Once you have reviewed and revised your message for readability, use the following guidelines to make sure that your message is clear:

•Break up overly long sentences. Do not connect too many clauses with coordinating conjunctions. Long, complicated sentences are difficult to read and understand.

•Rewrite hedging sentences. Sometimes you have to use phrases such as it may be or it seems that to avoid stating a judgment as a fact. Nevertheless, when you have too many such “hedges,” you come across as being unsure of what you are saying.

•Impose parallelism. When you have two or more similar (parallel) ideas to express, use the same grammatical pattern for each related idea. Parallelism can be achieved by repeating the pattern in words, phrases, clauses, or entire sentences.

•Correct dangling modifiers. Sometimes a modifier is not just an adjective or an adverb but an entire phrase modifying a noun or a verb. Be careful not to leave this type of modifier dangling with no connection to the subject of the sentence.

•Reword long noun sequences. When nouns are strung together as modifiers, the resulting sentence is hard to read. You can clarify the sentence by putting some of the nouns in a modifying phrase. Although you add a few more words, your audience will not have to work as hard to understand the sentence.

•Replace camouflaged verbs. Avoid changing verbs into nouns and adjectives, which then require the use of another verb just to get your point across. To enliven your messages, use verbs instead of noun phrases.

•Clarify sentence structure. Keep the subject and predicate of a sentence as close together as possible. When a subject and predicate are too far apart, readers have to read the sentence more than once to figure out who did what. Likewise, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases usually make the most sense when they are placed as close as possible to the words they

modify.

•Clarify awkward references. Business writers sometimes use expressions such as the above-mentioned, as mentioned above, the aforementioned, the former, the latter, and respectively. These words cause readers to jump from point to point, which hinders effective communication. Instead, use specific references, even if you must add a few more words.

Once you have edited your sentences for clarity, focus on conciseness. Use the following guidelines to write concisely:

•Delete unnecessary words and phrases. Some combinations of words have more efficient, one-word equivalents. In addition, avoid the clutter of too many or poorly placed relative pronouns (who, that, which). Even articles can be excessive (such as repeating the in a list of items).

•Shorten long words and phrases. Short words and phrases are generally more vivid and easier to read than long ones.

•Eliminate redundancies. In some word combinations, the words tend to say the same thing. For instance, “visible to the eye” is redundant because visible is enough, without further clarification.

•Recast “It is/There are” starters. If you start a sentence with an indefinite pronoun, such as it or there, odds are that the sentence could be shorter and more active.

Three-Step Writing Process Outline