Clarity, Part 1

Clarity, Part 1

In this blog post, I will be writing about four different items that relate to clarity in writing. Clarity is very important to a writer as it makes it easy for their readers to understand what is going on. I learned abut all of these items from Rules for Writers.

Untangle Mixed Construction

This section is all abut making your sentences clear grammically and logically. This can be done be changing grammatical structure, straightening out logical connections, and avoiding certain constructions. Doing this allows for ideas to come across clearly and it makes it easier for the reader to understand. I don't usually struggle in this category but every once in a while my logic will not make sense. That can easily be fixed by taking my time to read everything over.

Eliminate distracting shifts

Distracting shifts can easily throw a reader off. Distracting shifts can happen by point of view shifts, change in verb tense, change in mood and voice, and avoid sudden shifts from indirect to direct questions or quotations. These changes make a situation very unclear to the reader. They will no longer know the tense or who is speaking. I have struggled with verb tense in the past but I fixed that through slowing down while I write and keeping sentence tense in mind.

Tighten wordy sentences

This is one that I often struggle with. I feel the need to get down as much as I can and this leads to sentences that are too long. I often repeat unnecessary words or ideas and that can make the reader get lost before reaching the end of the sentence. A writer can also cut out phrases that add nothing to a sentence to make it shorter. This is very important especially for a genre where it is important to be brief.

Choose appropriate language

While I normally keep my language formal and appropriate, I think this is a very interesting category because our genre is pretty informal. Due do that, formalities may split and they piece could quickly be filled with slang and words that would never be seen in a formal paper. While a QRG is less formal than an essay for example, it is still important to remain professional.

Jenny Downing."Clarity and brightness of chablis wine". https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clarity_and_brightness_of_chablis_wine.jpg. 3/24/2009 via Wikimedia. Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Reflection
I peer edited Addie's QRG and Rosa's QRG, I discovered that both of them did very well in the categories of clarity that I chose. Both of them used appropriate language, didn't have any distracting shifts, or any mixed constructions. If they could improve in one categories it would be to get rid of wordy sentences. In Rosa's QRG, she used the sentence "Newman sees the connection social media creates between people as real and beneficial to users; they become more aware of issues affecting people they care about over social media than they would if they were connecting less efficiently and less often in the real world" which could be cut up because it is a little wordy. In Addie's QRG she says "According to these activists, although nobody can determine whether or not Jackie was telling the truth due to the lack of evidence, that does not mean it didn't happen, and it does not mean that the issue is not prevalent in our country, particularly on college campuses" is very and either needs to be split up or cut down.