Category: Writing

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Who can understand the viscous language of everyday American commerce and enterprise: the business letter, the interoffice memo, the corporation report, the notice from the bank explaining its latest “simplified” statement? What member of an insurance or medical plan can decipher the brochure that tells him what his costs and benefits are? What father or mother can put together a child’s toy-on Christmas Eve or any other eve-from the instructions on the box? Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline pilot who wakes us to announce that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable weather wouldn’t dream of saying that there’s a storm ahead and it may get bumpy. The sentence is too simple-there must be something wrong with it.
But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb which carries the same meaning that is already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves she reader unsure of who is doing what-these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur, ironically, in proportion to education and rank.
During the late 1960s the president of a major university wrote a letter to mollify the alumni after a spell of campus unrest. “You are probably aware,” he began, “that we have been experiencing very considerable potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction on issues only partially related.” He meant that the students had been hassling them about different things. I was far more upset by the president’s English than by the students’ potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction. I would have preferred the presidential approach taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he tried to convert into English his own government’ memos, such as this blackout order of 1942:
“Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination.”
“Tell them,” Roosevelt said, “that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows.”
Simplify, simplify. Thoreau said it, as we are so often reminded, and no American writer more consistently practiced what he preached. Open Walden to any page and you will find a man saying in a plain and orderly way what is on his mind…
How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing: one can’t exist without the other. It is impossible for a
Attachments:
6335897_1_Read-Zinsser.docx

UsingEBSCOhost Web, locate an article which deals with the potential benefits or disadvantages of an online education. Prepare a 100-150 word response in which you identify the strengths and weaknesses of the writer’s argument. What does the writer do well? What could he/she have done differently? In your response, focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the article/argument. Do NOT provide a summary of the article. Include a ink to the article beneath your response.
(peer review, safe guard, no plagiarism, and need (100-150)words).

Unit 5.1 DB: Preparing for a Crisis
Why should public sector organizations createplans in advance for a crisis? Describe the main elements of good practice in preparing for a crisis? Provide a specificreal-world example of a crisis and how it could have been better managed.
1 paragraph and 3 scholarly references
https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/contingency-planning-necessity-risk-assessment-8898%20
Attachments:
6335862_1_Chapter-5–Contingency-planning-and-crisis-preparedness.pdf

Unit 5.2 DB: Key Components
Find a public sector organization that you are familiar with, map out the key components of:
a contingency plan for a potentialcrisis.
a preparedness framework for a potential crisis.
1 paragraph and 3 scholarly references
Attachments:
6335861_1_Chapter-5–Contingency-planning-and-crisis-preparedness.pdf

1. How valuable is a person’s time in various cultures? Find a business message (written or visual) that demonstrates that the writer’s culture values courtesy or consensus over time.
2. Identify three major differences between school writing and business writing.

Waste management in the construction industry.