Clear Sentences Checklist
Here's a checklist of questions you can ask yourself to make your writing easier for your reader to understand.
Do all of the words in the sentence serve a purpose?
As we saw in the example sentence, one of the reasons it was confusing is there was additional information that didn't serve the intent of the sentence. When you're trying to fill space in a paper, suddenly adjectives, adverbs, and unnecessary asides often start popping up. Worse, many students, in the course of trying to reach minimum length requirements for a paper, start writing sentences with no substance at all. Let's look at an example:
In the course of the novels we are given multiple chances over and over to become suspicious of Snape's character, most importantly the multiple times that he harasses Harry and his friends for seemingly no reason at all even though they hadn't done anything to him.
The sentence, an analysis of A-Popular-Book-Series-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, is pumped full of redundancies and ambiguous phrases that take away from the clarity of the sentence. First, we have 'multiple chances' and 'over and over.' As the writer, maybe what I think I'm saying is that Snape gives multiple reasons to doubt him on several separate occasions. Or maybe what I mean is that he does certain things enough times - i.e. 'over and over' - that there are multiple reasons to doubt him. It's not clear, so it has to go. Let's get rid of 'over and over.'
Next, we have 'most importantly the multiple times.' We've already used 'multiple' in the sentence once, so let's replace that with a synonym like 'many.' Also, what does 'most importantly' tell us? It seems to refer back to the 'multiple reasons,' but what is most important? If what the writer really means is to point out specific instances, he must be specific. Let's replace 'most importantly' with 'including.'
Next, let's look at the last part of the sentence, 'seemingly no reason at all even though they hadn't done anything wrong to him.' This is classic fluff, as 'seemingly no reason at all' and 'even though they hadn't done anything wrong to him' express the same sentiment. Choose one - whichever you think is most effective. But we'll clip the last part entirely and remove 'at all' since there's no difference between 'no reason' and 'no reason at all'; that last part also features 'seemingly,' a word choice that makes the sentiment weaker, not stronger. Are you still with me?
Finally, to backtrack to a matter of style, ask yourself: what does 'In the course of the novels' mean? What course are we talking about? Let's remove 'in the course of' entirely and let 'the novels' speak for themselves and not make it an introductory clause but put it in the thick of the action. After our patented Sentence Weight Loss Plan™, here's the lean, mean sentence we're left with:
We are given multiple chances in the novels to become suspicious of Snape's character, including the many times he harasses Harry and his friends for no reason.
Is the sentence in passive voice?
Look. Passive voice isn't always a bad thing (and we'll go into the problems with passive voice in greater depth in other lessons), but in general, you want to avoid it because it emphasizes all the wrong parts of the sentence and, worse, bores your readers. Check this out:
The new life form discovered by the scientists will be remembered by generations to come.
We're talking about discovering new life! Let's not make it boring. In the active voice, the subject is the one performing the action - 'Gladys sang a song.' - but in the passive voice the subject is having the action done to it, as in, 'The song was sung by Gladys.' Here we've got a couple of passive constructions, so let's fix them to make the verbs active again. Let's change 'The new life form discovered by the scientists' to 'The scientists discovered a new life form'. (See, now the scientists are doing the discovering, not having the discovering done to them). Then, let's change 'will be remembered' to 'remember' and place it so that 'generations' are performing the action. So the whole sentence now looks like this:
The scientists discovered a new life form that generations to come will remember.
Much more interesting!
Have I made any common mistakes?
Finally, check to make sure you haven't made any obvious errors. Are all of your commas, colons, and semicolons in the right place? Is anything misspelled? Do your subjects and verbs all agree with each other (singular to singular and plural to plural)? It's important to edit and proofread your sentences because little mistakes make your sentences confusing and distract your reader from the point you're trying to make. While your reader is staring at that misplaced comma, he's completely ignoring the substance of your sentence. There goes all your hard work.
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