Jeffrey Strausser - Painless Writing

To Beth, Katie, and Matthew

Copyright 2021, 2016, 2009, 2001 by Jeffrey Strausser

All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-5062-6813-2

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This book presents nine Painless Techniques to make your writing clear, interesting, and concise. Employing these techniques will immediately transform your writing style so that you can write better with less time and effort.

Each technique has its own chapter that describes and demonstrates the technique through straightforward examples. Practice makes permanent; each chapter contains writing exercises to help you make these techniques a permanent part of your writing style.

Does dramatically improving your writing appeal to you? If so, grab the reins and take control of your writing. It is never too late to develop a clear, interesting, and concise writing style. The sooner you begin, the sooner it will happen. Its painless!

Painless Icons and Features

This book is designed with several unique features to help make writing easy.

PAINLESS TIP

You will see Painless Tips throughout the book. These include helpful tips, hints, and strategies on the surrounding topics.

CAUTIONMajor Mistake Territory!

Caution boxes will help you avoid common pitfalls or mistakes. Be sure to read them carefully.

REMINDER

Reminders will call out information that is important to remember. Each reminder will relate to the current chapter or will reference key information you learned in a previous chapter.

BRAIN TICKLERS

There are brain ticklers throughout each chapter in the book. These quizzes are designed to make sure you understand what youve just learned and to test your progress as you move forward in the chapter. Complete all the Brain Ticklers and check your answers. If you get any wrong, make sure to go back and review the topics associated with the questions you missed.

EXAMPLES

There are many examples throughout the book to help you identify good writing techniques, such as First Attempt and Better. Follow these examples to help you improve your writing style.

SIDEBARS

These shaded boxes contain extra information that relates to the surrounding topics. Sidebars can include detailed examples or practice tips to help make writing techniques interesting and painless.

Have you ever read something where the writer used too many words to describe what was happening or to describe something? Remember growing increasingly frustrated until you said, Enough, already! and started skimming, or, worse yet, you just quit reading?

Many times, writers using multi-word, vague prepositional phrases rather than one-word descriptive adjectives or prepositions cause wordy writing because they use many words when only a few are needed. Unfortunately, the problems do not stop there. Many students substitute prepositional phrases throughout their writing where verbs would have been the better choice. This writing fault leaves them with a passage that is wordy and dull. This wordiness and dullness causes readers to skim, and once they begin skimming, they are not going to fully appreciate the work that you put into your assignment.

Look at some of your writing. Be honest. Is it wordy... dull... hard to understand? Maybe you are writing with too many wordy and vague prepositional phrases. If you are, dont worry! This common writing fault can be easily corrected. All you have to do is use the Painless Technique presented in this chapter and you will soon be eliminating unnecessary prepositional phrases.

PAINLESS TIP

Dont overdo it!

Do not try to eliminate all prepositions from your writing because prepositions and prepositional phrases provide your reader with additional information about the nouns and verbs in the sentences you have written. The problem is that many writers overuse them because they think this is the only way to provide information. However, you will soon learn that is not the case. Overusing prepositions is a common fault, which, left unattended, develops into a bad habit that leads to wordy and dull writing. We certainly dont want to do that! Therefore, eliminate all unnecessary prepositions and their accompanying wordy baggage.

The first Painless Technique will help you eliminate this dull baggage from your writing. Lets start by stating this first technique.

PAINLESS TECHNIQUE #1Make your writing clearer and more interesting by eliminating unnecessary prepositional phrases.

Make sure you can identify prepositions and their phrases

A preposition is a word used to link a noun to a sentence and, in so doing, to relate the noun to either another noun or a verb. The English language contains many words that can function as prepositions. Below are words that commonly function as prepositions:

A prepositional phrase consists of a preposition and a noun or a pronoun acting as the prepositions object. Within this phrase, the preposition depicts a relationship to the noun. Some prepositional phrases are shown below.