Alger 2 University Level: Master 01 ling.

Faculty of foreign languages Lecturer: Mrs. Soumia BENNANI1

Department of English
Module: Writing

Lecture 02: Writing Concise and Precise

Situation:

You wrote a twenty-seven pages article. You would like to send it on the day of
the deadline. The journal's editor asks you to diminish the number of your
article's essay by 7 pages!!!!
What do you do?
Write the most important procedures you would take two hours before meeting
the deadline.

Theoritically:
Rewriting texts can be done through different techniques:

At one point when you read, you might want to transmit what you read. If you
keep the exact passage (copy out the text) and you use quotation marks, the technique
is called: QUOTING.

If you don’t use these marks, you are sentenced to PLAGIARISM. The latter
is the term used for “[taking the words or ideas] of someone else and [passing] it off
as one’s own”.

When you express the text’s meaning using different words, you aim is to
clarify the writer’s greater objective. The rewording of the text stands, most of the
time, in a gray area where you cannot be right or wrong. This technique is called
PARAPHRASING.

1
Officially, you can get in touch with your teacher via E-mail: soumia.bennani@univ-
alger2.dz

It is optional to try to get in touch with your teacher via facebook.

Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/soumia.bennani.505

Classroom substitution is your Fb group for the module:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/229711628647980
 You can read a text and then SUMMARIZE it in your own words. In this
case, you are not to reflect upon the critical side of this text. You are just giving a
brief statement of the text’s main points.

When you reflect upon the text’s significance, you tend to explain the hidden
meaning of words/ideas. When you interpret, you convey your own understanding of
the text through your own words/ideas; you state the reasons that made you perceive
of the text as such.

When you take a given text and reduce the number of words, there are several
techniques. Shrinking the size of a text includes either keeping only the necessary
meaningful words or rewording the whole text in your own words.

To improve your writing, it is important to keep in mind:

 Vary your sentences length. (Simple/complex/compound/compound-complex

sentences) You should cut unnecessary conjunctions or subordinations. Find
them and decide if you can keep/ remove them; if you keep one sentence or
more.
 For academic reason, use passive voice.
 Reconsider your punctuation and capitalization. You should consider splitting
the sentence if you count more than three commas in your sentence.
 Avoid redundancy: Some words do not add value to the text as you can
remove them without affecting the sentence’s meaning. (Such as: In spite of
the fact that/Although, the one and the only/the only/ the unique, As a final
conclusion/The conclusion/to conclude…)
 Make your topic sentence interesting for the reader to keep reading the rest of
the paragraph. Introducing second and third points risks skipping the reader’s
attention.
 Organize the essay’s structure. Make sure to keep one thought per paragraph.
 Avoid run-on sentences or fused sentences which occur when two complete
sentences are squashed together without using a coordinating conjunction or
proper punctuation, such as a period or a semicolon. Run-on sentences can be
short or long. A long sentence isn’t necessarily a run-on sentence. For more
details, please check:
http://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/runons.htm
 Finally use the statistics option on your computer to count the number of the
words in your text. Reducing your word count will force you to evaluate
each word. Do not cut crucial information, though. Make sure you keep
essential ideas with fewer words.
 Practice:
1- Exercise about run-on sentences: (auto-correction)
http://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/quizzes/runons_quiz.htm
2- On your facebook group, you will find a text (Here is just a picture!) entitled: The
Alienated Henderson and the Paradox of Freedom.

a/ Shorten the text. Mention the technique(s) you used.

b/ Use the techniques you think they are suitable but DO NOT CHANGE the
meaning. The text is 704 words. Write no more than 300.