Writing Effectively Workshop (Career Service Post)

Yesterday (4/19/2012 @ 3 pm) I attended the “Writing Effectively: Clear and Effective Sentences” Workshop administered by Duane Roen and Paula Schevers. It was a very interesting workshop because I went into it thinking that I already knew how to write effectively and that I was not going to walk away from it with any tips or new information to apply in my future writing. I was wrong. I learned numerous new things to incorporate into my writing. After the workshop was over, I started to think about my writing and realized that there are a lot of times when my writing consists of wordy phrases and is sometimes unclear. I found the main cause of my unclear writing to be that I am always trying to make my academic writing sound grandiose or pompous to impress readers. At the end of the day, regardless of the fact that I realized that I needed to incorporate a couple of strategies to improve my writing, I found that I am not too shabby of a writer.
The workshop went through a lengthy handout that consisted of several exercises that revolved around the concept of clear and effective writing. I will not describe each activity but I will give a few examples. In the first activity, we had to distinguish which sentence was “clearer” out of the sentences provided. The second and third activities had us eliminate unnecessary words and replacing wordy phrases, respectively. The fourth activity required us to replace nominalizations with action verbs and the eighth activity had us editing for parallelism in a series of items. Most of the exercises were easy but a few of them required a little more time and thought. Despite the fact that the workshop was a little lengthy, I thoroughly enjoyed. It was presented well and I can honestly say that I learned some great stuff that I can definitely use in the future.