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
Concise Writing_Reducing Redundancy and Making Words Matter
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Del curso dictado por Duke University
English Composition I
297 calificaciones
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.
Conoce a los instructores
Dr. Denise ComerAssistant Professor of the Practice; Director of First-Year Writing
Thompson Writing Program
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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