Week 2: Sentences and Paragraphs

"Concise" means using no more words than necessary to convey your meaning. Here are six ways to achieve conciseness.

1. Avoid redundancy.  Look at this table--the words in parentheses aren't necessary. They say the same thing as the main phrase.

 2. Watch out for wordy phrases. Wordiness happens when you use more words than you need to say something. For example, "in view of the fact that" means simply, "because."

3. Make your subject clear and defined.

4. Use strong verbs.  Avoid using sentences that rely overly on some form of the word 'to be' in combination with nouns or prepositions. 

5.  Avoid vague words. Words like "thing," "stuff," "material," "people," "get," or "did" should be replaced with precise nouns or verbs.

6. Remove unnecessary modifiers. Too many modifiers weaken the force of your writing; they bury your main ideas in a mountain of words that don't mean much. Look for modifiers like "many," "really," "quite," "in my opinion," etc. and edit them out of your writing.

The word paragraph comes from the Greek word paragraphos ("to write beside" or "written beside"). The paragraph is a unit of writing expressing one specific idea, and is made up of one or more sentences.

A good paragraph has strong organization that makes sense to the reader. Each sentence should lead logically to the next, and should be connected through transition words or other connections. Besides a topic sentence and one main idea, an effective paragraph has coherence and development. 

Coherence

• Repeat key words
• Use synonyms for key words
• Use pronouns to link sentences together
• Link sentences with transition words 

Development

 A well-developed paragraph should have an adequate number of sentences to support the main idea. 

• Use examples 
• Give data (for example, statistics, data, information, examples)
• Quote others, either directly or through paraphrasing
• Tell a story
• Define your key words
• Compare or contrast ideas
• Examine causes and effects