Writing Clear, Concise, Sentences
writing.wisc.edu
writing.wisc.edu
But do not adhere to them as rigid rules or you will suffer in your ability to express yourself. Passive voice exists for a reason. Long words can add variety, rhythm, and color to your prose. Elongated sentences can help give your writing a flow that a mere parade of short sentences can never hope to achieve, not even after a thousand rewrites. Or not. All such items can be misused as well, and the books are replete with bloated forms of expression used by lawyers, politicians, educators, administrators, and the like who would not know a simple word or sentence even if it stood before them doing somersaults. The key is to know sound principles for clear and concise writing and then to apply them with a rhythmic ear for balance in your forms of expression. That means, yes, use passive voice, long words, and flowing sentences as needed to add grace to your prose but always with the baseline in mind: that is, to communicate in ways that are clear and concise and that people will readily understand for your stated purpose (formal style for formal settings, casual for casual, and whatever fits for anything in between).
I note all this because, years ago, I consciously and diligently set about to attempt to master writing and stumbled upon the rock of "simplicity" during such stretches in my learning process where I had assumed that all one could do was follow such rules. Any attempt to apply such rules one-dimensionally is a mistake, and you will regret trying it. Follow sound principles, by all means, but not dogmatically.
The other major keys to good writing are depth of language skills and extensive reading. No one will read your work unless you have something helpful to say. You get this by working hard to develop your skills, and lots of writing (and reading) is vital to this process.
However, they will also say to forget all that and go beyond, because expression shouldn't be confined by rules.
I've always thought you abide by the rules just long enough to spot their usefulness and then your throw them out the window and create something new.
Toss in a good measure of courses involving study of Hemingway and Vonnegut and I was a wreck for years. A passive construction, a ten-dollar word, the odd adverb--all had me in doubt and writing the most vanilla prose.
So it goes.
It was only when I started participating in NaNoWriMo that the forced march of cranking out 1666 words a night for a month combined with the permission to produce a shitty first draft allowed me to being my recovery.
Hemingway: Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited.
Faulkner: He did not feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which it its well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course.
I would have written "Writing clear and concise sentences"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma
EDIT: Ignore this. I thought he was referring to the first line of the post. "Follow the principles below to write sentences that are clear, to the point, and easier to read."
Writing clear sentences.
Writing clear (concise) sentences.The "concise", like the "clear", in "Writing clear concise sentences" is a restrictive adjective, primary to the meaning of the sentence, with all words spoken at the same pitch. Clarity and conciseness are orthogonal. Perhaps there's a slight pause between clear and concise, which could be shown with a single comma.
I think they're claiming a lot more than "here's how to write concise sentences, if that's the style you're aiming for."
Note also that this section ("Clear, Concise, Sentences" [sic]) falls under the heading "Improving Your Writing Style."
Well I don't see the problem here. It is true that many righting concise sentences can help many people improve their writing style (it's the case for foreigners like me).
I think the site targets two types of audience:
- Those with very poor style who want to improve
- People with good style who just want to learn how to write concise sentences.
I'll give an example illustrating the second point. For some of my school projects, I had to review a lot of "science project reports", and similar stuff. Well trust me, it is painful to read a report with long, convoluted sentences expressing a simple idea..
Good writing skills are so important today when you consider that much of the writing people typically do is in an email or a powerpoint, not a romantic novel.
To look at it another way, these are the rules that are made to be broken in the service of stylized writing. If you don't know the rules, you won't know when to break them.
Style: Toward Clarity and Grace
Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace
I can't speak to the first 2, but I purchased the 3rd and found it to be excellent.
There should be a startup in here. Paste bad writing in. Get good writing out. Improve income by 30%.
Post: http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi...
HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529166
All great, and I liked the book quite a lot. However, the publisher decided to max out on the book's popularity. First, there were quickly about 4-6 (slightly different) versions of it in print, all at the same time. Second, they would release a new version of the main edition (Style: Toward Clarity and Grace) every year. Once they realized it was a textbook, the price leapt up and up. I suppose it's just supply and demand, but it made it very hard to get students to buy the book (once it went from $10 or $12 to $35), if it was recommended and not required.
tl;dr Buy the 1995 edition for $8.93 on Amazon, not the 10th edition for $35. I'm reasonably confident that the essential advice and meat of the book is the same.
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never us a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
The same goes for Strunk and White, who in the very passage instructing writers to abjure the passive, say:
"Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can _be made_ lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as /there is/ or /could be heard/."
Still, at least the guide linked in the OP has picked actual examples of the passive voice as illustrations, and concedes that there are times when it can be reasonably used (sorry, "writers can reasonably use it"). This makes it something of a rarity, even if the advice is still poor.
http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/
And when you're ready, here is The Economist's style quiz: http://www.economist.com/diversions/quiz.cfm?quizname=styleq...
"Vigorous writing is concise...this requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." - Strunk and White "The Elements of Style"
There are many "manuals of style" available as well like: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html.
"There was a failure of communication."
This sentence is not in the passive voice.
They are far more thoughtful about style (what it is and how to teach it) than most writing guides. They acknowledge that there is not one best or ideal style for all occasions and that the style they describe and teach is one among many. It's an eye opening book in many ways. (Note: I see that there's a second edition just out. I haven't read that. I read the original in the late 90s. I doubt they've ruined it, but just in case.)
[1] http://classicprose.com/ with excerpts from the book here: http://classicprose.com/csx.html
Muddy writing, by contrast, is generally meant to impress and not convey information. The intended reaction is "I don't understand what you said, so you must be smart." This, unfortunately, seems to work for businesspeople and academics. But I hope that geeks can see through it.
"But if [the student] only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire."
The rest of his essay: http://silouanthompson.net/library/early-church/on-the-incar...
I don't really know who he is, but he make some very convincing arguments.
With a title like this, I won't even read the thing. So many things are wrong with this first sentence. 1. Why The Capitals For Each Word? That screws with my human word recognition algorithm. 2. The title implies three things: Writing clear, do something concise and something with sentences. That's all but clear to me. "Writing clear": you mean writing the word clear? Does not sound interesting to me. What do you want with "Sentences" and "Concise"? Not clear at all to me. 3. Probably, the author meant something like "How to write clear & concise sentences". That gives the sentence instantly another meaning.