Clarity: Part I

Weijn, Sandor Diego. "Lake Ohrid- The Clear Water" August 24, 2007
Public Domain 

After reading the "Clarity" section of the Rules for Writers handbook, I thought I really need to buckle down on the little bits and pieces that made my writing less than good in certain areas. Below are some of the topics I focused on.

Wordy Sentences & Paragraphs

When it comes to this issue, I only have one institution to blame- High School. I have spent the last four years writing a ludicrous amount of paragraphs that all needed extensive explanation, academic vocabulary, and fluff sentences to make the essay look larger than it is. This is a problem. I have learned that I write with inflated phrases such as "I think that" or "in my opinion..." which makes the reader focus more on the author's opinions than the issue. So I will have to remove the excess to keep the QRG brief and readable.

Variety

As stated above, I have an overabundance of wordy paragraphs and phases that either have dangling modifiers or overly complex explanations- which bore the reader. I order to address this issue, I need to employ a variety of sentence structures with more emotional and logical phases to keep the reader interested. This can include more memorable introductions and catch phrases.

Dangling Modifiers

This portion of the chapter was the most difficult to understand mostly due to its complexity in explaining what a "dangling modifier" is. With that in mind, I will most likely comb through my QRG to find phrases that are similar or identical to the examples given. Otherwise, I see no current issues with the direction of my argument. All of my phrases eventually have a relevant point to them, rather than just pasting information for the sake of pasting information.

Active Verbs

When it come to my writing style I assume- based on the chapter- that I write passively and more "in light of the situation" style. This I now know bores the reader, as he or she finds it as a mere narration of an issue. So in order to correct this, need to write more actively, calling upon the reader to draw an opinion based on the facts presented. Plus, the use of "be" verbs make the QRG less notable, by that I mean makes each sentence sound dull rather than lively and full of emotion.

Reflection:

Ayra and Mika did excellent jobs constructing and explaining their controversies, especially when taking such broad and information packed issues and summarizing it in such simple terms. I have never heard about Mika's controversy- and he did a great job creating brief paragraphs and introductions to fill in the reader to the problem.

What I saw from each document, was a large mass of information with incidental breaks with bullets or visual aides.For example:

"The accusations online that Yaoxue and his team plagiarized their project brought the award’s selection under extreme scrutiny. The blogpost on Github by user KraneSun brought forth the allegations to user Iordan Iordanov, whose code was supposedly used in the award winning project in China. According to Cyranowski, the reporter from the Natural Publishing Group, Iordanov is a software developer in York, Canada, who had “never heard of Zhang before the GitHub posts.” In Iordanov’s responses to many Chinese media sources and Nature.com, he affirmed that the video Zhang Yaoxue posted of his project was, indeed, showing “one of [Iordanov’s] remote-desktop applications” in action. At this, online forums exploded, with users on GitHub saying that Iordanov should file a formal complaint on the matter to the Chinese selection committee that presented the award to Yaoxue."

Also, I found Ayra had issues when supporting her more opinionated phases. Links were rather scarce as well as visual aides. For example:

"This controversy as a whole is mainly opinion. It is up to each person to decide whether what was done was ethical or not. The facts are as follows. The CIA and APA had psychologists torture both victims and prisoners of the 9/11 attacks. They did this in order to gather information. From a psychological standpoint, researchers were trying to figure out how torture corresponds with compliance. The opinions are as follows. Either that the experiments were moral and necessary in obtaining research and information or that they were unethical and there are alternative methods to get the information that was needed."

Overall, the both posts were well supported and easy to read, any suggestions I made were for the sake of keeping the QRG readable, memorable, and grammatically correct. I now have a general idea how my QRG should be structured.