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    Concision: A No-Grammar Guide to Good Writing
    Concision: A No-Grammar Guide to Good Writing
    Concision: A No-Grammar Guide to Good Writing
    Ebook54 pages20 minutes

    Concision: A No-Grammar Guide to Good Writing

    By Farhan Musavi

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    About this ebook

    “The best sentence? The shortest.” —Anatole France

    Farhan Musavi got into the business of writing in 2011. Since then he came across the works of thousands of writers and saw most of them making a common mistake.

    They use too many words to say something which can be said in much fewer words—the mistake of not using concision.

    Concision—the first grace of writing style—means saying things in as least number of words as possible, thus not wasting readers' time.

    And this is something very basic. Something no writer can ignore if he wants to be well regarded and taken seriously.

    Now most writers are making this mistake and virtually no one is talking about it.

    Writing blogs are inundated with articles like How to Get a Book Contract, How to Use Twitter for Blog Promotion, How to Get Clients that Pay $100 an Article, etc. But he found there are very few, if any, blogs that talk about this issue.

    However he managed to find a few good resources which dealt with this topic in quite detail. But the problem was that their treatment of the issue was too grammatical.

    In other words this knowledge of concision is traditionally reserved for those who know at least introductory grammar.

    He didn’t like the idea. What is a person, who wishes to improve his writing skills and is not well versed in grammar, to do?

    Hence he set out to condense all that information into simple English, an English which even a non-grammarian may understand. He assembled all the information on concision he could find and converted it into non-technical language.

    The result is the book—Concision: A No-Grammar Guide to Good Writing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFarhan Musavi
    Release dateJun 2, 2020
    ISBN9780463447642
    Concision: A No-Grammar Guide to Good Writing
    Author

    Farhan Musavi

    Farhan Musavi stumbled upon blogging in 2011 when his friend called him to visit his website so that he may earn money from ad impressions. He was immediately hooked.The idea that you can write a blog from home and earn money from it was an intriguing one. He spent the next several months reading about blogging and writing and was surprised when his first article got accepted in Problogger.Since then he has been working as a writer and has done both freelancing and full-time jobs.Today he contributes to reputed journals like The Huffington Post and Lifehacker and blogs on majorjournal.com.He lives in Lucknow, India.

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      Book preview

      Concision - Farhan Musavi

      CONCISION

      A no-grammar guide to good writing

      FARHAN MUSAVI

      Copyright 2015 by Farhan Musavi, majorjournal.com

      Published 2015.

      New impression 2020.

      Smashwords Editon.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, without the prior permission in writing of the author, or as expressly permitted by law.

      However you may reproduce limited passages for reviews and quotations.

      Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the author on mail@majorjournal.com.

      The illustration on the title page is a detail from the painting The Passion of Creation, 19th century, by Leonid Pasternak. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

      The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

      —Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters

      Contents

      Preface

      1. What is concision?

      2. Don’t be extra cautious

      3. Delete words readers can infer

      4. Use parallel structure

      5. Don’t differentiate unnecessarily

      6. Don’t use big words

      7. Do use big words

      8. Announce things with punctuation marks

      9. Don’t explain what readers already know

      10. Don’t write unrelated points

      11. Combine sentences

      12. Change the passive voice to the active voice

      13. Change negative forms to affirmative forms

      14. Trim the modifiers

      15. Keep the metadiscourse under control

      16. Don’t use concision everywhere

      Notes

      Annotated bibliography of further reading

      About the author

      Preface

      I got into the business of writing in 2011. Since then I have come across the works of thousands of writers and I have seen most of them making a common mistake.

      I am not talking about the errors of punctuation, spelling, or grammar (though you may be surprised to know how many writers make even those mistakes). Instead, I am referring to the mistake of using too many words to say something which can be said in much fewer words—the error of failing to use concision.

      And this is something very basic. Something no writer can ignore if he wants to be well regarded and taken seriously.

      Now most writers are making this mistake and virtually no one is talking about it. Writing blogs are inundated with articles like How to Get a Book Contract, How to Use Twitter for Blog Promotion, How to Get Clients that Pay $100 an Article, etc. But

      Enjoying the preview?
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