Writing with Clarity

This was a greatly needed chapter for me. Being an English major, I frequently have to write papers, and I've become very good at filling them with useless fluff-words, otherwise known as BSing! The interesting thing is, there are many English teachers that seem to like that type of writing. Their reasoning is, the more you go on about a topic, the more clarity your subject will ultimately have. If you say what you mean in several different ways, at least one of those ways will penetrate to the reader. (I can already tell that I'm doing this in my blog post!)So my dilemma was learning how to balance subject clarity and sentence clarity. It's important for your sentences not to be convoluted, even if your paper is. This chapter really gave some good advice on how to accomplish this. There are so many useless phrases that I use to make me look smarter, such as ‘due to the fact that’ or ‘at this point in time’ when really it would be better and smarten up my writing to be more concise. I also have a fondness for “verbizing” words! I think you can get away with this more in creative writing, but in professional writing it should be avoided like the plague!
The editing mistake I found was in another blog that I read. It was made by one of my friends who, unfortunately, doesn’t have the best grammar. A mistake that she frequently makes is mixing up ‘where’ and ‘were.’ It really bothers me because I don’t think it’s that hard to keep them straight! In the same blog post she had these two sentences: “Really, they where rather easy to make.” And, “I’m not sure were the pictures went.” Some people make some interesting mistakes!