Assignment #9

The important elements that were discussed in chapter eight were clarity, coherence, conciseness, voice, delivery, punctuation, language usage, and layout. Reading about each of these different styles of writing will make my paper and future papers that I write much better. I would always just write and never had these things that were discussed in the back of my mind.

Often times when I think of clarity, I think of if my writing is clear to myself, not the potential reader. I need to make sure that my paper is clear to the audience that will be reading it. A way to do this is to have my paper edited by more than one person. They can give me feedback on if it is making sense to them or not.

I didn’t even know what coherence meant before I read about it. I always just thought that it meant awake or alert. But in regards to writing, it means having my paper make sense. It flows nicely from idea to idea and has nice transitions.

I have always just tried to fill up the amount of assigned pages assigned to write. As hard as it is, conciseness is important when writing. I need to be as powerful as I can in the least amount of space.

The importance of voice never really mattered to me because I didn’t really care. I just did the assignment. However, the more I look at it, it is important that my personality, writing style, and how I want readers to perceive me stays consistent throughout my paper. This means that quotations I use should somewhat be similar to my writing style and that I am able to effectively relate them to what I am saying.

Punctuation is just a way to end and connect sentences right? Wrong. After reading this section, I realized that punctuation really can affect the way a reader reads and feels about a statement. The reason I though of this was because of the examples given in the chapter eight. I need to better pay attention to my punctuation and think how it will potentially affect the reader.

I like how the book said that language use is to be used as linguistic etiquette. In my research paper, I need to be mindful of all types of people. To include everyone, I should use plural words such as them or us.

The book mentions that a good page layout can strongly affect the persuasion of a reader. I need to follow the instructions about the format of the paper so I can be a more persuasive writer.