Cutting The Flab: The Secret To Write Better
Effective writing is an essential skill that enhances your communication and strengthens your argument, no matter what career you pursue. Effective writing is correct, logical, precise, yet well-developed – qualities that come only with practice. However, there are some tips and tricks which help your writing shed its flab, provided you are already conversant with grammar and logic.
Good writing needs clarity and economy. In a nutshell, these can be achieved by:
- Using simple, familiar words instead of unfamiliar, difficult words
- Using concrete or specific words instead of vague or general words
- Using acronyms carefully
- Avoiding clichés
- Avoiding jargon specific to a discipline
- Avoiding foreign words that the target readership may not know
- Avoiding redundancy and circumlocution
- Avoiding discriminatory writing altogether
Let us take these points one by one:
Use Familiar Words If You Want Effective Writing Out of Your Pen (Or Keyboard)
Our pace of life becomes a little faster each day. Who has time to navigate through a sentence like ‘The conclusion ascertained from the perusal of pertinent data is that a lucrative market exists for the product’? Wouldn’t it be quicker to grasp if you just wrote, ‘The data studies show that the product has good demand’? Similarly, you could use ‘destroy’ for ‘annihilate’, ‘difficult’ for ‘obscure’, ‘small’ for ‘minute’, ‘verify’ for ‘corroborate’ and so on.
However, use your vocabulary wisely. While trying to simplify your language, do not underestimate the intelligence of your audience. If you need to use the word ‘substantial deficit’, do say so; ‘the company lost a lot of money’ doesn’t really have that impact. Effective Writing doesn’t mean dumbing your writing down.
Using Concrete Words Works Best For Business Writing
When you communicate for business, your writing needs to convey a definite meaning with precision and directness. If you write, ‘the company suffered tremendous loss’, your reader forms only a vague idea about the magnitude of the loss. But if you say, ‘a 70% loss in profits’, the well-informed reader is immediately alerted to the significance of the situation.
Avoid ambiguity. ‘The professor said on Monday he would give an exam’. Can you tell me when the exam is supposed to take place for sure? ‘We saw her duck’. You saw one biped, certainly. Use words like ‘bi-monthly’ carefully; some people think it means twice a month! Similarly, learn about the differences in British and American usage of English. Did you know that when you ‘table a resolution’ in Britain, you put it forward for debate, but in America when you table a resolution, you finish it off? Haha.
Using Acronyms Carefully: An Often Overlooked Principle of Effective Writing
Acronyms and abbreviations are more popular than ever now, especially with WhatsApp. But WhatsApp is a primarily informal chat platform, while written communication in any professional field still retains a degree of formality. So no tc, tx, rofl, brb, imo, 2n8, asap (the list goes on…).
Common abbreviations are all right. WHO, IBM, AIDS, RADAR, NASA, IIT – we’re familiar with these. Any less familiar ones need the full form when you mention them for the first time: Indian COUNCIL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH (ICSSR).
Avoid Cliches To Keep Your Write-Up Polished
Cliches are rhetorical phrases that may lend a touch of relaxation in a dry piece of informative text. Most of the time they are so overused that the reader feels bored and tired at encountering the same phrases again and again. Last but not the least, there is no time like the present. Unless you burn the midnight oil, you’ll have to face the acid test. But once the ball is in your court, everything will be fine, and you’ll add a feather in your cap. Elementary, my dear Watson! If your writing looks this familiar and predictable, scrap it and write again.
Avoiding Jargon Is A Strict No-No For Effective Writing
Jargon is the range of technical words and phrases specific to a particular discipline or field of work. How many lay readers would know what a corbel or a bravura or a zeugma is? What does ‘elegant’ mean in mathematics? What is dorsiflexion or a coda or a sua sponte? Why should we say ‘accrued interest’, ‘per diem’ when we’ll be much more easily understood with ‘unpaid insurance’ and ‘daily’? Most of the time we think that certain complicated ideas are not expressible without these complex words. However, we forget that the goal of effective writing is to reach a greater audience than originally intended. So it is best to avoid jargon when you’re addressing your writing to a generic audience. If necessary, write the word, and provide the meaning within brackets or in a footnote.
Avoid Foreign Words To Keep Your Article Free of Confusion
Did you know that some everyday words we use – a.m., p.m., i.e., etc. – are actually non-English? We use them so much that we’ve forgotten they are foreign words. However, there are some foreign words which we could avoid. It was a custom and a trend to use Latin and French words within English language texts e.g. ‘vide supra’ which means ‘see above’, or ‘raison d’être’ which means ‘the justification for’. Thankfully, the trend has almost ceased now.
Avoid Redundancy And Circumlocution To Continue Effective Writing
Redundancy means unnecessary repetition of an idea. If you say, ‘basic fundamentals’, aren’t you saying the same thing twice? Correct! Eliminate any one and see how the meaning remains the same. Similarly, we say, ‘return back’, ‘adequately enough’, ‘resume again’, ‘month of May’, ‘few in number’, ‘true fact’, ‘new innovation’, ‘future prospect’. We can trim one word from each of these phrases.
Circumlocution is going around in a loop to arrive at an idea instead of coming to it in a straight line. Say, you have a sentence like this: ‘It is not believed that the proposed design will meet all the required specifications based on the previous test experiences obtained in the laboratory’. You can halve your reading and understanding time by re-writing it as: ‘Laboratory tests indicate that the proposed design will not meet all the requirements’. Simple.
Avoid Discriminatory Writing
Readers and writers alike are so used to gender-biased words that they barely register that such words are there. What do I mean by gender-biased words? Well, certain words convey certain assumptions of gender. Take the word ‘doctor’. Don’t you automatically assume that the doctor will be male? Don’t you say ‘lady doctor’ when you specifically want to indicate that the doctor is female? This is called gender-bias. Get rid of it. Instead of writing, ‘A student must do his homework before coming to class’, write ‘A student must do his or her homework…’ or ‘Students must do their homework…’ Learn to say ‘chairperson’, ‘professor’, ‘firefighter’.
Nowadays, it is also not acceptable to use words that discriminate against people using their age, disability, race, colour, or sexual orientation. That is why we use words like ‘senior citizen’, ‘physically challenged’, ‘specially able’, ‘of (name of country) origin’, ‘person of colour’, ‘gay person’ etc. Remember that these words are not sugarcoating reality. By understanding and using these words, you show that you are sensitized to any marginalization in the society and the discrimination that comes with it.
In conclusion, we should say that it looks like a lot of work, but once you start practising – one bite at a time – it really gets easier and easier. All the best!
Author –
Sudeshna Datta Chaudhuri
Sudeshna Datta Chaudhuri is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT), Bhubaneswar, where she teaches Professional Communication and Business Communication. She has previously worked in Lady Brabourne College, Kolkata, and the School of Cultural Texts & Records (SCTR), Jadavpur University. She has worked on various documentation and archiving projects, and taught in the UGC-approved PG Diploma Course in Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics run by SCTR. She received her doctoral degree from Jadavpur University in 2013, and worked at her postdoctoral thesis with the UGC Dr S. Radhakrishnan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Humanities & Social Sciences. Though her degree is in English literature, her other area of interest is Hindustani Classical Music.
