Chapter 8

The first thing that came to my mind when reading this article was the importance of being clear. Clarity is such a large factor when writing all types of papers. When I go to thinking about this topic of clarity, clarity isn’t just important in writing but in all aspects of communication whether it is in a movie, radio, books, magazines or in writing itself. The problem is how can we be more of a clear writer? I think this comes with experience and time. The author says in our book, “we never know what we want to say until we’ve written it.” This is such a clear sentence and makes complete sense. When I’m writing a paper, sometimes I feel like I am all over the place. I fell when the reader actually starts reading this paper they are going to get dizzy! The last sentence is something that struct me as insightful. It reads, “deep or complex ideas need not be expressed in obscure ways. Indeed they shouldn’t be.” Going along with clarity is coherence. Making sure that paragraphs are flowing together smoothly, and sentences actually follow idea to idea is so important to giving the reader an idea of understanding. Conciseness is something that often times writers in high school and college struggle with when given a large paper to write. When the teacher says there is a minimum of 8 pages, often times students will write for six pages and then go back in and add enough sentences of ‘blah’ until the paper has reached the eight page minimum. BUT, when conciseness is drowned with these ‘blah’ sentences, the reader may get bored or lost. Adding unconcise sentence can add unclarity and incoherency. Lastly, something that sounds so simple (and perhaps is) is punctuation. Punctuation is probably the easiest that I have mentioned, yet if punctuation is wrong, the whole paper can lose credit. The audience may come to believe that if the person can’t use proper punctuation, there is no way I can trust what the reader is saying.

I know I will need to work on all of these topics. I know that my clarity and the coherentness of my papers is a big struggle. I feel if I can continue working with these two topics, my papers will be delivered in such a convincing way. The book in chapter eight calls this deliver, deliver, deliver!