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Chapter Three: Two Common Problems
Makeover Common Problems 1. Rewrite the following passage, intended for a general audience, removing unnecessary set phrases, transitions, intensifiers, and qualifications. Eliminate any repeated information or overexplanation. Change the sentence structure if you like, but include all the major ideas of the original. Reduce the passage by half or more. How do your revisions change the writer's voice?
In conclusion I feel it necessary to state that our current welfare system for distributing
benefits to the poor is none other than ineffective not because it supports that
proportion of the people who may find themselves in need but because of the way in
which benefits are administered, or misadministered, even as we speak. Imposing
demeaning need requirements (requirements that must be met before a person is acknowledged
to be in need of welfare benefits) and regulations based on someone else's arbitrary
moral beliefs, however they arose, on downtrodden welfare recipients is shameful
and counterproductive. In words of one syllable, why not just provide every man,
woman, and child whose income is under a certain figure to be determined by policymakers
in light of current fiscal realities with enough money to bring them up to the threshold
figure so defined and let those persons spend the money in any way or fashion they
feel inclined to spend it? Present figures indicate that on average it costs fifteen
thousand dollars a year to provide an average amount of benefits to a family of three-
Makeover Common Problems 2. Rewrite the following passage, intended for a general
audience. Correct its over-
Many marketers put customers to work. This represents a saving. The work used
to be done by employees, and they had to be paid. Customers carry merchandise home
themselves. They use their own cars and pick up appliances and furniture and even
building supplies and these things used to be delivered. Customers serve themselves
in groceries and restaurants. They are their own tellers in banks. They assemble
barbecues and toys and pump gas. Many items are now sold by mail. More every year
are sold over the Internet. This saves merchandisers even more. Customers serve
themselves in these transactions. They supply their own sales pitch. They fill
in their own order forms. They provide their own store settings. They pay for delivery.
The merchandiser's role is reduced. The merchandiser merely links customers and
suppliers.
Chapter 4: Finding the Right Words
Makeover Right Words 1. Rewrite the following passage to provide an effective mix of formal and informal, general and particular, abstract and concrete words.
About a jillion years ago earth's only natural satellite impacted our planet and rebounded into shallow space where it was captured in an orbital trajectory. There it remains at the present time. This conclusion is based on analysis of the composition of the satellite in question, which turns out to be greatly at variance with the makeup of mother earth. Data from the lunar research satellite Clementine substantiate hunches that the moon and earth are of separate origin and tend to refute notions that the lunar orb might have broken away from the earth while both were hotter than hell, in fact in a molten state. Other theoretical wild hairs, like the idea that the moon and earth formed at the same time or that the moon was sucked into the earth's gravitational grasp and captured in orbit without a collision to take the steam off its speed, just don't hold water.
Makeover Right Words 2. Rewrite the following passage to provide an effective mix of long and short, learned and commonplace, connotative and neutral words.
Lewis Thomas characterizes cumbersome medical technology such as the now little-
Chapter 5: Finding Fresh Words
Fresh Words Makeover Passage. Rewrite the following passage to eliminate clichés and usage problems, correct quoting technique, and supply at least two original figures of speech. For usage problems, consult Appendix A. What effect do your changes have upon the writer's voice?
Warehouse shopping clubs jump up and down about they're prices, the lowest available on more household goods, appliances, and hardware then you could shake a stick at. These prices are real, not just an allusion. To make a long story short, warehouse store savings come from low cost marketing and militantly plane stores stripped as bare as a baby's bottom where customers wonder up and down on there own. The clubs advertise once in a blue moon and offer as few frills as possible, usually sitting paletted goods straight off the boat from manufacturers on cold steel shelves and selling them with almost no personnel service. As a result expenses average a vanishingly small 8 percent of sales as opposed to 22 percent at grocery stores, which are themselves slick operators compared to other retailers. Club markups are lower than a snake's belly. Consumer Reports sites warehouse clubs' 10 percent margin, far below those at other stores, stating "less than half the 20 to 24 percent average markup of items sold in supermarkets . . . even higher at department stores, which typically sell items at 40 to 50 percent above their cost."
Chapter 7: Definite Actors and Actions
Actors and Actions Makeover Passage. Use a combination of techniques-
Public funding and preferential legislation that favor improvement in the fuel economy
of private automobiles and trucks ought to be opposed by popular opinion. The cost/load
ratio of automobiles and other gas powered private conveyances such as trucks and
vans might be vastly improved upon by mass transit options, whose efficiency as people
transporters can be up to hundreds of times greater. Lower maintenance costs and
pollution per passenger mile, traffic reduction, and increased safety can also be
gained from mass transit systems such as busses and trolleys. Freight can be handled
more economically and with less environmental damage by railroads and even air lines
than by trucks. Excessive amounts of fuel, even allowing for continuing improvements
in economy, are burned by trucks, and expensive roadways and interstate highways
are increasingly damaged by their overabundant use. In an era when fuel reserves
are threatened, traffic is constantly rising in volume and danger, and infrastructure
damage is increasingly common and expensive to repair, use of automobiles and trucks
should be curtailed. Mass transit systems and more efficient ways of moving freight
should be encouraged instead by decision-
Chapter 8: Coherence
Coherence Makeover Passage. Revise the following passage to improve its coherence.
Be sure to use each of the techniques described in this chapter-
Human beings' desire to have everything their own way was remarked on by Freud. Darwin has light to shed on this trait. Gluttony, lust, greed, and anger could help early humans survive. More food might help a person survive and reproduce. The tendency to hoard food for oneself and one's relatives would be encouraged by natural selection. Whether the food was gained honestly would not matter. Natural selection might favor those willing to fight. They could cow others. They could monopolize resources. They could attract mates. Now guns and knives make it easy to do more damage to others. The old impulses still survive. Infidelity is adaptive. Males spread their genes around. Protection and access to more providers are benefits for females. Creatures strive for evolutionary advantage. Passing your genes to as many of the next generation as possible is evolutionary advantage. Early humans lived in tougher times. Altruistic behavior is something we can afford. They couldn't. Many of the traits of the evolutionary winners have been passed to us. Saint Augustine knew a lot in the 5th century. He didn't have a Darwinian explanation. Our corrupt nature was "already present in the seed from which we were to spring." This was said by Augustine.
Based on Robert Wright,
"Science and Original Sin."
Chapter 9: Assigning Emphasis
Emphasis Makeover Passage. Use a combination of techniques-
Objections to the elaborate packaging that has become a feature of American grocery
marketing are partly right and partly wrong, experts say. Much waste is avoided
by this packaging. For instance, American producers get a larger percentage of available
foodstuffs to market than producers do in China, mostly because our packaging is
so much more effective than packaging is in China. The well-
Chapter 10: Controlling Rhythm
Rhythm Makeover Passage. Rewrite the following passage, using a variety of breath
units and stress-
Asynchronous processors are computer central processing units (CPUs) uncontrolled
by clock crystals. Every operation occurring in asynchronous CPUs can proceed at
optimal velocity. No job must slow down to the pace of others to keep all operations
in step. You would think that a chip on which every job goes as fast as it can would
be quicker than one on which one job is held back to keep pace with the others, but
this does not seem to be true so far. Indeed, although in asynchronous processors
selected operations occur swiftly compared to a variety of others, the processor
frequently must wait on the results of laggard operations before forwarding information
so the computing process can procede. But since no clock crystal must send time
signals to each part of the chip, clockless CPUs can save up to four fifths of the
power needed for synchronous chips with the same capacities.
Chapter 11: Structural Variety
Variety Makeover Passage. Use combining techniques to provide a variety of sentence structures and breath units in this passage. Choose some combinations to promote coherence (Chapter 6), to make nuclear stress fall on important words (Chapter 7), or to ensure that important ideas appear in major grammatical constructions like separate sentences and independent clauses.
Around 1700 the Comanches lived in New Mexico. They were a small tribe. They lived
by hunting and gathering. Then they got horses. This changed them. They became fearsome
warriors. They were called the “Spartans of the Plains.” They resisted European expansion
on two fronts. They resisted the Americans. They resisted the Mexicans. By 1750 they
controlled all of New Mexico. They dominated Texas. They ruled in parts of Louisiana.
They ran free in northern Mexico. They lived mainly on buffalo herds. These herds
were vast in the early nineteenth century. About 7 million buffalo lived then in
Comanche territories. Horses lived there too. Those territories were home to about
2 million wild horses. The Comanches kept another 120,000 domesticated horses. These
horses allowed the Comanches to fight effectively. They fought with Europeans. They
fought other Indian tribes too. The horses allowed the Comanches to kill buffalo
as well. They killed about a quarter of a million buffalo a year.
Based on Frank
McLynn, “Spartans of the Plains,” a review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire
Chapter 12: Rules of Thumb
Rules of Thumb Makeover Passage. Use the writing tips from this chapter to revise the passage that follows. How do your revisions change the writer's voice?
Under the principles of feng-
Based
on Witold Rybczynski
The
Most Beautiful House in the World
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