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Clear and Concise Sentences Get to the Point!

Clear and Concise Sentences Get to the Point!. Standard 8.4.7. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” --William Strunk. What root word do you see ?. Concise.

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Clear and Concise Sentences Get to the Point!

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  1. Clear and Concise SentencesGet to the Point! Standard 8.4.7

  2. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” --William Strunk

  3. What root word do you see? Concise

  4. Clear and Concise Sentences A sentence is not concise simply because it is short; a concise sentence contains only the number of words necessary to achieve its effect or to make its point.

  5. Whenwouldyouwant to use this type of sentence in yourwriting?Whenwouldyou NOT want to use this type of sentence in yourwriting?

  6. How to Make Sentences Clear and Concise • Cut down on extra, repetitive, and unnecessarywords • One way to find out which words are essential to the meaning of a sentence is to underline the key words (the words that give the sentence meaning. Who, what when, where, why, how, etc.) • Then, look carefully at the remaining words so that you can see which are unnecessary and delete them.

  7. Tryit!Underline the necessarywords. There were many factors that influenced his decision to become a teacher. They played a softball game that was exhausting.

  8. GetRid of Deadwood! •Deadwood- Unnecessary phrases and words that take up space and add nothing to meaning The problem with deadwood: Deadwood distracts and annoys the reader and weakens your writing style.

  9. Deadwood: “Meaningless” words Eliminate common words that add little meaning or relevance to sentences. Examples include kind of, sort of, type of, actually, really, various, virtually, basically, generally, practically, specific, particular, truly, clearly, obviously, and undoubtedly. Actually, Mary kind of glanced at Bob when she realized they had basically lost the battle.

  10. Deadwood: Repetitive Words Do not combine pairs of words when the meaning of one implies the other. Examples: final outcome, past history, free gift, sudden crisis, each individual, future plans, end result, true facts, actual truth, first and foremost. The future plan Congress will propose to completely overhaul the healthcare system could negatively frustrate constituents.

  11. Deadwood: using “is” as a crutch Using "is" in a sentence gets it off to a slow start, and makes the sentence weak. Replace as many "to be" verbs with action verbs as you can, and change all passive voice ("is defended by") to an active voice ("defends"). Circle the “is” form The point I wish to make is that fish sleep with their eyes open.

  12. Practice Underline key words and cross out dead wood to get you started. Then, rewrite the following sentences eliminating meaningless or redundant words. You may have to modify the sentence structure. 1. When I asked her about the new job, she sort of looked at me with anger and basically did not reply. 2. Now that Bob has truly been fired, appealing to the CEO is kind of useless.

  13. Practice First, copy the sentence. Underline key words and cross out unnecessary ones to get you started. Rewrite the following sentences eliminating meaningless or redundant words. You may have to modify the sentence structure. 3. Each individual will receive a free gift during the upcoming ceremony tomorrow. 4. Committee members first began by discussing the new marketing plan; then they presented the true facts about foreign imports from Belgium. 5. Anthropologists really believe these old fossils are absolutely crucial to uncovering our past history.

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