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Assess your paper, part 3
..........Do you communicate clearly?
Third--and more difficult:
How well do you communicate?
- Did you organize your paper
in a way that's appropriate
to the topic and type of paper you've written--a report
or an essay? The crucial question is not whether your
paper matches a standard format for an essay or report. Instead:
Does the structure of your paper help your
reader to grasp easily the ideas you want to communicate?
- Structure aside, do you communicate
your ideas in a way that an intelligent reader will find interesting
and easy to follow? A
few pointers for this huge topic are:
- Writing well is hard work!
Be sure to leave yourself
plenty of time to write a first draft, and then let it rest for
a few days. Then you can read, assess, and revise your paper
with a fresh eye.
- Have you expressed your ideas
in your own words, or
does your paper consist of a string of quotations? If the quotations
are correctly documented,
you will avoid academic dishonesty, but excessive quoting will
suggest either that you're overly fearful of plagiarism or that
you didn't take enough time to reflect on your reading: that
you haven't fully "digested" your material.
- Use the ACTIVE rather than
the passive voice (also
called active and passive moods). Go through your paper:
wherever you find that you've used the passive voice, change
it to the active voice. At times you'll judge that the passive
voice is appropriate--but this will be rare.
- Passive voice: "The coffee was spilled on the
floor because of an accident tripping over the cat, resulting
in some regrettably bad language." The passive voice ("the
coffee was spilled") invites grammatical blunders, wordiness,
and loss of clarity. Who spilled the coffee, did an accident
really trip over a cat, and who used bad language--the cat?
- ACTIVE VOICE: "I tripped over the cat, spilled
my coffee on the floor, and used some regrettably bad language."
See how the active voice ("I tripped ... and spilled ...
and used bad language") clarifies things? And unless your
professor specifically forbids it, don't be afraid to use the
first person ("I") as it will help greatly with clarity.
For more information on active and passive voice see the excellent
Passive Voice Handout developed by the
Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.
- Does your writing tend to
be over-compressed, wordy, or a mixture of the two? Over-compression and wordiness both cause
loss of clarity, but how do you find and resolve the problem?
Go through your paper slowly--reading aloud.
If the spoken word sounds wrong, then there's a problem with
the written word. Revise until it sounds right. Add clarifying
words, phrases, or even sentences to over-compressed writing.
And look for ways to simplify wordiness. Cut redundant phrases,
and replace wordy phrases with a simple word or two. For example:
"at the present time" converts easily to "now"
or "today." Also, consider your choice of words--as
I discuss below.
- Use small words; be sparing
with big ones. Some students
think--or even have been taught--that the writer of a scholarly
paper should use big words to make their work seem more professional.
Not so. A simple writing style is far more clear, and hence more
professional. Or, as G. K. Chesterton explains in the passage
below, "The long words are not the hard words, it is the
short words that are hard":
Most of the machinery of modern
language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour
very much more than it ought. . . . Long words go rattling by
us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands
who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves.
It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any
opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "The
social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by
all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards
a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can
go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the
gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish
Jones to go to gaol [jail] and Brown to say when Jones shall
come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that
you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words,
it is the short words that are hard.1
- An excellent, concise, and
gracefully written guide to clear writing may be found in Menzel, Jones, and Boyd's Writing a Technical Paper. The
authors wrote this book with the scientist in mind--Menzel was
an astrophysicist--but anyone who wants to improve his or her
writing will benefit greatly from studying chapter 4, "Grammar,"
and Chapter 5, "Style." The book was published in 1961,
so some of the other chapters--such as the one on preparation
of a hard copy manuscript--are out of date.
- See also "Style in Writing"
on pages 193-225 of the
11th edition of Barnet's A Short Guide to Writing About Art.
1G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908;
reprint, Garden City, New York: Image Books, a division of Doubleday&
Company, 1959) 124.
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