Do I Make Myself Clear? summary

There’s nothing wrong with the proper sentence structures you were taught in grade school, but keep in mind: If each sentence is structured the same way, the writing will be pretty dull.

It’s wise to remember that, first and foremost, the job of a sentence is to express a complete thought, and there’s more than one way to do this. Classic sentence structures are guidelines. They’re there to ensure your subject, verb and predicate are in the right place, and thus to make your complete thought easily understandable.

Harold Evans has edited some major authors, among them Norman Mailer, E.L. Doctorow and Gore Vidal. And though each has his own unique style, they all follow the same principles of clear and effective writing.

Most writers agree that the passive voice should be avoided.

If you’ve worked in an academic, bureaucratic, political or technological setting, then there’s a good chance you’re familiar with writing that’s been puffed up with unnecessary words. Sometimes these superfluous words are used in an effort to sound intellectual or cutting edge; in other cases, they’ve been deliberately employed to confuse the reader.

Believe it or not, it’s common for voting proposals to be written in a deliberately confusing manner so that bewildered citizens will vote for a law that they would otherwise never vote for.

Every writer knows that a double negative is a big no-no. You don’t want to not keep that in mind when trying to be clear. Get the picture?

When appropriate, you can even go one step further in your avoidance of nots by looking for chances to turn your negative sentences into positive ones. After all, a writer should tell the reader what is happening rather than what isn’t.

We’ve looked at parasitical prepositions, but the damage done by those pesky little words is nothing compared to the havoc wreaked by zombie nouns and flesh-eaters.

Zombie noun is a term coined by Professor Helen Sword, of the University of Auckland, and it refers to words that began life as a verb but have since been devoured and turned into deadly, sentence-ruining nouns.

In his classic book 1984, George Orwell invented “Newspeak,” a form of language that both diminishes the meaning of certain words and eliminates free thought.

In Orwell’s book, a totalitarian government has implemented a plan to have every citizen communicate solely in Newspeak by the year 2050. Well, recent events have shown that we might be running ahead of schedule since the true meaning of words are already being dangerously manipulated by politicians.

You might be thinking that correct usage of a few words can’t make much difference in the grand scheme of things, but as recent events show, bad writing can cost billions.

The recent recession that began in 2007 is a perfect example of how much damage bad writing can cause.