Clarity, Part 1

Everyone has flaws as a writer or something that they can improve. In this blog post, I will briefly describe what I learned from 4 topics pertaining to sentence clarity.

McPhee, Nic "2008-01-26 (Editing a paper) - 31" 1/26/08 via Flickr. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic 

1. Parallel ideas: I have already learned all the content of this section but I'm not very good with parallelism. It's a good reminder to know what makes a sentence parallel and what's a faulty parallelism. I need to be careful with what part of speech I should use in a sentence because it's really easy to screw it up, especially with infinitives. an example is the sentence "The clerk told me to change my flight or take the train." The correct way to write that sentence is "The clerk told me to change my flight or to take the train." It's a very subtle difference but it matters.
2. Add needed words: This is only tricky in compound sentences. It's the kind of clarity that makes sentences like "my brother and I went to the park" correct and not "my brother and me went to the park". This type of clarity seems like an extension of parallel ideas to me. This section can be summed up by making sure a sentence makes sense if it were to exclude the extra subjects or direct objects.
3. Misplaced or dangling modifiers: Like the other subjects, I have also learned about this one. I learned it long ago and I think I still make mistakes with this form of clarity. Misplaced and dangling modifiers seem like a pretty obvious issue but at the same time, they seem like easy mistakes to make when typing out as much content as possible as quickly as possible.
4. Wordy sentences: I frequently make wordy sentences. This section goes through many ways to tighten sentences. Most examples ultimately say that a sentence can be shortened by changing a modifier to an adjective or by finding a better word to take place of many.

Reflection:
I read Brandon and Savannah's QRGs. After reading these sections about clarity, I felt like I was more aware while reading their drafts. I wouldn't say that I learned anything but being aware of clarity issues definitely helps when editing a paper. In Brandon's QRG, there was a wordy sentence that said "Since the end of 2002, medical science has been working tirelessly to make gene mapping- or the recording of the human DNA code and all of its genetic qualities- more cost effective so that diagnostic professionals may treat genetic diseases before they harm the patient." He could fix it by splitting the sentence after "more cost effective" and replacing "so that" with "This will allow". I read over Savannah's QRG multiple times but I cannot find a point where it is unclear or too wordy.