Entrepreneurship Development and Communication Skills (1+1)

Writing Skills

Don’ts

(i) Avoid clichés: A cliché is a faded word or a phrase which has lost itseffectiveness because of overuse. When it is first coined, it is fresh and vigorous and conveys the menaning vividly. With the passage of time it loses sharpness and ceases to exercise the desired impace.

(ii) Very often when you start writing, such words and phrases would come to your mind and if you are not alert, find a place in the text of your report and thus weaken it. Although clichés are not necessarily unsuitable or wrong their frequent use would tire the discriminating reader. In the beginning you may have some difficulty in recognizing clichés. Soon, however, you would discover that phrases such as ‘worthwhile areas’, ‘inter-disciplinary techniques’, ‘broader fields’, the ‘long-range view’, mean little or merely serve as substitute for real ideas. You may feel tempted to use them only because they readily occur to you. The following extract makes excessive use of clichés. Notice how tiresome it is to read it:

(iii) Original extract. He left no stone unturned in his efforts to achieve tenure. Finally, a sadder but a wiser man, he learned that in this day and age, tenured professorships are few and far between. His campaign ground to a halt, and at subsequent faculty meetings, he was conspicuous by his absence. He concluded his farewell to his students with these words of wisdom, ‘Last but not lease, follow this advice: do as say, not as I do.’

(iv) Suggested revision . He tried strenuously to gain tenure. But finally he became aware that few tenured professorships are available. He ceased his efforts and stopped attending faculty meetings. In his farewell to his students, he exhorted them not to follow his career as an example.

Some clichés commonly used are given below:

Food for thought, crowning glory, part and parcel, sum and substance, the vast majority, burning question, level best, spare no efforts, overriding considerations, desperate need, discuss threadbare, teeming millions, leave no stone unturned, untiring efforts, eminently satisfactory, kind perusal, favourable consideration, resource personnel, hotbed of politics, explore every avenue, iron hand of the law, day in and day out, awake to one’s duty, heart and soul, melting pot, etc.

There is a caution. There are a few clichés that communicate an idea so clearly that it would be difficult think of a substitute. The familiar phrases like ‘a drop in the ocean’, ‘wear and tear’, ‘practice what preach’ are hard to improve upon.

Avoid excessive use of jargon: Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary defines jargon as ‘the mical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group.’ Every group of specialists developed a set of highly specialized terms; yet these are the very words that cause readers a lot of difficulty. Communiation of technical matter in non-technical language is not easy but the ability to do so can be acquired with practice. For report writing it is essential to acquire this ability. For the reader of your report may not be a specialist in the subject . Only an inexperienced writer would think that the use of jargon is the mark of intellectual superiority. If he does not check the habit of using jargon, he would meet the fate of other jargonists. His writing would be weak and unintelligible and tire the reader soon. However, remember that every profession has its jargon and it would be difficult to communicate to fellow professionals without its use. Jargon saves time but this is not the only reason which makes our writing jargon-ridden. Jargon is sometimes used to nourish one’s ego and enable a group to speak in terms that impress or mystify the outsider. Its use is also justified on the ground that complex thought cannot be expressed without the use of highly technical language. But the fact is that just as lethargy prompts us to use clichés, false pride impels us to use jargon.

Let your writing be as jargon-free as possible. Try to use words that are more widely understood so that those who do not belong to the specialist group are also able to follow you. Mach-2, for example, is a jargon in aeronautics. But it would be wrong to assume that it is universally understood. If you represent an aircraft company and are trying to impress the shareholders, you may say, ‘we are designing a plane to fly at speeds beyond Mach-2’. Would it not be better if you said instead, ‘we are designing a plane to fly over two times the speed of sound?’

Ours is an age of specialization, which is taking place not only in science and technology, but also in social sciences. Decipher the meaning of the following sentence!

‘They ameliorate the stresses of inter-ethnic situations and provide contents of acculturation under relatively permissive conditions.’

The following three general rules will help you in using jargon:

(i) When a word of a phrase from the general vocabulary expresses your thought as well and as precisely as a specialized term, always use the general term.

(ii) Even if the specialized term is more precise and economical than the general term, do not use it unless you are sure that the reader would understand it.

(iii) When you have to use the specialized term repeatedly, define it carefully at its first appearance.

We now give a few examples to show how the meaning becomes clear if the jargon is removed.

Jargon-ridden. The biota exhibited a one hundred per cent mortality response.

Jargon-free. All the plants and animals died.

Jargon-ridden. The responsibility of a person involved in pedagogical pursuits is to impart knowledge to those sent to his for instruction.

Jargon-free. The teacher’s job is to instruct student.

Now we give an example that shows how communication completely fails because of the use of jargon

A plumber discovered that hydrochloric acid was good for cleaning clogged drains. He sent his suggestions to the Bureau of Standards.

‘The efficacy of hydrochloric acid,’ the Bureau wrote back, ‘is indisputable, but he ionic residues are incompatible with metallic permanence.’

The plumber replied, ‘Thank you, I thought it was a good idea too.’

Finally someone at the Bureau wrote ‘don’t use hydrochloric acid! It corrodes the pipes.’

One more small point. Language is in a state of flux. Among the changes that you would notice all around you is the tendency to form new words with suffixes ‘-wise’, ‘-ise’. Often these suffixes rob a word of its exact meaning. For example, ‘They finalized the contract may be taken to mean:

(i) They put the contract into is final form.

(ii) They completed the writing of the contract.

(iii) They agreed on the terms of the contract.

(iv) They accepted and signed the contract.

What meaning does the following sentence convey: We are factoryising our farms. Turning our farms into factories? Setting up factories on farms? Organising farms as though they were factories?

Look at the challenge ‘-wise’ offers:

We can do very little about this instrument , resolution-wise.

These are far enough, atomic number-wise , to produce big changes.

There are not many things instrumentation-wise a man can do.

Such words foster woolly thinking and vague writing and impede communication. Beware of them.

Avoid using foreign words and phrases: Foreign words and phrases, like jargon, are also often used impress and mystify the reader or to parade one’s scholarship. Some writers believe that their use could make the writing dignified. Thus, instead of ‘see above’ they use ‘vide supra’ and for ‘the distification for ‘, ‘raison d’etre’. To keep your writing simple, use plain English for foreign words and rases.

Report writing, the use of accepted abbreviations is unavoidable. However, certain abbreviations derived from foreign words and phrases, masked as time-savers such as op. cit., loc. Cit., create a lot of confusion, specially if the report has a large number of references. Even though they save the labour both the author and the printer. They demand extra work from the reader. Abbreviations like, e.g., vs., viz., am., pm, etc. are well understood and you need not avoid them.

Avoid redundancy: Redundancy is the part of a message that can be eliminated without loss of formation. It may be either the use of unnecessary words or needless repetition of an idea. It has been said that a sentence should have no unnecessary words, just as a drawing should have no necessary lines, and a machine no unnecessary parts. Extra words do not confer extra value to the ought.

The race in this higly competitive world we need an alert and agile mind. A ponderous mind among other things, redundancy in writing. Cut out the unnecessary words from your writing see how the thought begins to shine clearly. If you prune your language with patience and discernment, your writing would automatically become pointed and sharp. Unfortunately, superfluity is the most common cause of woolliness in expression and yet it is most easily avoidable. The student are asked to write technical articles by following preocedures