Curated OER
Eliminating Wordiness
Teach your class how to write concisely and edit writing. The slide show covers be verbs, active voice, passive voice, repetitive wording, and more. Complete with numerous examples and images, it is a comprehensive resource that could be...
San José State University
Writing Concisely: Deleting or Replacing Unnecessary Information
Are you actually feeling really tired of reading wordy, redundant, long, lengthy sentences practically all the time over and over again? Introduce writers to this handout and exercise to teach to tighten up their prose! Provides two ways...
San José State University
Avoiding Nominalization
Improve syntax with this explanatory handout. It clarifies one way to make writing more precise: avoiding nominalization. This resource provides four ways to find and change nominalization problems and 10 sentences to correct. There are...
Curated OER
Reduced Time Adverb Clauses
Looking for a way to improve your students' writing conventions? Include this adverb clauses activity in your next grammar lesson. Middle and high schoolers read a three-paragraph selection and rewrite adverb time clauses to make the...
Curated OER
Eliminating Wordiness: Exercise 1
In this writing exercise, students are given a series of sentences and asked to rewrite them to eliminate wordy phrases and clauses, repetition and passive voice.
Curated OER
BBC News School Report: Write As You Speak
Middle schoolers complete this journalism/language arts worksheet to improve their writing. They work in partners interviewing each other, then write key facts in a table, summarizing what, who, where, when, why. They make their...
Curated OER
Complete the Sentences 3- Intermediate Level
In this grammar worksheet, students make decisions about the best word choices to convey an idea. Students read 10 sentences and 4 choices for a missing word. Students choose the most specific word for the blank.
Capital Community College Foundation
Guide to Grammar and Writing: Writing Concise Sentences
Why write five paragraphs when you can say what you want to say in two? Learn how to make the most of your words and sentences to get your point across without being too wordy.
Online Writing Lab at Purdue University
Purdue University Owl: Conciseness
Word choice is a must for successful writers, so choose your words wisely and learn to be concise.
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Concise Language Adds Zest!
This slideshow focuses on how to revise writing using concise language by eliminating unnecessary words and redundancy, avoiding generic phrases, using active voice and familiar terms, and looking for just the right words to convey...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Concise Language
This tutorial focuses on concise language by eliminating empty phrases and redundant words. It offers a video showing poor communication due to redundancy and a slide show which lists common empty phrases and provides an exercise to help...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Concise Language
This tutorial focuses on writing more concisely and editing your text to make it more concise. It offers a slide show that presents 5 editing techniques and examples of each, and a video lesson of how to write summaries and how to write...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Concise Language: Qualifiers and Intensifiers
This slideshow focuses on removing unnecessary qualifiers and intensifiers to make writing more concise. It defines each term, gives examples, shows how removing them does not affect sentence meaning, and provides a partial list of each.
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Concise Language: Removing the Excess
This slideshow lesson compares writing to meat; lean meat is healthier for you as is lean writing. It lists common phrases to eliminate, explains intensifiers and suggests using them sparingly, provides a wordy paragraph and the trimmed...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Concise Langauage: Reframing Negatives
This slideshow lesson focuses on the reasons to reframe negatives in your writing and how to do so. It provides examples and suggests using negatives sparingly only to caution your reader.
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Concise Language: Unnecessay Modifiers
This slideshow lesson focuses on identifying unnecessary modifiers and removing them from your writing. Rule of thumb: if the adjective does not tell the reader something the noun absolutely cannot, eliminate it. It provides student...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Concise Language: Wordiness
This slideshow lesson focuses on using concise language by eliminating wordy construction in writing. It explains why writing needs to be concise and ways to do so by eliminating unnecessary passive tense, wordy constructions, and words...
University of Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin: Writing Center: Improving Your Writing Style
If you are looking for ways to make your writing clearer and more concise, check out this site. Many helpful hints are given here. Information can be downloaded in PDF format. L.11-12.3a Syntax
TED Talks
Ted: Ted Ed: Beware of Nominalizations (Aka Zombie Nouns)
This video lesson focuses on removing nominalizations (long nouns made by adding suffixes to verbs, nouns, and adjectives) from your writing to make your sentences live instead of being a part of the living dead. Nominalizations impede...
Grammarly
Grammarly Handbook: Writing Concisely
This page compares wordy writing to a art gallery cluttered with a mixture of great works and poor attempts making it hard to see the great works. Remove the clutter, write concisely so the reader gets the point of the paper. It offers...
Grammarly
Grammarly Handbook: Unnecessary Words and Phrases
This page explains the need to revise writing to remove unnecessary words and phrases to produce clear, concise writing. Examples are provided.
Grammarly
Grammarly Handbook: Wordiness
This page focuses on reducing wordiness in writing by using more concise language, and avoiding extra-long words and sentences.
Grammarly
Grammarly Blog: Avoid Unnecessary Construction and Prepositions
This page focuses on the need for clear and concise language when writing.
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Concise Language
Notes, two videos, and a PowerPoint presentation introducing concise language and explaining its importance and how to edit writing to make it more concise.