{"id":9585,"date":"2023-01-29T15:02:36","date_gmt":"2023-01-29T20:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/?page_id=9585"},"modified":"2025-09-12T15:27:27","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T19:27:27","slug":"sentenceclarity","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/engl2116-014spring2023\/engl2116january30\/sentenceclarity\/","title":{"rendered":"Sentence Clarity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Lesson for Sentence Clarity<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Three very important ways to refine your prose:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Active Voice<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Parallelism<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Redundancy<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Create parallel constructions for the following sentences (parallel means that each item or phrase is in a similar grammatical structure):<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The new employee is enthusiastic, skilled, and you can depend on her.\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Revision:<\/strong> The new employee is enthusiastic, skilled, and dependable.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Each item in the series&#8211;enthusiastic, skilled, and dependable&#8211;is an adjective.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The original &#8220;you can depend on her&#8221; is a clause and doesn&#8217;t fit the other two items in the series.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Our trip was boring, expensive, and one I\u2019ll never repeat.\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Revision:<\/strong> Our trip was boring, expensive, and unrepeatable.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Better Revision:<\/strong> I&#8217;ll never repeat our boring, expensive trip.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Forcing an item to conform to a series isn&#8217;t a good idea. Consider all strategies for revision.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>She plans to study all this month and on scoring well in her licensing examination.\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Revision:<\/strong> She plans to <strong><em>study<\/em><\/strong> all this month and <em><strong>score<\/strong><\/em> well in her licensing examination.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Keep verbs in the same tense and form for parallelism.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Create non-redundant constructions for the following sentences:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>I think I should forewarn you ahead of time before you visit my parents.\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>There are many revisions here, but you must get rid of the redundant <em>forewarn you ahead of time<\/em> because you forewarn before something and not during or after.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Asking what your country can do for you isn\u2019t appropriate. Asking what you can do for your country is, however, appropriate.\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The above butchers John F. Kennedy&#8217;s famous line and demonstrates redundancy as opposed to effective repetition from <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ushistory.org\/documents\/ask-not.htm\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Kennedy&#8217;s original phrasing<\/strong><\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Rhetorically, his original has quite an impact, but it&#8217;s probably not going to be professional prose.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Also, the next line furthers the style of effective repetition but is sexist, which we&#8217;ll discuss next:<br>&#8220;Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of <strong>man<\/strong>.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Using &#8220;man&#8221; to refer to all humans in 1961 was sexist, but 2nd wave feminism had yet to reach the mainstream, so people (the men in charge) wouldn&#8217;t have thought its use was wrong.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Sexist Language<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Revising sexist language. As a general rule, don\u2019t refer to a person, job, or activity as gendered. In other words, don\u2019t forget that men and women may occupy the same jobs. What to do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Make things plural.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Use <em>person<\/em> instead of <em>man<\/em> or <em>woman<\/em>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Use <em>they<\/em> as the singular pronoun.*<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Switch between <em>he<\/em> and <em>she<\/em>. (This is a bit outdated, and <em>s\/he<\/em> is even worse.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p>*In my recent book <em>Video Game and American Culture: How Ideology Influences Virtual Worlds<\/em>, I use <em>they<\/em> as a singular pronoun. Because I thought there might be someone out there who thought I was making a mistake, I used the following footnote to put the issue to rest: &#8220;It is past time for English to have non-gendered singular pronouns. I use <em>they<\/em>, <em>their<\/em>, <em>them<\/em>, and <em>themselves<\/em> for both plural and singular pronouns instead of maintaining the <em>he\/she<\/em> binary.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Unless you\u2019re addressing high school children or younger people, use <em>man\/men<\/em> or <em>woman\/women.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, take a look at the age range for pediatric medicine at the American Academy of Pediatrics (<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.aap.org\/sections\/med-peds\/default.cfm\">AAP<\/a><\/strong>) under &#8220;General Pediatrics.&#8221; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/www.aap.org\/sections\/med-peds\/med-peds101.cfm\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Age range is birth to 21 years<\/strong>.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lesson for Sentence Clarity Three very important ways to refine your prose: Create parallel constructions for the following sentences (parallel means that each item or phrase is in a similar grammatical structure): Create non-redundant constructions for the following sentences: Sexist Language Revising sexist language. As a general rule, don\u2019t refer to a person, job, or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":598,"featured_media":0,"parent":9554,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-9585","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P2HAOx-2uB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/598"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9585"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11985,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9585\/revisions\/11985"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/aaron-toscano\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}