Lesson by Daniel Roche
Description (for Instructors)
This in-class lesson plan uses a series of instructor-led discussions and prompt-based revision activities to help students identify how “concision” affects writing, as well as how to enhance concision in business texts. Students devise, learn, and practice strategies to enhance concision in professional writing examples, as well as analyze the relative concision they achieve in their own BTW 250 texts. By providing students with several concision-aimed revision strategies and applying them to both student and non-student samples, this lesson enhances students’ post-class skill transfer.
The following lesson is designed to be completed synchronously in class. However, it can be adapted into an asynchronous lesson using various tools, such as an interactive quiz, on the Course Management System (CMS) of your choice.
Materials
Explanation (for Students)
1. Discuss terms:
Consider the term “concision,” as well as your associations with it. Some questions you may consider are as follows:
- What does “concision” mean, and what does it mean to be “concise”?
- When is concision useful in writing?
- If you’re aiming to be concise, what tips should you apply to your writing?
Take 2-3 minutes to jot down some of your ideas. Then, we’ll discuss our associations, definitions, and ideas as a class.
For Instructors: During/after this discussion, give students an overview of the five principles of concision:
- Delete words that mean little or nothing (i.e., kind of, actually, particular, really, certainly, various, virtually, basically, generally, given practically, etc.)
- Delete words that repeat the meaning of other words.
- Delete words implied by other words.
- Replace a phrase with a word.
- Change negatives to affirmative.
2. Delete Meaningless Words Exercise
Take the next ~2 minutes to re-phrase the following statement to eliminate meaningless words and achieve greater concision. Volunteers will then share their revised statements with the class.
“Productivity actually depends on certain factors that basically involve psychology more than any particular technology.”
For Instructors: The following can be provided as a sample “simplified” statement:
“Productivity depends on psychology more than technology.”
3. Replace a Phrase with a Word Exercise
Take the next 2-3 minutes to revise the following passage by replacing phrases with synonymous words, thereby achieving greater concision. Volunteers will then share their revised passages with the class.
“As you carefully read what you have written to improve wording and catch errors of spelling and punctuation, the thing to do before anything else is to see whether you could use sequences of subjects and verbs instead of the same ideas expressed in nouns.”
For Instructors: The following can be provided as a sample “simplified” passage: “As you edit, first replace nominalizations with clauses.” A breakdown of the phrase replacement is as follows:
- “carefully read what you have written” = edit
- “the thing to do before anything else” = first
- “use X instead of Y” = replace
- “nouns instead of verbs” = nominalizations
- “sequences of subjects and verbs” = clauses
4. Hemingway App Exercise
Visit www.HemingwayApp.com. Then, copy and paste a piece of your writing from this class or a different class into the Hemingway App. Share your app readout with a fellow peer, being sure to answer the following questions:
- At what “readability grade level” (upper right-hand corner) is your writing?
- Did Hemingway App find any adverbs? Do these adverbs end in “-ly”?
- Did Hemingway App find any uses of passive voice?
- How many sentences are “very hard to read?”
For Instructors: At some point before, during, or after students’ discussions, read them the following passage from the Hemingway App “Help” Page:
“Now, when we say ‘grade level,’ we aren’t saying that’s who you’re writing for. In fact, Ernest Hemingway’s work scores as low 5th grade, despite his adult audience. What our measurement actually gauges is the lowest education needed to understand your prose. Studies have shown the average American reads at a tenth-grade level — so that’s a good target.
“Writing that scores at a 15th-grade level is not better than writing at an 8th-grade level. In fact, a high grade level often means it is confusing and tedious for any reader. Worse, it’s likely filled with jargon. After all, unless you’re writing a textbook (and even then) you don’t want it to sound like a textbook.”
5. Passive Voice Exercise
Take the next 1-2 minutes to re-phrase the following statement to eliminate passive voice and achieve greater concision. Volunteers will then share their revised statements with the class.
“In Lesson 7, wordiness was one of the issues that Williams argues as having a negative impact on concise writing.”
For Instructors: Be sure to explain to your students what passive voice is.
Explain that active voice—in which the subject performs an action—often sounds more direct and confident than passive voice—in which the subject is acted upon. For instance, “John threw a ball” is more commanding than “the ball was thrown by John.”
The following can be provided as a sample “simplified” statement for this exercise: “In Lesson 7, Williams illustrates how wordiness negatively impacts concise writing.”
6. Discuss Other Concision Exercises
Consider the following additional methods for adding concision to your writing. Discuss with a partner how each exercise might work to ensure concision, which exercises you most gravitate towards, and whether some exercises might target certain aspects of concision better than others.
- Use text-to-speech software, such as that found at https://ttsmp3.com/.
- Look at your total word count in a paragraph or page and try to reduce the total word count by 3%.
- Summarize each paragraph with a single sentence or phrase. If anything detracts from the summary ask yourself if it needs to be there.
7. Lesson Review
Use the remainder of class to begin writing a reflective analysis on how concision could be applied to a selected assignment from BTW 250. This analysis should be written in an email format, use specific examples, and amount to a minimum of 250 words. After class, submit your completed analysis to the corresponding submission tool on Moodle.