Adding Clarity to Your Writing

This table presents five writing techniques for increasing the clarity of a document (such as eliminating wordiness). A common point for all of these techniques is to reduce as much as possible both the overall word count (less words mean the message is easier to follow), and to reduce syntactic (grammatical) complexity (less complexity reduces the burden of translators).

Note that this are heuristics, or rules of thumb; there will be circumstances in which a longer and more complex sentences are preferable.

Technique	Explanation	Example
1. Replace clauses with nominalized actions and a general verb (often passive) with clause with the action as a verb.	‘Combining’ the action and the verb itself will save space and make the sentence easier to follow.	Original: An inspection of all the joints must be done before continuing with the next step.   Revised: Inspect all the joints before continuing with the next step.
2. Split apart long strings of coordinated clauses (clauses joined by and or or) into separate sentences or a list.	If sentence as has a lot of coordinated clauses (more than three is a good rule of thumb), then often the result a ‘wall of text’ that reader will skip over.	Original: Thunderbird has a number of features, such as an email client, an address book, an RSS feed reader, a calendar, a TODO list, and notebook.   Revised: Thunderbird has a number of features: An email client.An address book.…
3. Keep subjects and verbs together	Putting lots of extra information between the subject and verb (with subordinate clauses, etc.) makes it harder the understand the underlying logic of the sentence.	Original: The Nix package manager, which can be installed either as a separate package manger on existing [Linux] distributions or as distribution by itself called NixOS, allows users to easily create reproducible builds.   Revised: The Nix package manger allows users to easily create reproducible builds. It is available either as an additional package manager or as package manager for an entire distribution called NixOS.
4. Avoid negation as much as possible.	Sentences with multiple negations are more difficult and will take longer to process than a simpler sentence without negation.	Original: Do not install the Windows recovery drive on a USB stick with no files that you do not want to lose, as the installation process will overwrite everything on the drive.   Revised:  Do not install the Windows recovery drive on a USB stick with any files that yow want to keep, as the installation process will overwrite everything on the drive.
5.Remove redundancies from circular statements	Circular statements are statements that starts and ends with the same premise. Thus, they do not really prove or resolve anything.	Original: You can configure manually the program by editing its configuration file in the home directory, which changes how the program’s behaviour.   Revised: You can configure that program manually by editing its configuration file in the home directory.