Writing takes various formats depending on the instructions and the type of paper. However, what is constant is the clarity and conciseness a paper should have. Conciseness and clarity are essential in writing since they ease the reader’s work. The primary purpose of writing is for people to read the work. A paper is considered clear and concise when a reader can go through it and understand what the writer is saying without getting confused. Many writers, however, need to follow the guidelines for achieving clear and concise writing.
To begin with, to achieve precise and concise writing, the writer should be objective. Being objective in writing will ensure that the writer avoids being wordy by only writing what they need in the paper. Wordiness in writing may make it difficult to understand the work since the reader has to figure out what the writer is trying to mean. Wordiness and redundancy go hand in hand. However, whereas wordiness reflects the use of many unnecessary words to explain a simple concept, redundancy is the use of multiple words with the same meaning.
In most cases, being too wordy makes the work flowery, hence failing to meet the standards of appropriate academic writing. To avoid being wordy in writing, avoid overly detailed descriptions of various things, including but not limited to participants, apparatus, or procedures. Moreover, the paper should focus on the intended information by avoiding obvious and irrelevant elaborations that may make the work look longer.
Another way to achieve precise and concise writing is to use a professional tone and professional language. Despite various papers having different writing styles, the paper should maintain professionalism and adhere to the guidelines of appropriate academic style. For instance, writing a scholarly paper and writing a creative paper may take different formats. While scholarly papers are keen on scientific and literary writing, creative writing is flexible and sometimes allows using devices. Therefore, as much as the paper allows the use of devices, the writer should use them sparingly as they may divert the reader’s attention from the main content. To avoid such mistakes, the writer should have the picture of the reader in his mind by identifying the target audience. This will guide the paper’s style, clarity, and conciseness, as they will know that scholarly writing needs to be as professional as possible. In contrast, creative writing can use devices in moderation to keep the reader on the subject of discussion.
Finally, clear and concise writing is based on sentence and paragraph length, contradiction and colloquialism, logical comparison, and anthropomorphism. When writing, ensure that you use varied sentence lengths, as this will help maintain the readers’ interest. Overusing sentences that are too short produces choppy prose, while overusing sentences that are too long dilutes the paper’s content, which needs to be clarified. The same guidelines can be applied to the length of a paragraph. Moreover, while trying to achieve more precise and concise writing, the writer should avoid contradiction and colloquialism, especially in scholarly writing. Scholarly writing guidelines do not accept shortened words; for example, writing can’t instead of cannot.
Similarly, colloquialisms, for example, writing gonna instead of going may diffuse the meaning of an entire writing. While writing, consideration of logical comparison should be met. However, sometimes, writers need help to achieve this by omitting keywords or non-parallel structures. Moreover, writers can omit essential points that hinder the writing from achieving the correct comparison structure in trying to achieve brevity. Hence, achieving clarity and conciseness during writing requires the writer to observe most of the abovementioned points.
References
American Psychology Association. (2020) Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) https://doi.org10.1037/0000165-000
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