Clarity, Part 2

Kirk Teetzel "mirror" April 12, 2006 via Flickr
non-commercial reuse with attribution

In this blog post I will look at four more concepts from the clarity readings and reflect on them based on my QRG and the revisions I made to better reflect those topics.

Active Verbs

This is about seeking the proper verb voice. Active verbs (voice) is a much more engaging thing as it is a direct action, an action where something actively occurs. This is much more interesting and engaging for readers so it is recommended wherever possible. I revised the following sentence to include a better use of active verbs:

During 2014, General Motors blew through the single-year records for automotive recalls by
wide margins.

In the sentence above, the verb blew was initially the passive verb phrase has blown.

Variety

It is important to include various different sentence structures and constructions in your writing as to avoid repetitive and boring simple sentences. By varying the ingredients such as the subject, verb, direct object, indirect object, object complement, verb complement, etc. you can write something that is a much better read. I revised the sentience below from being a complex sentence first to a compound sentence and then a compound-complex sentence:

Furthermore, there is evidence that engineers made changes to the ignition switch parts in 2005;
evidence that they knew about the problems even then and did not issue a recall.

Emphasis

It is very important for clear writing that your emphasis is in the right places. If your emphasis is not in the right places, readers will probably still understand the writing however it can be much harder to read a piece. In writing, a virtue is to be able to write exactly as much as necessary to get your point across: no more and no less.

Wordy Sentences

As I mentioned in the reflection on Emphasis, a virtue of writing is to write exactly as much as necessary and no more and no less. Therefore, I tried construct all of my sentences as parsimoniously as possible in order to make the reader's job as easy as possible.