Clarity, Part 2

Understanding & Revising

Hampel, Matt "EDIT>" (10/4/2008) via Flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License

After reading four new sections of the Rules for Writers Handbook, I have encountered new aspects of my writing which I can improve upon. Once I revised my QRG using these as a guideline, I learned and understood more about these Clarity topics. I will outline each section, and explain what I learned about each.

Find the Exact Words

• Select words with appropriate connotations
• I tend to insert words when I am not entirely sure of their definitions. I didn't see this too much in my draft, but I fixed the two words that were off-base.
• Use standard idioms
• I had no clue there was such a thing. The list of approved and unapproved idioms in the book made it very easy to go back and check my draft. Luckily, I hadn't used them incorrectly.

Replace Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers

• Repair dangling modifiers
• I rarely led any of my sentences with modifiers, but when I did, it was correctly formatted. 
• Move awkwardly placed modifiers
• I found a good example of this in my draft: "A variety of groups have increasingly been using social media to influence users." Increasingly is strangely placed, and makes the sentence awkward. I fixed this sentence to make more sense.

Untangle Mixed Constructions

• Untangle the grammatical structure
• In my QRG, I have very tangled and complex sentences that sometimes lose their meaning. 
• Straighten out the logical connections
• My sentences are a little round-about on occasion. For example, I wrote "The fact that they are sharing this information over social media means that concerned citizens and individuals can immediately respond to actions the government takes, or to to political ideologies the government adopts." Near the end, this sentence begins to lose logical meaning due to its length and strange wording.

Add needed words

• Add the word that if there is any danger of misreading without it
• Looking back at my draft, I only found a few sentences that might need to have that inserted. Overall, I insert that effectively.
• Add the articles a, an, and the where necessary for grammatical completeness
• I noticed a couple sentences where I lost track halfway through revising the first time around, and I fixed them to make them grammatically correct.

Overall, I am still having issues with simplifying and clarifying my sentences. I need to invest more  time in my writing, and look closely at each sentence I produce.