Week #3 Blog, Jake Halter
My 11th secret to writing well involves cutting out extra fluff. Honestly, I think we are all guilty of adding extra fluff into our writing. This is especially the case when we need to reach a certain page number or word amount for school and work assignments. I believe the trick is to reread what you have written and ask yourself if some of the words are necessary to convey your message. Concise writing is pleasing to the reader as well as to the eye. It is a big area on which I could definitely improve, as well as most students.
As I have mentioned before, I am a huge reader of the news. I particularly love reading from Associated Press and read their articles on a daily basis. Funny enough, I actually found three grammatical errors this week in their articles. They are small, but I found them and recognized them.
One article that reported on the deaths of the elderly during hurricane Irma stated, "...investigators believe the deaths at the Rehabilitation Center were heat-related and said the a criminal investigation is underway." The underlined word "a" needs to be omitted for the sentence to read correctly.
One article, talking about a spy museum, wrote about all of the devices the museum had. It read, "...listening devices, clandestine radios, spy cameras and uniforms and clothes of the most famous spooks every employed by CIA, KGB, FBI, and Britain's MI6." I underlined the word "every" as it should read "ever" and not include the extra letter.
The final article which I read had a similar mistake as the first two. In fact, maybe the class can help me in the comments because I believe the sentence used the wrong word, but I could be wrong. The sentence reads, "...13 arrests had been made and four officers hurt, none was hospitalized." I am 99.9% sure the word "was" is supposed to be "were" but for some reason I am a tad bit confused to be certain. What do you think class?
Cutting out extra fluff is a good tip. I know I get carried away all the time.
ReplyDeleteI cannot believe that sentence in your final example is so poorly written. I ran into the same problem with the word "none." The verb can be singular or plural, depending on the subject. In this case, I would say "was" should have been "were." I would even change "13 arrests had been made" to "13 arrests have been made" since have is plural and sounds better.
Nice job on your 11th writing tip. We like to ramble on and on instead of getting right to the point. Several years ago I took a Magazine Writing class. The Professor stressed the important of avoiding wordiness and often asked us to reduce our articles by 40%. This meant a lot of drafts and revisions, producing a much better article.
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