If you think that something small

cannot make a difference, try going

to sleep with a mosquito in the
room.
Anonymous

Work and value your work

 As/after you write …

• Re-read, review, re-think, re-arrange,

re-write, re-structure, tighten,
sharpen, prune, polish, alter, connect,
eliminate, expand, condense, re-
evaluate
 Working with words

• The right word

• The newspaper, radio, television, and
the ads mediums have prompted a
lot of readings, discussions, and
debates about Gujarat. (?)
• The media has generated a lot of
discourses on Gujarat.
 Working with words

• Remove qualifiers and

intensifiers

• My teacher is incredibly unfair as he

expects me to study so much!
• My teacher is unfair as he expects us
to study Cultural Studies at least one
and a half hours a day.
 Working with words
• Remove tautology

• Over a two-decade period, we can

ascertain that the political climate in
India has advanced forward without
any vision.
• We can ascertain the lack of political
vision in the past two decades.
 Working with words
• Avoid/Replace repetitive words
• In the last ten years, the US media have gone
from being controlled by fifty companies to five
(Schechter 2003). Many of these US media
institutions are corporate conglomerates for
whom the traditions of journalism are incidental
to profit-making. (?)

• In the last ten years, the US media have gone

from being controlled by fifty companies to five
(Schechter 2003). Many of these institutions are
corporate conglomerates for whom the traditions
of journalism are incidental to profit-making.
 Working with words
• Improve verbs, nouns
• Derrida digs a burrow into our
commonly held notions (wrong
understandings) about the written
and the spoken word.
• Derrida burrows into our commonly
held notions (misunderstandings)
about the written and the spoken
word.
 Working with words
• Use precise adverbs and
adjectives
• Reduce as much as possible. If
needed, make them strong and
original.
• An exciting debate is gradually
attaining its peak in contemporary
Cultural Studies. (?)
• A delicious debate is coming to a
simmering boil in Contemporary
 Working with words
• Develop shades of meaning

• Never shall I forget that night, the first night in

camp, that turned my life into one long night
seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children
whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke
under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed
my faith for ever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that
deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that
murdered my God and my soul and turned my
dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I
condemned to live
 Working with words
• Avoid ‘there’ , and ‘that’ traps

• There is this break up of consensus

in Indian Cultural Studies about the
values and roles that it ought to
stand for. (?)
• Indian Cultural Studies schools differ
in their notions about the field’s
values and roles.
• Quotations. Formal quotations, cited as documentary evidence, are
introduced by a colon and enclosed in quotation marks.

• The provision of the Constitution is: "No tax or duty shall be laid on
articles exported from any state." Quotations grammatically in
apposition or the direct objects of verbs are preceded by a comma
and enclosed in quotation marks.

• I recall the maxim of La Rochefoucauld, "Gratitude is a lively sense

of benefits to come." Aristotle says, "Art is an imitation of nature.“

• Quotations of an entire line, or more, of verse, are begun on a fresh

line and centred, but not enclosed in quotation marks.
• Wordsworth's enthusiasm for the Revolution was at first
unbounded: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
• Quotations introduced by that are regarded as in indirect
discourse and not enclosed in quotation marks.
• Keats declares that beauty is truth, truth beauty.
Proverbial expressions and familiar phrases of literary
origin require no quotation marks.
• These are the times that try men's souls. He lives far
from the madding crowd.
• The same is true of colloquialisms and slang.