words so sometimes it doesn't quite make sense. I need to spend more time going back and making sure that's understandable which subject I am talking about. The book gave useful advice on completing compound structure, because sometimes verb agreements get pretty confusing.

Wordy sentences

When I'm typing really fast I also have a tendency to repeat a lot of my words. This section really spoke to me because it talked about eliminating redundancies which I definitely need to work on. A lot of my thoughts come out at once so this gave me some useful tips on how to combine words. Rewording some of my words will help a lot in making the sentences more understandable.

Shifts
Something I have the most trouble with is verb tenses! I constantly switch back and forth between the different tenses. I'll be writing in present tense when I should be writing in the past tense. I like how the book gave different times when to use different tenses. For example, you always use the present tense when writing about fictional events. I also found the section on shifting from indirect to direct questions/quotations to be very helpful because I do that a lot too.

All of these sections were helpful in making my writing more concise.

Vvp1. "A Harkness table being used in a freshman English class." 12/31/08 via Wikipedia. Creative Commons License.

EDIT:

For the peer review I read both Isaac's and Alex's quick reference guides, both of which were very good! It was interesting to read my peers' writings and see how my quick reference guide compared to theirs. I realized when reading Isaac's and Alex's the structure of the guide. Some sections could be moved around to make it more understandable for the reader. The sentence I chose to examine came from Alex's blog, who chose to write about the euthanasia controversy. 

"Those who represent us do and sadly they aren’t against being bought.  People will do anything for their beliefs though.  That is why this debate won’t ever die until one side wins.  Euthanasia has to be legalized or shut down for the debate to even have a chance of ending."

The book had a section devoted to sentence variation and I think it could be very useful here. Alex's sentences all are the same length and sound the same so he could combine them, add new ideas or rephrase his sentences in order to make them better.