Beth writes

Tag: concise

  • Watch your language

    Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

    There is a rather clever grammar joke I like, although it’s very old.
    Why did the Judge hand the prisoner a full stop? It ended their sentence.

    This leads on to our discussion of sentence structure. Learning this will mean you don’t have to use Grammarly so much.

    When we write – there are two ways we form a sentence, active and passive.

    In active voice style you start with the subject, as in the person writing or who it is about. In the middle is the verb explaining what the person was doing.
    Finally, the object – what it has been done to. An example of this is “I’m going to the shop.”

    The passive voice reverses this – the object is first, verb is second, subject is third. So the same sentence above would be “the shop is where I’m going.”

    If you need help getting words right , I recommend using Grammarly.

    However, what it can’t do is tell you if your message is going to be offensive. That’s why you need to be aware of cultural issues within your audience.

    Typically, you don’t know who is reading, so it is best to avoid offending anyone.

    If an opinion is against another group and the wrong person saw it, you could be in trouble. There is no guarantee that you wouldn’t.

    This is one area where you can’t be too careful. Just because one disabled person laughed at an ableist joke, does not mean others will.

    So the action here is to choose words carefully, and don’t forget the structure.

  • What’s so amazing about words?

    A notepad with two pencils on a pink background.
    Photo by Mike Murray on Pexels.com

    Before we talk more on fonts, type color, or pictures let’s talk about words. People use words quite a lot. We use them in talking, writing, reading, listening and thinking.

    An open book with hard to decipher writing with other books behind.

    Here is an example of how not to use words well… 

    Have you ever been in a class and felt the teacher was droning on and you didn’t understand? I know for me my mind will start to wander after a few minutes. I don’t mean this to happen but when classes or meetings aren’t interacting this is what happens. How much of the lesson do you think am going to remember?

    A bored child at school stares into space
    Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

    Even when things are written down, they don’t make sense sometimes. The sentence and paragraphs structures aren’t right, or there are a lot of words we don’t understand.

    A man struggling to read information on his laptop.
    Photo by Oladimeji Ajegbile on Pexels.com

    In all our communications throughout life, we are sending or receiving a message from someone else.

    We already looked at what happens when someone doesn’t understand. To make this easier our communications should be

    • Clear – the message should be easy for the audience to follow.
    • Concise – This means being brief and to the point. We do this through keeping our sentences short and splitting different areas into paragraphs.
    • Easy to understand – getting its meaning across to others

    Here are two examples, one follows these rules so let’s see if you can spot which.

    1st) “Due to the supermarket not having what you needed, I couldn’t get your shopping.”
    2nd) “They were out of what you need so I couldn’t buy it.”

    Which sounds better? (The answer is B)

    In summary, remember to

    • Use words your readers know, 
    • keep your message brief & get to the point,
    • Make sure the readers understand your meaning.

    Tomorrow we are going to talk about active and passive voices.