THE SENTENCE
To unlearn the habits of ineffective writing and develop the techniques of clear, concise and coherent writing, we must begin with the basic grammatical unit - the sentence. Only after you have learned how to write a good sentence can you consider writing a paragraph and then building the paragraphs into a larger structure.
Warning and Comfort
If you try to write something at the end of this section you may feel that you have been left with a few disconnected fragments, that your ideas are worthless and that there is no point in writing anything at all. Many students have been reduced to tears by this process. It is however necessary, and in my experience the students who cry and despair most are those that emerge from the process to write the best. The reconstruction begins with the next section but it is an absolute waste of time to jump there now. The pain is unfortunately necessary.
Writing is often ineffective because it is in an inappropriate style. When I outlined the differences between the pedagogic and the academic, I suggested that they are similar syntactically to the spoken and the written respectively.
Consider the following passage. Is it in a written/academic or spoken/pedagogic style, and how can you tell?
It is very important to realise that the way in which people use language when they are speaking is quite different from the way in which they use language when they are writing. If you want to have the ability to communicate with effectiveness, you really should try to bear in mind one of the most significant differences between the written and the spoken forms of language, that is the fact that the levels of redundancy that are expected in written language and those expected in spoken language are not the same. As a general rule we can say that the level of redundancy in speech is noticeably very much higher than the level of redundancy in writing.
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Course Contents / Academic Editing Service
© 2002 Martin Paterson