Clarity, pt. 2

The four sections I read relating to clarity this time around were "Active Verbs," "Parallel Ideas," "Needed Words," and "Variety."

I've always been told by English teachers to avoid the passive voice. The preceding sentence is an example of this passive voice, but I think it is appropriate since I am trying to emphasize that I have always been told to avoid the passive voice. This section on active verbs was helpful because it showed me when passive verb structures are appropriate. After reviewing my project 2, I found this example: "The ocean dried, depositing a large bed of salt in the earth. The salt turned out to be a perfect place to have a nuclear repository, which was dubbed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP)." This sentence is already written in the active voice, but I wanted to emphasize how a salt bed was deposited since that is the relevant information presented in this sentence. To do this, I changed the sentence to read, "A large bed of salt was deposited when this ocean dried. This bed turned out to be a perfect place to have a nuclear repository, which was dubbed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP)." 

The section on parallel ideas was helpful. However, I found that I am already quite aware of parallel structures. I have noticed the awkwardness that is created when parallelism is not employed. As such my essay did not include any examples where parallelism was not used.

The section on needed words was quite intuitive. Despite its seemingly simple nature, though, this section was very helpful in letting me analyze my paper for any errors that arose as a result of missing words. For example, I found this sentence in my introduction: "The issue with nuclear energy and the manufacture of nuclear weapons creates waste." This sentence is unclear and the way it is written makes it sound like the issue creates waste rather than my intended meaning that the issue is that the weapons and power plants create waste. I revised this sentence to read, "The issue with nuclear power plants and the creation of nuclear weapons is that they create waste"

The last section I read was on variety. This is a subject that I am already very conscious of. I do not like when my sentence structures become too similar. Although I do commonly fall into a few repetitive structures, I often attempt to change these upon revision. As such, I found my paper to have satisfactory variation after my first revision.