Download conciseness

CONCISENESS
What is conciseness?

We obscure the real potential in our
sentences by being wordy. Writing becomes
too abstract, uninteresting and difficult to
understand.
The goal of concise writing is to use the most
effective words. Concise writing does not
always have the fewest words, but it always
uses the strongest ones. Writers often fill
sentences with weak or unnecessary words
that can be deleted or replaced. Words and
phrases should be deliberately chosen for the
work they are doing. Like bad employees,
words that don't accomplish enough should
be fired. When only the most effective words
remain, writing will be far more concise and
readable.
But… how do we achieve
Conciseness?
When you finish writing try
revising your paper bearing
in mind these pieces of
advice:
 Eliminate wordy sentence
structure
 Drop unneeded words
 Omit redundancies
Eliminating wordy sentence
structures
Revise unnecessary expletive
constructions
An expletive construction consists of it and there
along with a form of the verb be placed before
the subject in a sentence.
E.g. It was Facebook that kept me from doing
my homework
There is a new song I want to download
Revise unnecessary passive constructions
Active voice adds liveliness as well as conciseness, so it’s
usually preferable. The simplest way to revise from the
passive voice is to make the doer of the action the subject
of the sentence.
E.g. Business English class was taught by an Irish teacher.
The Irish teacher taught the Business English class.
Sometimes you can revise a sentence from passive voice
to active voice by using a new verb. This is especially useful
when you want to keep the same subject. Keep this in
mind when revising for you do not want to mislead
readers about the focus of your writing.
E.g. Britain was defeated by the United States in the War
of 1812
Britain lost the War of 1812 to the United States
Combining sentences and reducing
clauses and phrases
 Combining sentences: look carefully at
sets of sentences in your writing. You
may be able to fit the information in one
sentence into another sentence.
E.g. The Titanic was discovered seventythree years after being sunk by an
iceberg. The wreck was located in the
Atlantic by a team of French and
American scientists. (?)
 Reducing
clauses: you can sometimes
reduce an adjective clause simply by
dropping the opening relative pronoun
and verb.
E.g. The scientists held a memorial service
for the passengers and crew members
who had died. (?)
Sometimes you can reduce a clause to a
single word.
E.g. When they were confronted with
disaster, some passengers behaved
heroically, while others behaved selfishly.
(?)
 Reducing
phrases: sometimes you can reduce
phrases to shorter.
E.g. More than two billion searches are done in
Google each month. (?)
Using strong verbs and avoiding nouns formed from verbs
Your writing will have more impact when you choose verbs that are
strong because they directly convey an action. Be and Have are not
strong verbs and they tend to create wordy structures.
E.g. The board members were of the opinion that the revisions in the
code were not changes they could accept. (?)
Look also for nominals (nouns derived from verbs, usually by added
suffixes such as –ance, -ment, or –tion). Turning them back into verbs
reduces words and increases impact.
E.g. The woman had the appearance of having had an accident. (?)
Using pronouns for conciseness
 E.g. Queen Elizabeth II served as a driver and
mechanic in World War II.
Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in
1944, while the
future queen was still a princess. Although
Princess Elizabeth did not
know how to drive, she quickly learned how to
strip and repair many
kinds of engines. (?)
Let’s work on these
sentences:
o
o
o
o
o
It is stressed by the psychologist Robert Epstein that there are many
existing advances in everything. The advances are in the field from
astrophysics to car design to dance. The advances creatively combine ideas
that were from widely different sources.
Epstein gave his students the assignment of a problem. The problem called
for the retrieval of a ping pong ball. It was located at the bottom of a
vertical drainpipe that was sealed at the bottom.
Some of the tools that the students had been given by Epstein were too
short to reach the ball. Other tools hat the students had been given were
too wide to fit into the pipe.
The students were stumped at first. The students tried unsuccessfully to
capture the ball with the tools. Then the students stepped back from the
immediate situation. The students saw the big picture and began thinking
creatively.
Water was poured down the drainpipe by the students. The ball achieved
flotation and rose to the top. The ball was retrieved by the students there.
Dropping unneeded words
To achieve conciseness,
eliminate unneeded
words that clutter
sentences. Revise
imprecise language so
that many inexact
words do not take the
place on one exact.
Let’s try these
exercises:

As a matter of fact, statistics show that many marriages end in divorce.

Mary Stuart did not say the monarch’s oath when she became queen of Scotland due to
the fact that she was just six years old.

The project's final cost was an essential factor to consider.

The child touched the snake in a reluctant manner.

His comment was of an offensive nature.

Gordon took a relaxing type of vacation.

It seems that the union called a strike over health benefits.

The team had the tendency to lose home games.

The crime rate that exists is unacceptable.

Work crews were dispatched for the purpose of fixing the potholes.

In the case of the proposed water tax, residents were very angry.

In the event that you are late, I will leave.

The point I am trying to make is that news reporters should not invade people’s privacy.
Omitting
redundancies
Planned repetition can create a powerful rhythmic effect. The dull drone of unplanned
repetition, however, can bore a reader and prevent the delivery of your message.
Unplanned repetition, called redundancy, says the same thing more than once.
Certain redundant word pairs are very common. Avoid expressions like each and every,
forever and ever, final and conclusive. Other common redundancies are perfectly clear,
consensus of opinion.
Redundancies deaden sentence’s impact.
E.g. The consensus of opinion among those of us who saw it is that the carton was huge in
size. (?)
Now let’s try this:
1.
Replace several vague words with more
powerful and specific words.
Wordy: The politician talked about several of the merits of
after-school programs in his speech (14 words)
Concise:The politician touted after-school programs in his
speech. (8 words)
Wordy: Suzie believed but could not confirm that Billy had
feelings of affection for her. (14 words)
Concise: Suzie assumed that Billy adored her. (6 words)
Wordy: Our website has made available many of the things
you can use for making a decision on the best dentist.
(20 words)
Concise: Our website presents criteria for determining the
best dentist. (9 words)
Wordy: Working as a pupil under a someone who develops
photos was an experience that really helped me learn a
lot. (20 words)
Concise:Working as a photo technician's apprentice was an
educational experience. (10 words)
2. Interrogate every word in a sentence
Check every word to make sure that it is providing something important and unique to a sentence. If words are dead
weight, they can be deleted or replaced.
Wordy: The teacher demonstrated some of the various ways and methods for cutting words from my essay that I
had written for class. (22 words)
Concise:The teacher demonstrated methods for cutting words from my essay. (10 words)
Wordy: Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood formed a new band of musicians together in 1969, giving it the ironic name
of Blind Faith because early speculation that was spreading everywhere about the band suggested that the new
musical group would be good enough to rival the earlier bands that both men had been in, Cream and Traffic, which
people had really liked and had been very popular. (66 words)
Concise: Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood formed a new band in 1969, ironically naming it Blind Faith because
speculation suggested that the group would rival the musicians’ previous popular bands, Cream and Traffic. (32
words)
Wordy: Many have made the wise observation that when a stone is in motion rolling down a hill or incline that that
moving stone is not as likely to be covered all over with the kind of thick green moss that grows on stationary
unmoving things and becomes a nuisance and suggests that those things haven’t moved in a long time and probably
won’t move any time soon. (67 words)
Concise: A rolling stone gathers no moss. (6 words)
3. Combine Sentences.
Some information does not require a full sentence, and can easily be inserted into another sentence without losing
any of its value.
Wordy: Ludwig's castles are an astounding marriage of beauty and madness. By his death, he had commissioned three
castles. (18 words)
Concise: Ludwig's three castles are an astounding marriage of beauty and madness. (11 words)
Wordy: The supposed crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico aroused interest in extraterrestrial life. This crash is
rumored to have occurred in 1947. (24 words)
Concise:The supposed 1947 crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico aroused interest in extraterrestrial life. (16
words)
References
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/572/01/