You should now be beginning to understand the basic techniques of redundancy reduction, and be able to work through the following exercises.

Include all the information given in each group of sentences in one sentence within the word limit. If you click on HINT, you will get the first few words of the model version. 

1. There are many different roles that a teacher is required to play when doing his or her job. For example, he or she must be a child psychologist, a source of knowledge, a class manager and as well as all these different roles he or she must be a behavioural model too! That's why the job of being a teacher is a very difficult one it you want to do it well but also why it is both challenging and rewarding as well.

Maximum 29 words. HINT

When you are ready, click here to compare your version with one of only 24 words.

 

2. Jean Piaget was a famous Swiss psychologist who was born in 1896 and after living for many years in various different places in the world died in 1988. He developed a theory of cognitive structures. This theory of his has had a very great influence on many people who are educationalists.

Maximum 20 words. HINT

Click here to compare your version with two of 18 words each.

 

3. In 1923, Mustafa Kemal, who was born in 1881, became President of Turkey, an office he retained until his death in 1938. When he became President of his country he instigated a series of reforms which were radical and far-reaching. Because of these reforms that he managed to introduce Kemal was successful in his efforts to transform not only just the politics of Turkey but also its economy and its culture as well.

Maximum 26 words. HINT

Click here for a version of 21 words.

 

4. The new University of Cyprus, which has recently been established on that Mediterranean island, has certainly proved to be very expensive to set up. So the government of Cyprus has had to find a lot of money to make the dream of a university become a reality. However, in the long-term the fact that the island of Cyprus now does indeed have its own university is bound to bring benefits to the Cypriot economy. That is because not so many students from Cyprus will now decide to take their money off the island in order to study at various other different universities scattered throughout the world.

Maximum 27 words. HINT

Click here for a version of 23 words.

 

5. When he had reached the age of thirteen years, Roy was referred to the clinic. He had no friends at school, where he was involved in frequent fights in which he would attack other children regardless of their size. These attacks which Roy made against innocent children had not been provoked in any way. Sometimes he would attack children much bigger than himself but on other occasions it would be smaller children who were the victims of his indiscriminate aggression. At the clinic to which he was referred the specialists who worked there were able to diagnose Roy as one of those unfortunate individuals who suffer from the disorder known as paranoid schizophrenia. The particular form of schizophrenia which Roy was suffering from appeared to be a mild form however, so things were not quite as serious as they might have been.

Maximum 36 words. HINT

Click here for a version of 30 words.

 

6. Of the people who have the misfortune to be addicted to narcotics, it is true to say that the majority are young people aged between fifteen and twenty five years. While we cannot say for certain what it is that makes these young people take the decision to start experimenting with drugs for the first time, it is probably the case that they fall into one or more of the following three categories. Firstly they may be experiencing problems of a psychological nature, or secondly they may want to rebel against society or their family, or last but not least they could simply be curious about drugs and want to find out for themselves what it is like to take narcotics.

Maximum 30 words. HINT

Click here for a version of 25 words.

 

7. It is possible to say that there are two different types of motivation. On the one hand there is intrinsic motivation and on the other hand there is extrinsic motivation. If a man or woman is intrinsically motivated this means that he or she is interested in the work itself and therefore will want to do the job well no matter what he or she may be paid. When we say that somebody is extrinsically motivated we want to say that they do not care about the job that they are doing but only for the remuneration that they will get. When we come to consider the world of business it is quite clear that the better type of employees to have working for you are of course intrinsically motivated ones as opposed to those who are extrinsically motivated.

Maximum 33 words. HINT

Click here for a version of only 26 words.

 

8. If we look at the history of developmental psychology we can see that in the past there were two different opinions about the kind of factors which may have an influence on the development of an individual human being. On the one hand there was what was known as the environmentalist view, while on the other hand there was the geneticist view. According to the first of these opinions it was the environment which had the biggest impact on how an individual might develop. However those holding the geneticist opinion believed just the opposite, because according to them it was nature, not nurture, which had the greatest influence on development. In more recent times a new view of development has emerged. This is the epigenetic view which has largely superceded the two historically conflicting views which have been described above. Epigeneticists believe that both genetics and the environment are of equal importance in shaping development. Indeed, epigeneticists contend that the two factors are inextricably linked and so it is impossible to clearly separate the effects of one from the effects of the other.

Maximum 38 words. HINT

Click here for a version of 31 words.

 

 

9. Many children, not only boys but also girls as well, may go through a period in their childhood development in which they have temper tantrums. These tantrums usually develop when the child has reached the age of about two years old. In fact about twenty per cent of two-year-old children have temper tantrums at least twice a day. Such behaviour is the result of the fact that at around this age children would often like to express themselves more than they are able to do because at this particular stage in their development they cannot talk well enough to communicate through language exactly what they wish to express. This inability to express themselves as fully as they want leads to their feeling very frustrated and unable to communicate. These feelings of frustration may come out in the form of a temper tantrum in many cases.

Maximum 30 words. HINT

Click here for a version of 22 words.

 

10. There have been a number of attempts to explain the unfortunate disorder known as anorexia from a psychiatric perspective. The various different explanations that have been offered at various times by such diverse figures as Arthur Crisp, Roger Slade, Hilde Bruch and Maria Selvini Palozzoli are perhaps those which have had the greatest influence upon the way in which anorexia is viewed at this point in time. However, the feminist and sociologist Morag McSween finds the explanations of these four thinkers unsatisfactory. Indeed, when she wrote a book on the subject of anorexia entitled Anorexic Bodies: A feminist and sociological perspective on anorexia-nervosa, she made a particular point of being highly critical of all four of these thinkers that I have mentioned above on the grounds that, in Morag McSween's opinion, all of them in their own particular ways regard anorexia as an individualistic deviance. In contrast McSween argues in this book of hers which was published in 1993, that anorexia is a cultural phenomenon. This means that she does not think that it is, as Crisp, Slade, Bruch and Palozzoli suggest, a disorder which can be explained solely in terms of the individual anorexic's disordered personality.

Having completed this exercise, you will be better able to write a concise and coherent sentence. I advise you to spend several hours looking at some of your own recent writing. Subject each of your paragraphs to the same treatment: how many of them can you reduce to a single sentence?

When you are ready, move on the next part of the course, which looks at how paragraphs are constructed.

Course Contents / Academic Editing Service