Style, Clarity and Concision

Two students hand in papers with the same argument, the same sources, and the same evidence. One reads like a clear window; the other reads like a windshield in a rainstorm. The difference is not intelligence, and it is not talent — it is a small set of sentence-level habits that can be named, practiced, and checked. This chapter teaches those habits as procedures rather than as taste. You will learn where readers expect to find the main character of a sentence, where they expect the point to land, which words earn their space and which ones are furniture, and how to rebuild a paragraph so each sentence hands off cleanly to the next. Every principle here comes with a weak version and a revised version so you can see the machinery working. By the end you will not be a “better writer” in the vague sense. You will have a repeatable edit.

Section 1Find the Character, Find the Action

The two questions that fix most bad sentences

When a sentence feels heavy and you cannot say why, stop trying to describe the feeling and ask two mechanical questions. First: who or what is the main character here? Second: what is that character doing? Then check whether the answers are sitting where readers look for them. English readers expect the main character in the subject slot and the main action in the verb. When a writer buries the character inside a prepositional phrase and turns the action into an abstract noun, the sentence still means something — it just costs the reader more to get it.

Look at a sentence of the kind that shows up constantly in student drafts and in professional reports alike.

Weak: The determination of the cause of the medication errors was accomplished by the committee through an examination of dispensing records.

Revised: The committee examined dispensing records to determine what caused the medication errors.

Twenty words became twelve, but length is the side effect, not the point. The real change is structural. In the weak version, the grammatical subject is determination — an abstraction that cannot do anything — and the actual actor, the committee, is stuffed into a by phrase. The main verb is was accomplished, which names no action at all. In the revision, the committee is the subject, examined and determine are the verbs, and the reader can picture people doing something. This one move — characters into subjects, actions into verbs — is the highest-yield edit in English prose, and it is the organizing idea of Joseph Williams’s widely used book Style.

Practice the diagnosis on your own writing this way. Pick any sentence longer than about eighteen words. Circle the first eight words. If those eight words do not contain a concrete actor followed quickly by a real verb, you have found your problem. You do not yet need to know how to fix it; noticing is most of the work.

Nominalizations: verbs and adjectives wearing noun costumes

A nominalization is a noun made from a verb or an adjective: discuss becomes discussion, apply becomes application, careless becomes carelessness. Nominalizations are not errors. They are ordinary English. The trouble starts when a writer stacks several of them into one sentence, because each nominalization drags a preposition behind it, and prepositional chains are what make prose feel like wading.

Watch the chain build: the implementation of the reduction of the utilization of restraints. Four nouns, three ofs, no action visible. Now unpack it: the unit used fewer restraints. Same content, one clear actor, one clear verb.

The passive voice, honestly

In the active voice, the subject performs the action: The nurse flushed the line. In the passive voice, the subject receives it, and the verb takes a form of be plus a past participle: The line was flushed by the nurse. The agent can be dropped entirely: The line was flushed.

Popular advice says to avoid the passive. That advice is too crude to be useful. The linguist Geoffrey Pullum has documented how often sentences condemned as passive in style guides are not passive at all — writers reach for the label as a general complaint about vagueness. Automated grammar checkers inherit the same confusion, so treat their flags as prompts to look, not verdicts.

Here is a more usable rule. The passive is a problem when it deletes an agent your reader needs. It is a good choice when the agent is unknown, irrelevant, obvious, or when the passive lets you begin a sentence with information the reader already has. Compare:

Agent hidden, and it matters: Errors were made in the dosage calculation. (By whom? The sentence is built to avoid saying.)

Agent hidden, and it does not matter: The samples were refrigerated for twelve hours. (Nobody needs to know which technician opened the door.)

Passive earning its keep through flow: Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes. The second was awarded for her isolation of radium. (Beginning the second sentence with the second keeps the topic steady; an active version would start with a new subject and jolt the reader.)

Disciplines genuinely disagree here, and you should follow the conventions of the course you are writing for. Traditional laboratory reports in the sciences have long favored the passive in methods sections to keep attention on the procedure. Meanwhile the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, seventh edition, explicitly recommends the active voice and permits — even prefers — first person for describing your own work. Both norms are defensible. What is not defensible is using the passive reflexively because it sounds more formal.

Section 2Cutting Without Losing Anything

Five named kinds of clutter

“Omit needless words” — William Strunk Jr.’s most quoted instruction, carried into every edition of The Elements of Style — is useless on its own, because the whole problem is that your own needless words do not look needless to you. So work from categories instead of instinct. Each of the five below can be searched for.

One. Empty modifiers. Basically, actually, really, quite, very, rather, somewhat, certain, particular, kind of, in a very real sense. Delete and reread. If the sentence lost nothing, the word was furniture. “The results were actually quite surprising” is just “The results were surprising,” and the shorter version is stronger because nothing dilutes the adjective.

Two. Doubled words. English is full of set pairs in which one word already covers the other, and legal drafting preserved the habit: null and void, free and clear, cease and desist. Ordinary prose copies it — full and complete, first and foremost, each and every, hopes and dreams, various and sundry, true and accurate. Pick one. “Each and every student” is “every student.”

Three. Redundant modifiers. “In the modern world of today,” “in my personal opinion, I think,” “past experiences,” “future plans,” “plan ahead.” If a word repeats meaning the word beside it already carries, cut it.

Four. Redundant categories. A noun often already names its own category. Pink in color. Large in size. Rectangular in shape. At an early time. Of a strange character. During the period of the war. Pink is a color; large is a size. Say pink, large, rectangular, early, strange, during the war.

Five. Long phrases doing one word’s job. This is the most mechanical category and the easiest to fix with a search.

Two openings worth auditing every time

Two sentence openers are so common that a targeted search will improve almost any draft. The first is the expletive construction: there is, there are, there were, it is used as an empty placeholder. These constructions delay the real subject and often bury a verb inside a noun.

Weak: There are three reasons that explain why the policy failed.
Revised: The policy failed for three reasons.

Weak: It is important to note that the sample included only night-shift staff.
Revised: The sample included only night-shift staff.

The second is heavy metadiscourse — writing about your writing. Some metadiscourse is genuinely useful; signposts like “This section turns to” help a reader navigate a long paper. But phrases such as “It is my opinion that,” “This paper will attempt to argue that,” and “It should be pointed out that” usually announce a point instead of making it. Compare a typical opening with its repair:

Weak: In this essay I will attempt to discuss and explore the idea that it may possibly be the case that mandatory overtime affects patient safety.
Revised: Mandatory overtime endangers patients.

Notice what the revision costs you: the hedging vanished. Sometimes that is exactly right and sometimes you need some of it back. Section 5 handles how much certainty to claim. The point here is that the certainty should be a deliberate choice expressed in one or two precise words, not an accidental fog created by six vague ones.

The twenty percent drill

Here is a drill you can run on any draft. Take one paragraph. Set a target of cutting twenty percent of the words without losing a single idea. Word counts are visible in every word processor, so the target is checkable. Most first drafts survive this easily, which is itself the lesson.

Before (82 words): It is basically important to note that, in the modern world of today, there are a large number of students who are of the opinion that the writing process is something that is very difficult for them personally. Due to the fact that these particular students have had past experiences in the past that were negative in nature, they tend to have a general tendency to avoid the act of writing whenever and wherever it is possible for them to do so.

After (19 words): Many students find writing difficult. Because their earlier experiences with it were negative, they avoid it whenever they can.

That example is deliberately extreme; a competent draft will not shrink by seventy-seven percent. A realistic gain on real academic prose is fifteen to twenty-five percent, and you should stop when further cutting starts removing content rather than packaging.

It is worth being honest that concision is not an unlimited good. Plain-language research and government initiatives such as the federal Plain Writing Act of 2010 give solid support for simplifying public-facing prose, and readers comprehend clear syntax faster. But scholarly writing sometimes needs the extra clause that specifies a condition, the qualifier that limits a claim to a population, or the second example that makes an abstraction concrete. Those words are not padding. The test is not “is this sentence short” but “does every word do a job.”

Section 3Old Information First: The Physics of Flow

Begin with what the reader already has

Individually correct sentences can still produce a paragraph that feels like walking uphill. The usual cause is order. Readers process a sentence by first locating it in what they already know, then absorbing what is new. So sentences read most easily when they open with familiar material — the topic position — and close with the new material. George Gopen and Judith Swan made this argument influentially for scientific prose in a 1990 article in American Scientist, and it holds across genres.

Watch what disorder does.

Choppy: Hospital readmission rates dropped after the pilot began. A dedicated transition nurse called each patient within forty-eight hours of discharge. Confusion about medications is the most common reason patients return. The calls were scripted.

Revised: After the pilot began, hospital readmission rates dropped. The drop had a simple mechanism: a dedicated transition nurse called every patient within forty-eight hours of discharge. Those calls followed a script, and the script targeted the most common reason patients come back — confusion about their medications.

No sentence in the first version is wrong. But each one starts a new subject, so the reader has to hold four unconnected items and assemble the relationship without help. The revision hands off deliberately: the drop picks up the previous sentence, those calls picks up the calls, the script picks up the script. Nothing enters the paragraph before the reader has somewhere to hang it.

Topic strings: keep your subjects in one family

A topic string is the set of grammatical subjects running down a paragraph. Read only the subjects, ignoring everything else, and see whether they belong to a coherent group. If the string reads Piaget → the theory → children → a study → it → researchers, the paragraph is about six things. If it reads Piaget → his theory → the theory → it → this model, the paragraph is about one thing, and the reader knows it without being told.

Scattered subjects: Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive development. Object permanence is acquired during the first stage. Later researchers questioned the age boundaries. Cross-cultural evidence complicates the sequence. Textbooks still present the model as fixed.

Steady subjects: Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive development. His first stage, the sensorimotor period, is the one in which an infant acquires object permanence. His age boundaries, however, have not held up: later researchers found the milestones arriving earlier than he predicted. His sequence has been questioned too, since cross-cultural evidence suggests it is less uniform than he claimed. His model nevertheless still appears in textbooks as if it were settled.

The second paragraph is not shorter. It is easier, because the reader tracks one character — Piaget and his model — through five sentences. Do this check with a highlighter on a printed page; it takes two minutes and it exposes structural problems that no amount of word-polishing would reveal.

Transitions that do real work

Students are often told to “add transitions,” and the result is a layer of Additionally and Furthermore pasted onto sentences that still do not connect. A transition word is a promise about a logical relationship. If the relationship is not there, the word is a lie in miniature. Choose the connector that names what is actually happening between the two ideas.

Two mechanical notes. Placing however after the subject rather than at the front often reads better, because it lets the familiar subject arrive first: “The committee, however, disagreed” rather than “However, the committee disagreed.” Both are correct; the second is louder. And however cannot join two independent clauses with only a comma — use a semicolon or a period, a point Chapter 12 takes up in detail.

Section 4Emphasis, Rhythm and Sentence Shape

End on the word you want remembered

The last few words of a sentence carry disproportionate weight. That location is the stress position, and readers give it emphasis whether or not you intended any. A great many limp sentences are limp for one reason: they end on throat-clearing rather than on the point.

Weak: The study found that students who revised at least twice scored higher on the final essay, which was the outcome the researchers had predicted.
Revised: As the researchers had predicted, students who revised at least twice scored higher on the final essay.

Weak: Revision is where the real writing happens, according to many experienced writers, in most cases.
Revised: Many experienced writers will tell you that the real writing happens in revision.

The revision technique is blunt and reliable: identify the phrase you most want the reader to carry forward, then move everything else in front of it. Trailing qualifiers, source attributions, and dates almost always belong earlier. Watch for sentences that trail off into a clause beginning with which — that construction is the most common way writers give away their stress position.

Length is a meaning-making tool

A paragraph in which every sentence runs a dozen or so words is exhausting, not because a dozen words is too many but because sameness erases emphasis. Vary the lengths and the short sentence becomes a hammer.

Uniform: The nurse manager reviewed the incident report and noted several procedural gaps. She scheduled a meeting with the two staff members who had been on duty. The conversation revealed that the unit had been short-staffed for eleven consecutive shifts. She concluded that the individual employees were not the primary cause of the error.

Varied: The nurse manager reviewed the incident report and noted several procedural gaps, so she scheduled a meeting with the two staff members who had been on duty that night. The conversation went somewhere she had not expected. The unit had been short-staffed for eleven consecutive shifts. Nobody had failed. The system had.

The content is nearly identical. The second version lands because a run of four short sentences follows one long one, and the two shortest carry the claim. Use this sparingly. If every sentence is short, the effect disappears and the prose sounds like a slogan.

Parallelism: matching grammar to matching ideas

Parallelism means giving coordinate ideas the same grammatical form. When items in a list or a pair share a structure, the reader recognizes them as a set instantly and stops re-parsing. When they do not, the sentence stumbles even though a reader could not always say where.

A quick test: read the shared word aloud, then attach it to each item in turn. In “praised for her accuracy … praised for her speed … praised for because she stayed calm,” the third attachment fails, and you have located the break.

Subordination: putting the point in the main clause

Coordination joins ideas of equal weight with and, but, or, so. Subordination demotes one idea into a dependent clause so the other can dominate. Beginning writers over-coordinate, stringing clauses together with and until nothing stands out. The fix is to decide which idea is the point and let the grammar say so.

Take the same facts and arrange them three ways.

Coordinated (no emphasis): The sample was small, and the effect was large, and the study has not been replicated.

Emphasis on the caution: Although the effect was large, the sample was small and the study has not been replicated.

Emphasis on the finding: Although the sample was small and the study has not been replicated, the effect was large.

Nothing was added or removed. Only the arrangement changed — and with it, what the reader believes you think. This is why subordination is an argumentative tool, not a decorative one. Before you write a complex sentence, decide which half is your claim and which half is your concession, then put the claim in the main clause. Chapter 7 treats concession as a move in argument; here it is the same move executed at the level of the clause.

Section 5Register, Precision and the Edit Itself

Academic register: formal, not inflated

Register is the level of formality a situation calls for, signaled through word choice, contractions, sentence length, and how directly you address the reader. Academic register sits between two failures. Too casual, and the writing loses authority: “Basically the study was kind of a mess, honestly.” Too inflated, and it loses meaning: “The methodological infrastructure of the aforementioned investigation evidences non-trivial deficiencies.” The target sits between them: “The study has three methodological problems.”

The most reliable sign of an inflated register is that the writer reached for the longer synonym every time — utilize for use, facilitate for help, prior to for before, subsequent to for after, ascertain for find out, in the vicinity of for near. The longer word is not more academic. It is often less precise, since utilize traditionally suggests putting something to a use it was not designed for, which is almost never what the writer meant.

A few register questions have genuinely unsettled answers, and instructors differ. Contractions are now accepted in much academic prose and still discouraged by some readers. First person was once forbidden and is now recommended by APA style for describing your own work, while some instructors still bar it in argumentative essays. The singular they is endorsed by APA and by most current style guides and is standard in edited English, though a minority of readers resist it. Where a genuine convention conflict exists, ask what the assignment expects rather than assuming there is one universal rule.

Claim exactly as much as your evidence supports

A hedge is a word that limits the strength of a claim — may, suggests, often, in this sample. An intensifier pushes the other way — clearly, obviously, certainly, undeniably. Both are precision instruments, and both are usually misused: hedges get piled up until nothing is claimed, and intensifiers get sprinkled on claims that have no support behind them.

Over-hedged: It could possibly be argued that there may perhaps be some indication that shift length might have a potential effect on error rates in certain circumstances.

Over-claimed: Shift length obviously causes medication errors, as everyone knows.

Calibrated: In two observational studies, shifts longer than twelve hours were associated with higher error rates. Because neither study randomized assignment, the relationship may not be causal.

The calibrated version states what was found, in what kind of study, and what that design cannot establish. Notice that the reporting verb is doing the calibration. Verbs sit on a ladder of strength: proves and demonstrates at the top, then shows, then indicates, then suggests, then hints at. Choose the rung your source actually reached. A single correlational study does not prove anything, and writing that it does is a factual error dressed as a style choice. Words like obviously and clearly deserve special suspicion: they most often appear precisely where the writer has no evidence and is hoping confidence will substitute.

Jargon and the reader who is not you

Jargon is specialized vocabulary. It is not automatically bad — among specialists it is efficient, and refusing to use it wastes everyone’s time. It becomes a problem in exactly two situations: when the audience does not share it, and when it is used to sound credentialed rather than to be exact.

Suppose you are writing about hospital communication for a first-year composition course, where your reader is an educated non-specialist.

Unexplained: Poor SBAR compliance during handoff correlates with adverse events, particularly when the receiving RN lacks context on the patient’s baseline MAP.

Reader-aware: Hospitals use a four-part script called SBAR — situation, background, assessment, recommendation — to standardize what one nurse tells the next at shift change. When staff skip parts of the script, patients are more likely to be harmed, especially if the incoming nurse does not know what the patient’s normal blood pressure has been.

The second version is longer, and it is better, which is a useful corrective to Section 2. Concision serves the reader; it does not outrank the reader. The rule of thumb is simple: a technical term may enter your paper once you have earned it with a definition on first use, and it must then be used consistently. Do not define SBAR and then start calling it “the handoff protocol” three paragraphs later. Elegant variation — swapping synonyms to avoid repeating a word — is a virtue in fiction and a defect in explanation.

The edit in passes

The largest practical mistake in revision is trying to fix everything at once. You cannot simultaneously evaluate an argument, rebuild sentences, and hunt commas; attention does not divide that way, and the big problems lose to the small ones because the small ones are easier to see. Run separate passes instead, each looking for one thing. Print the draft or change the font before you start — making the page look unfamiliar genuinely helps you see it.

Reading aloud is not a folk remedy; it works because your ear catches breaks in rhythm, missing words, and clauses that run past their natural end, all of which the eye silently repairs. If reading aloud is impractical, have your device read the draft to you. A synthetic voice will not smooth over anything, which is precisely the value.

Words worth knowing