To KISS the ABCs of Writing

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Salaam and Greetings All,

 

It looks like a great day for Monday morning. It rained for a couple of days. That got the haze away, albeit probably temporarily. And hopefully the water catchment areas are doing better.

 

Last week I wrote about reading. A former colleague commented, the writing was laborious. She didn’t used that word, but, I knew where she was coming from. In my defense, it was about reading, not writing.

 

Now, we shall write about writing.

 

What is KISS the ABCs?

 

KISS

·         Keep It Simple Stupid.

·         This is not to say the reader is stupid. The idea is to keep things simple, avoid jargons.

·         The main objective of writing, is to express, not impress.

·         Zig Ziglar recommends 8th grade English. I guess in Malaysia’s context, we can use Form 5.

 

ABCs

·         Accuracy. Brevity. Clarity.

 

Accuracy.

·         Use numbers. Avoid superlatives, or words, eg: frequent, sometimes, big, huge, fast, slow.

·         Use comparisons. Eg; As big as a soccer field, or as tall as a five story building.

 

Brevity

·         “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” – Mark Twain

·         Avoid redundancies:

o   Repeat again. Repeat is doing it again.

o   One week’s time. Week is a time.

o   Blue in color. Blue is color.

·         Article “The”. We tend to put the article “the” to every other word. Rule of thumb, write as you normally would, then when editing, remove “the”. If it doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence, it does not need to be there.

 

Clarity

·         Brevity is good. However, it should not be at the expense of clarity.

·         “Shoot him not spare him”.  This is an ambiguous statement. It could mean “Shoot him, not spare him”, or “Shoot him not, spare him”. What do you mean?

·         “Ahmad and John loves fishing. He does it every week.” Who does it every week? Ahmad or John?

 

 

 

Enough for now. Enjoy the week.

 

Take care Y’all and Godspeed.

 

MH370, we pray for your return.

 

Iskandar

+6019 229 0182

http://thots2paper.blogspot.com/

 

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