Clarity, Part 1

In this post, I will explain some writing topics that I found I could improve on. Hopefully my explanations will be beneficial to my readers.

"Sudden Clarity Clarence"

"Prefer active verbs." There are three types of verbs- passive, be verb, and active. It is important to choose the active verbs when you can, because they make writing more interesting to the reader. An example of a weak verb sentence is- "The purse was stolen by the robber." An example of an active verb sentence is- "The robber stole the purse." I often overlook opportunities to use active verbs in my writing.

"Balance parallel ideas." This means that when listing ideas, you can use the same phrase if it applies to all of them. For example, instead of saying, "My favorite classes are Spanish class, and English class," you would say, "My favorite classes are Spanish and English. This was an obvious example, but sometimes writers can tend to leave modifiers in a sentence when they can just be left out.

"Add needed words." This doesn't mean trying to reach a word count for an assignment. Instead, it means that sometimes  words are left out. For example, you would need to add "an" in front of apple in the following sentence- "My mom bought a banana and apple." It is easy to assume that people know what you mean, when really you need to add words to ensure correctness.

"Emphasize key ideas." The part in this section that I found most useful was about combining choppy sentences. I love sentence variety because it allows the reader to not be bored with sentences of the same lengths. With that being said, it is important to only make important sentences choppy. Choppy sentences are meant to add emphasis to the reader.

Reflection
After peer review, I learned that the most common things that could be changed were "prefer active verbs," and "emphasize key ideas." I didn't really find the other two topics helpful when peer reviewing the QRGs because they weren't things that applied to the paper.

This is an example from Zayla's blog where I suggested that she could "prefer active verbs"- In recent news China has created a new monetary institution . This could be changed to "China created." This was from her QRG rough draft.