If we were in a face-to-face class, I’d have you do a writing workshop on your coming Technology Project. Make sure you check out the updated guidelines. This will be due April 22nd!!!
Instead, I’m going to provide some information on how to improve the flow of your sentences. By the way, if you want some serious advanced lessons on prose revision and style, I’m teaching ENGL 4183 “Editing with Digital Technologies” this Fall (2020). The title is somewhat misleading (I’m working on changing it, but, imagine that, is low on the University bureaucracy list of priorities). The course should really be called “Rhetorical Grammar and Style.”
Why Prose Revision
Being able to write efficiently and effectively is one of the most important skills to have as a future professional. Managers and supervisors have been complaining for quite some time that college graduates just can’t write well. Now, it’s typical of the older generation to claim that “things were much better in the past” (and, yes, contemporary TV is better, but today’s music is atrocious), but surveys show that these future (and current) employers think more time should be spent on writing.
This lesson deals with making your prose move faster. I assume that you have a good foundation in Standard Edited American English—proper grammar and syntax. The goal here is to help you write with your audience in mind. Of course, you should always write with your audience in mind, but what I mean is write so that they don’t have to struggle to find the meaning of your communications. Remember, the best thing you can hope for when you write a bad message (aside from the audience reading your mind) is that the receiver will contact you and ask for clarification. Carrying out your assumed (but false) message may actually be worse than doing nothing at all.
Often discussions of Plain Language come around to writers claiming that their language will suffer if they can’t “say what they want the way they want to say it.” I’ll let you in on a little secret: rarely does a writer, like a novelist or poet, sit down and write without some editor coming in and pruning his or her work. (My editor actually wanted my to write more, but, no surprise there). Writers consider their words to be their children—precious little beings they can’t get rid of. Longwindedness has been the downfall of many a writer. Don’t look at the following examples as destroying your authorial voice; look at it as enhancing your prose or clarifying your communications.
- Unclear: It is of the utmost importance that you, the reader, a Mr. Johann G. Vonstrügum, take the time to inquire about your recent credit card purchases in order to determine the validity of numerous transactions that may not have been authorized.
- Clear: We suspect an unauthorized user made recent purchases with your credit card.
Normally, I give the example and go through the revision step by step before offering the revision in its entirety. However, I want to show you this lesson’s goal immediately with an actual example. The original example is an enormous 41-word sentence, and the revision is a nice, efficient 11-word statement that gets right to the point. Before we go into the revision, think about which sounds better? Some people believe the original is better because an over-affected style signals a writer’s learnedness. Also, the original seems to follow legal writing (often called legalese), which has the tendency to be long-winded prose using big, scary words.
The revision may not appeal to some because it’s, well, too efficient. After all, if you have 12 pages to get to…The above revision comes right out and quickly states its intentions—“someone has used your credit card!” Because philosophers and other long-winded writers, who are considered the greatest minds ever, use big words and complex syntax, readers often feel that good prose is difficult prose. That isn’t always true. For instance, philosophers like Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida aren’t just writing about simple ideas in complex ways; they’re writing about very complex issues (in a language other than English sometimes) that are just hard to understand. Some issues are just difficult to comprehend, so, of course, they’re difficult to describe. This difficulty shouldn’t be a part of your writing. Unless your business is an existential detective firm (like the one in I ♥ Huckabees), you shouldn’t be writing about the meaning of life or other overly complex philosophical matters.
In order to not overwhelm you, let’s focus on two major ways to revise your prose and eliminate an overly verbose style:
Changing Passive Voice to Active Voice
Sentences in passive voice aren’t as lively as active voice sentences. In a passive voice sentence, the action is killed by having the agent of a sentence eliminated or added in with a preposition to the end of the sentence. In order to understand passive voice, we need to reexamine the basic structure of a sentence. All sentences have a subject and a predicate. The predicate contains the verb and everything else in the sentence. For instance,
- Congress raised taxes.
is a complete sentence. The subject, Congress, performed an action, raised, on the direct object, taxes. Since Congress performed the action, it is considered the agent of a sentence—the thing doing the doing. Active voice sentences always have the agent in the subject position. Take a look at the alternative passive voice construction of the above sentence:
- Taxes were raised by Congress.
Notice that the subject is no longer Congress but taxes—the thing “raised.” Technically, this is a grammatically correct sentence, but passive voice constructions aren’t always the most efficient sentences. Although you should avoid these passive voice constructions, you should also know when they’re appropriate. If we remove the agent from the sentence, here’s what we have:
- Taxes were raised.
By whom? Well, that’s the benefit of passive voice—you can have agentless prose. Obviously, Congress (or anyone raising taxes) would like the passive voice because it can shield them from blame. There are times when passive voice isn’t a form of chicanery, though. What if the agent isn’t important or unknown? In that case using passive voice is your best option.
Consider a much longer passive voice sentence:
- The file was delivered to the office of Mr. Harrison by Jerome.
Hmmm…wouldn’t this be better:
- Jerome delivered the file to the office of Mr. Harrison.
It certainly is. But what if we don’t care about Jerome’s delivery, and we just want to emphasize that the file got delivered? After all, the file is the most important piece of information in the sentence, so
- The file was delivered to the office of Mr. Harrison.
is perfectly fine. The passive voice also comes in handy if you’re trying to communicate that something should be done, but you don’t know or don’t want to say who should do it. For instance,
- The database should be updated weekly.
By whom? Well, if you don’t know, you very well can’t include that bit of information. However, more likely than not, your goal should just be to eliminate all unnecessary passive voice constructions.
Limiting Prepositional Phrases
In an effort to have more efficient prose, we’ll want to limit the number of prepositional phrases tacked onto our sentences. Let’s return to a sentence from earlier:
- The file was delivered to the office of Mr. Harrison by Jerome.
Let’s care about Jerome in this example; he’ll be accountable for the delivery. First of all, we need to get Jerome into the natural agent position as the sentence’s subject. It’s an easy move and makes the sentence active:
- Jerome delivered the file to the office of Mr. Harrison.
The by Jerome in the previous example was just added to the sentence as opposed to having Jerome the main player. The best sentences (excluding artistic, poetic styles, which can’t be taught and aren’t exactly necessary for professional writing) have the subject and verb as close together as possible; we can’t get closer than Jerome delivered. However, we still have a lengthy phrase—the office of Mr. Harrison. Can’t we just say,
- Jerome delivered the file to Mr. Harrison’s office.
If we weren’t meant to use possessives in English, they wouldn’t have given us ‘ses. Sometimes readers think that lengthening prose with prepositional phrases sounds better. I’m not exactly sure why, but it may have something to do with ornate, ceremonial prose we hear at special occasions. For instance, the following is a graduation style:
- I hereby declare at this Noon hour on the eighth day of the fifth month in the year of nineteen hundred ninety-eight that the students before us by the recommendation of the faculty and by the power of the Board of Regents are to have the degree of Bachelor from our school.
Yikes! Remember, graduations (and Presidential Inaugurations) are where we hear long-winded prose. There is no reason May 8th, 1998 should take 15 words to say.
Next Class
I adjusted the readings for this week and next before Spring Break. For Monday, you’ll be reading Hunter Havelin Adams, III. “African Observers of the Universe.” It’s on Canvas, so go check it out. I’ll have video game article up on Canvas for Wednesday, 4/15…I’m just not sure how many yet. They will also be on Canvas.