Wordy-ness

Nota bene: I had mentioned that we would try to cover parallelism this week, but I'd like to save it for next week. 

We've spent a lot of time in this class thinking about writing in terms of the big picture by asking some version of the following questions.  What does the whole essay look like?  What does the whole essay do?  How do we develop our ideas?  How do we put our ideas in a larger context?  and How do we organize our ideas? 

I also want to spend some time in the second half of this class thinking about how to edit our prose to make it communicate more clearly and effectively on the sentence level.  This form of editing assumes that you can recognize the subjects and verbs of sentences, certain parts of speech, and the sentences that have too many of them.

Nota bene 2: Please let me know if you need additional practice with any of the following common errors: run-on sentences, sentence fragments, mixed construction sentences, and /or dangling modifiers.

We want to communicate our ideas using as few words as possible.  This means that we have to recognize and delete common phrases that we use to clear our throats (like "It is necessary to believe that") before we get down to our main points.  We also want to get rid of common phrases that we use for emphasis (like "really," "totally," "so," "do," and "very").  And we want to try to eliminate as many prepositions as possible by preferring, whenever possible, to use action verbs in the active voice.