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Concise Writing_Reducing Redundancy and Making Words Matter

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Composición en Inglés I

Universidad Duke

4.6 (368 calificaciones) | 150K estudiantes inscritos

You will gain a foundation for college-level writing valuable for nearly any field. Students will learn how to read carefully, write effective arguments, understand the writing process, engage with others' ideas, cite accurately, and craft powerful prose. Course Learning Objectives • Summarize, analyze, question, and evaluate written and visual texts • Argue and support a position • Recognize audience and disciplinary expectations • Identify and use the stages of the writing process • Identify characteristics of effective prose • Apply proper citation practices • Discuss applying your writing knowledge to other writing occasions

Destrezas que aprenderás

Essay Writing, English Language, Academic Writing, Editing

Revisiones

4.6 (368 calificaciones)

5 stars
270 ratings
4 stars
67 ratings
3 stars
14 ratings
2 stars
4 ratings
1 star
13 ratings

LB

Jun 21, 2018

Helpful, informative, and engaging! I've always been at the top of my classes in English, but this is helping me sharpen my skills even more and apply them to my life.

PB

Apr 01, 2018

Hard work and worth it! Grateful for the opportunity. Fully recommend it for anyone who is serious about learning to write clearly and improve their prose.

De la lección

Crafting Powerful Prose and Op-Ed Revision

This week Professor Comer will address the topic of concise writing; how to convey meaning with fewer words. Your task is to rewrite your op-ed.

Concise Writing_Reducing Redundancy and Making Words Matter7:41

Concise Writing Part 2_Noticing Prepositional Phrases10:24

Impartido por:

Dr. Denise Comer
Assistant Professor of the Practice; Director of First-Year Writing

Transcripción

Hi.

We're talking today about concise writing, and I'm a little nervous to talk about

concise writing because it's often thrown around as the most

important aspect of effective writing and concise writing, that people place so

much value on it that I want to push back against that a little bit.

Not only because I tend to be a little wordy, and so

obviously I would feel a little push back against concise writing.

But I also think, I mean it's important to make a choice,

make a writerly choice about how concise you want to be.

And it's okay if sometimes you don't want to be concise.

So throughout this whole video I'm going to be emphasizing moderation. You

don't have to aim more for the most concise version of everything you want to

say. That said concise

writing is important. It

does add efficacy to your writing in many different contexts and

in many different times. So I'll show you some strategies

that you can use to help with that. First of all, I want to think about

context with, if you have a word limit then it's much more important to be

concise because you want to make sure that your ideas are communicated and that

you're not kind of wasting precious space with words that don't need to to be there.

With disciplinarity it is also

more important in some disciplines than in others to have concise writing.

So you might want to read what others have others have written

in a particular discipline to see if they are either more or less concise.

And then again moderation,

so don't go wild making everything as concise as possible.

Just make choices, make informed choices.

One of the most common causes of the lack of concise writing is redundancy.

And this involves redundancy of words as well as redundancy of ideas.

In this first example we'll talk about words.

Here are a few sentences that offer redundant words.

The final outcome of this course will be writing expertise.

Your writing is strong, tough, and robust.

Sometimes I feel anxious and uneasy about my writing.

And as you can see the redundant words over here final

outcome really an outcome is the final outcome so

you could take out final.

Your writing is strong, tough and robust.

This is something I'm terrible at.

I always have ands in many of my sentences.

And I often don't need them, right?

One word would probably be good enough.

In this case maybe robust has a slightly different flavor than strong and tough.

But strong and tough are the same so, I think maybe I would go with strong.

Sometimes I feel anxious and uneasy about my writing.

In a way this is emphasizing just how anxious and uneasy someone might feel.

So maybe this writer really does want to

convey the double nature of that anxiety, or maybe not.

So if the writer wants to eliminate something, again maybe he or she doesn't,

but if the writer does I think I would put

anxious since it's the more honest version.

Uneasy can maybe seem a lesser version of anxiety.

Redundancy also happens though across a writing project based on ideas.

Here's an example.

Talent is not something people are born with, or without.

Talent is not an innate gift.

Expertise does not come naturally.

And this writer was really trying to emphasize his or her point, and

felt like saying it three times would be more effective than just saying it once.

And perhaps that's true, that's why I said in moderation.

So maybe this writer really does need to say it three times.

I'm not sure.

I probably think that actually saying it once would be enough so

I would probably take out those sentences.

Now, if a writer really was attached to perhaps this final sentence instead then

you could make a different choice.

Sometimes we make the fault flaw of becoming too attached to certain

ways that we've said it.

Maybe this writer really loves the way here she wrote it the first time.

Also really loves it the second time, also loves the third time and

can't make a choice.

When that happens what I suggest is that you just take those sentences, and

don't delete them.

But just move them to another document for another time for

another writing project so you can have the beautiful sentence that you had

written but you don't have to have redundancy of ideas.

Another aspect of concise writing that you'll want

to be making choices about is elevated phrases and language.

And this is particularly something to be thinking about in

the context of academic writing where students maybe

are hoping to write to sound smart or to impress somebody and so

they'll use what they think of as academic sounding language or

If you have, if you're trying to reach two pages,

you kind of spread out your ideas, using words as filler words.

It's not the best idea, because as readers you kind of know,

when you see a filler word or an elevated language, so

here are three of the common ones that you might notice.

At the present time.

You could just write now.

[LAUGH] Due to the fact that, you could just right because.

The reason for is another because, or perhaps, why.

You don't have to sound smart, you should just trust that you are smart and

that your ideas are important enough that they are going to make a difference.

Not in that necessarily the smart sounding phrases that you use.

One another aspect of concise writing that you might want to be

thinking about is unneeded qualifiers.

Such as I am really excited to read your writing.

Your feedback is absolutely essential or

learning how to write more concisely can be somewhat helpful.

Here the really excited I would suggest that excited is excited.

Like, I don't know if you can be really excited, it's already like a little more,

it's a higher degree of enthusiasm than just enthusiastic or happy, or

looking forward to, right.

I suppose you could argue that maybe this writer could take that out and

use thrilled as maybe a more

extreme version of really excited but in general probably excited is good right.

I am excited to read your writing.

I don't need to say really.

Your feedback is absolutely essential, essential means you can't live without it

you can't do without it so you really don't need absolutely.

And here, learning how to write more concisely can be somewhat helpful.

I understand that this person is hedging on the somewhat and

since my emphasis here is on moderation with concise writing,

you're aiming to be concise, I think I'm going to leave this.

I'm going to write stet, which means leave it alone.

So, sometimes it's okay to have a qualifier

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