Clarity, Part 1

In this post I will be talking about 4 different way to improve the clarity of my writing. These tips are from the Rules for Writers and I will be discussing how these tips can help improve my writing.

Kim, Johnathan, "Writing" uploaded 26 March 2007 via flicker.com, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic 

Active Verbs:

I often fall victim to using passive verbs and it makes my writing sound like it has holes in it or is unsure.  In this section I learned that while a majority of the time the active voice is the best voice to use because it conveys a stronger meaning the passive voice does have some use if I was to emphasize the receiver of the action. I also learned that I should use the name of the thing that is doing the action instead of beating around the bush. The most important thing I learned is to be direct.

Misplaced and dangling modifiers:

I have fallen victim to dangling modifiers countless times and it has made my writing sound confused. In this section I read the key thing that helps me was the modifiers should always come directly before the word they are modifying. It also touches on ideas from the Active Verbs sections and again is about directness not beating around the bush.

Emphasis:

When I typically try to emphasize ideas I often do not do very well due to the fact that I forget about the colons and semicolons.  In this section I learned that there are two main ways to emphasizes thing: equally and unequally. If I was to emphasize both points equally I would use a correlative conjunction or a colon. This is helpful when both ideas are important and are based around the same main point. when I want to stress the importance of one over the other I should use make one an independent clause and the other dependent resulting in the dependent clause being less important that the independent clause.

Wordy Sentences:

I typically like to ramble in my sentences because I do not necessarily know if I am able to get my point across to the reader the same way I was thinking about the idea.  In this section I have learned to cut down the amount of words I am using by not over inflating phrases. The main takeaway from this material is that certain words have the same power as phrases do. This makes the writing sound smooth and not so clunky.

Reflection

I was glad to see that I was not the only one to make the mistakes with dangling modifiers and emphasis. After reading Hallye's QRG I noticed that she had several instances of dangling modifiers. For example, one of the sentences I found read, "Attempting to handle large influxes of tourists, especially at  such a popular site, can be a struggle for a place as understaffed and underfunded as one Pompeii." To me at first this read fine then when I went over it again I noticed that there was some misplacement with Pompeii. Dangling modifiers tended to be the biggest problem for people.

I also noticed in Chelsea's QRG that the problem with emphasis showed up. In her sentence, "There has been a large debate between scientists over whether or not these methods would actually be beneficial to put to use. This has left the two different groups at odds over how to effectively and safely combat climate change." If this was me I would have combined these two sentences to make the both of these sentences carry equal amounts of weight instead of having them be separate.

I did not notice as many active voice problems or wordy sentences but there were a few. I think all of us suffer from these problems to one degree or another and it is really hard to get everything down in the first go.