Five Ways to Make a Sentence More Concise

Expressing oneself clearly and concisely in speech is a challenge because one has so little time to order one’s thoughts and choose one’s wording carefully, but writing is easily improved with even the briefest review. Always read over what you have written (whether it’s a tweet or a book manuscript) before you distribute or publish it—not only to adhere to the mechanical basics of grammar, syntax, usage, and style but also to check for narrative flow and conciseness. The following sentences, and the discussions and revisions that follow each one, include advice for paring unnecessary words and phrases.
1. As you establish your policies, it is recommended that you develop a comprehensive list of business activities.
When offering recommendations, avoid overly polite entreaties, and simply state the advice as an imperative: “As you establish your policies, develop a comprehensive list of business activities.” (Other words that signal an expendable phrase are advised, suggested, necessary, and imperative.)
2. Nearly all of the processes and steps conducted during this phase were planned in the early stages.
In “all of the” phrases, of is almost always optional, and the can often be safely omitted as well: “Nearly all processes and steps conducted during this phase were planned in the early stages.”
3. IPO activity has increased over the past few years, and that presents a great advantage for the company.
Be alert for opportunities to condense sentences consisting of two independent clauses into a simple statement. Here, what was an introduced observation is recast as an acknowledged phenomenon, changing the subject from “IPO activity” to “the increase in IPO activity”: “The increase in IPO activity over the past few years presents a great advantage for the company.”
4. Organizations can realize tremendous value from risk management in a cost-effective and efficient way.
The presence of way (or manner, or basis, or any similar vague noun) at the end of a sentence signals a sentence in need of abbreviation. Simply dismantle the phrase that ends with the noun and convert the adjectives that precede the noun into adverbs: “Organizations can cost-effectively and efficiently realize tremendous value from risk management.”
5. There are core sets of critical activities and critical communications that must be performed at this stage.
When a sentence or clause begins with an expletive (“There is/are” or “It is/They are”), consider omitting the phrase and beginning the sentence with the noun or noun phrase that follows (and delete the now-extraneous that that follows the subject): “Core sets of critical activities and critical communications must be performed at this stage.”
Taking Conciseness Too Far
Be cautious, however, about overzealous conciseness, as in the case of multiple nouns and noun phrases stacked in a dense swarm of words. Relaxing a sentence can be just as effective as tightening it in improving a sentence:
Overly concise: Executive management and board of directors’ expectations about scalability can be unrealistic.
Relaxed: The expectations of executive management and the board of directors about scalability can be unrealistic.
From: Daily Writing Tips

Writing Science for the Public

It’s no secret that science has a PR problem. Scientists, it seems, are generally viewed as cold and competent but not warm and trustworthy. According to social psychologist Susan Fiske of Princeton University, a person’s perceived warmth strongly influences how much they are trusted. This presents a problem for scientists, especially in an era when funding, research impact, and science literacy rely so heavily on communicating effectively with a broader audience. Even when seeming warm and trustworthy could help their message be heard, it can be hard for scientists to shake the “cold and competent” stereotype. The authoritative and unemotional way that scientists are taught to write for journal articles usually is not appropriate when communicating with a general audience. Learning the principles of journalistic nonfiction often requires scientist authors to step away from an academic writing style that has come to feel intuitive. Nevertheless, using these styles can make the scientist’s work more relatable, memorable, and trusted.

Here are some tips:

• Write for the readers—Scientists tend to aim their writing toward what they think their colleagues want to read. This is a natural reflex—after all, that’s the audience they’re accustomed to thinking about when they write journal articles and grant proposals. But a scientist’s colleagues will be a minority of the readership of a magazine article. Try to step back, review your own assumptions, and broaden your view of who your audience really is.

• Use your audience's lexicon—Introduce only the terms essential to your story and no more. Even certain words likely to be familiar to readers, like "dynamics" or "mitigate," should be avoided just because they sound jargony and can have different meanings in different fields. Look for alternatives that are more direct. At the same time, avoid talking down to your audience. Sometimes scientists try too hard to make sure everyone is on board. It sounds like they’re talking to middle schoolers, a big turn-off to most readers.

• Your first sentence must be indelible—Leave your impression early. Many academics start with something more like a broader impacts statement or an obvious foundational concept in their field, as they would in a journal article. But if you tell readers something they already know in the first sentence, they are likely to think you have nothing to say that they don't already know. You risk losing readers right then and there. If your article contains news of major breakthroughs, many of your readers will completely miss it.

• Know where you are taking the reader first and then tell them—Show them—within the first page, provide them with a story that illustrates what is at stake and sets the scaffolding for your thesis. Your reader is busy and has lots of other things to read. They will not read your article unless you immediately let them know why they should, and fine prose is one of the quickest ways to focus your reader’s attention.

• Each subsection and paragraph is a potential pathway into the text for a scanning reader—Each paragraph should introduce an interesting new idea with a topic sentence.

• Questions generally make poor topic sentences— Framing the topic as a question can be a hard habit to break. But in narrative nonfiction, posing questions instead of stating the topic outright risks leaving out crucial information, such as who is asking the question, why that individual cares about it, and how it was first raised. Introducing how the line of inquiry arose in the first place is usually an important part of a science story.

• Each subsection needs to transition the reader from one idea to the next— As a section concludes it should signal why the next section follows. Transitions are the key.

• Stop listing things—just stop!—Try instead to figure out the narrative tying the pieces of a list together. Used profusely in academic and government writing, lists are an efficient way of communicating points or variables. But they’re dry and can be a real slog for a reader. All too easily, they become the place where readers' eyes will glaze over and they will start flipping to another part of the magazine or return to scanning social media. A more intuitive way to communicate such ideas is to talk about how the objects of the list are connected to one another. It might take an extra sentence or two, but the reader will grasp the concepts more readily and remember them better.

• Use the first person—Even though the desire to avoid the first person often comes from a sense of humility, text that is essentially autobiographical but avoids first person doesn't necessarily sound humble. It just sounds impersonal. Readers will stop reading quickly if they don't feel connected with the people or places in the story.

• If you want people to understand that a problem addressed by your research affects real people, you need to illustrate the problem by telling a story about real people—When scientists rattle off statistics but do not talk about how they connect to people’s lives, they risk coming off as cold and distant. Anecdotes may not have a place in science writing, but they are absolutely essential to journalistic and literary nonfiction.

• Avoid passive voice and clunky sentence structures—Although passive voice is not uncommon in scientific journal articles, it sounds distant, abstract, and stuffy. Today's readers have very little patience for slogging through wordy writing because you’re competing with short communication in the social media.

• When you feel you are done writing, don't just stop in your tracks once you’ve added the last bit of information you’d planned to include—Any article needs a conclusion, but one very different from the kind you might write for a typical journal article. Narrative nonfiction conclusions return to the intrigue, suspense, or line of inquiry the writer established to draw the reader further into the article, providing a sense of closure and wrapping up any loose ends. The conclusion is not just a repetitive summary of everything the article has just said. Try to find some forward-looking insights that show greater context for your work.

Using Correct Grammar

Those grammar classes seem like eons ago. Now we’re writers and we’re not as sure as we used to be. Years of exposure to lazy writing and editing by publishers and the media make things sound right, just because we’ve heard them over and over. As an editor, I’m offering some tidbits that I hope will help you refine your writing.

Phrase vs. Clause

A phrase is a group of grammatically related words that does not contain a main verb. T e wards in the phrase act as a unit, usually functioning as a part of speech. For example:

The girl is in school today, but tomorrow she is going to hunt. Notice that " in school " and "to hunt" are phrases functioning as adverbs describing a place or activity. "The girl" is a phrase in the sense that the words go together as determiner and noun, but it does not function as a part of speech.

A clause is a group of grammatically related words that does contain a main verb_

Some clauses can stand alone as complete sentences. Such clauses are called main or

independent clauses. For example: The girl is at home today, but tomorrow she is going hunting.

The two clauses in this sentence are "The girl is in school today" and "tomorrow she is going to hunt." The joining word "but" is simply a connecting word; it does not belong to either clause. Either clause, therefore, can stand alone, expressing a complete thought:

The girl is in school today. (complete thought) Tomorrow she is going to hunt. (complete thought)

Other clauses are prevented from standing alone because they begin with words that limit their meaning, words like because and when. Such clauses are called subordinate or dependent clauses. For example: The boy quit school because he missed too many classes. "The boy quit school" is a complete thought and, therefore, a main clause. "Because he missed too many classes " is an incomplete thought and, therefore, a subordinate clause. The "because” leaves us wondering what went before.

COMMON ERROR: A common writing fault is to separate two independent clauses with a comma (with no conjunction after it).

INCORRECT: They have a fly casting class here, the students like it.

CORRECT: They have a fly casting class here. The students like it.

or

CORRECT They have a fly casting class here, and the students like it.

What’s the Object?

As a part of the sentence, an object is a word that receives the action of an action verb. For example, in the sentence The batter hit the ball, the action of hitting has a receiver, ball.  The ball receives the action and is, therefore, called the object of the verb.

There are two kinds of objects: direct and indirect. The word that receives the action of the verb is called the direct object. When the direct object is passed indirectly to another receiver, that receiver is the indirect object. For example: My sister writes me long letters.

The direct object is "letters." The indirect object is "me." "Letters" receives the action of writing, while “me” receives the letters. One way to tell the two objects apart is that the indirect object usually comes directly after the verb.

Another way to determine which object is which is to ask these questions about the verb:

1. "Writes" what? Answer. "letters," so direct object.

2. "Writes" to whom or for whom? Answer: "me," so indirect object

Some verbs that often take indirect objects are: write, send, tell, give, buy, and sell.

Interrogative Pronoun?

Standard forms of this pronoun include: what, which, who, whom, whose. These pronouns are used to introduce questions: What are the odds? Who left the gate open? Which is mine?

NOTE: The subject pronoun “who” has the object form “whom.” It is the pronoun most often misused in the media today.

The tendency for many speakers is to avoid whom altogether and use who as both subject and object. This is no longer viewed as a serious error. However, using whom where the subject form is called for is an error to be avoided at all costs. For example:

ACCEPTABLE: Who are you calling?

CORRECT Whom are you calling?

INCORRECT: Whom is coming with us to the lodge?

CORRECT Who is coming with us to the lodge?

Demonstrative Pronoun

Standard forms of this pronoun are: this, that, these, those. These pronouns are used to stand for a noun and separate it from other entities. For example:

Is this the one you wanted? land me those.

NOTE: Generally speaking, use this and these to indicate items near the speaker, and that and those for items farther away. Notice that demonstrative pronouns replace the noun. The same words - this, that, these, and those - are also used as "demonstrative determiners" or demonstrative adjectives." For example: This woods is dark. (Here “this” is specifying the noun "woods," telling us which woods.)

Relative Pronoun

The relative pronouns are that, who, whom, which, where, when, and why. Like other pronouns, the relative pronoun replaces a noun. Like a conjunction, it serves as a joining word

between clauses. For example:

That's the man who shot my deer.

The word "who" is a relative pronoun. It stands for "man" and it (inks the main clause "That's the man" to the dependent clause "who shot my deer."

Photo Captions-an important vehicle for information dissemination

Photo captions are the most read body type in a publication. Of all the information content, only the titles of articles and abstracts have higher readership than captions. It follows that standards of accuracy, clarity, completeness and good writing are as high for captions as for other parts of the paper. As with headlines, captions must be crisp; as with articles, they must be readable and informative. 

   Figure Captions: Captions describe the photo or graph. Descriptions or discussion of the content of the Figure should be handled in the text of the article.