Clarity, Part 1

Clarity is important. I chose to focus on Active Verbs, Shifts, Variety, and Modifiers.

Jenny Downing. "Clarity and Brightness of Chablis Wine". 6-21-08 via Wikipedia. CC A2.0.

Active Verbs
This section was interesting to me because for years people have been telling me to use active verbs and I guess I never entirely understood what those were. This section was really helpful for me because it had examples, so I could actually see how to replace passive verbs with active verbs.

Shifts
Sometimes I shift gears too frequently in my writing. I don't think it's intentional, I think it's just the way my mind works. Like, I'll be writing something and then get excited about a new idea so I'll write that new idea too and the change in enthusiasm comes through in the writing. I can't remember ever being told to explicitly pay attention to the way I shift my language in my work but I think that's one of the most valuable nuggets I got out of the Clarity chapters.

Variety
Everyone loves variety. It keeps the writing exciting. Sometimes I think I fall into a lull and start using the same sentence construction over and over and over and over and over and over and it feels so long and you can lose sight of what I'm actually saying. Variety is the solution to that problem and I try to consistently write with good variety but it's hard and sometimes it just doesn't go as planned. This section was good because it gave some good pointers for how I might increase my variety and make my writing a little easier to read.

Modifiers
This one was great because it's a problem that everybody has! I misuse/misplace modifiers all the time (for example, the highlighted phrase two paragraphs above this one contains a misplaces modifier). The thing with modifiers is they're hard to keep track of and not many people remind me to look for them, so this section was a really nice wake up call and I think I'm trying to get the hang of it.


Reflection...
After reading through some other peoples' drafts, I realized that the mistakes I've been making with these clarity topics aren't unique to me. This is relieving because it means I'm not alone, but it also means that I should definitely pay more attention in my writing because anybody can make these mistakes. I think one of the more interesting things about this trend is that the mistakes sound right. Which is to say that they may go unnoticed by many people because they don't sound terribly out of place in our writing. However, the only real way to try to solve that problem is to be very careful in our writing, or to make grammatical correctness a habit in our everyday speech. I think the former is the more practical option because the whole concept of language is that it evolves and doesn't have to follow the grammar rules so specifically.