7 Cs of Tight Writing

The Seven Cs of Tight Writing

The Seven Cs include the following writing styles and considerations:

Completeness

Clearness

Concreteness

Correctness

Conciseness

Courtesy

Character
Although these seven Cs are most often emphasized in business and technical
writing books and courses, all writers should be aware of the importance of
these principles and how to apply them to their prose.
Completeness
Remember the Ws of writing: Who, Where, What, Why, Where, When and How?
Before you start writing, you should know where you want to go, how you plan
to get there, why you want to write in the first place, and why anyone else (e.g.
potential readers) would want to follow you.
Research: Research is important with both nonfiction and fiction. For instance,
1.
Say you plan to write a Historical Novel featuring a protagonist who
lived in Siam in the 1800s. Before you put pencil to paper, you need to know
more about Siam than what you saw in The King and I. You need more area
history than you will find on Wikipedia, and you definitely need to bone up on
Buddhism. Solid background research not only complements your story but
assures the reader that they can relax and enjoy the story while learning a bit
of history. Solid research helps your writing satisfy the reader, which is much
better than leaving them thinking theyve missed something.
2.
On the other hand, say you need to write a White Paper. You want your
document to be both interesting and complete, but at the same time you dont
want to create a list-based paper. You want this white paper to grab readers,
quickly assuring them that you understand their problem well enough to help
them solve it.
Once again accomplishing this goal requires that you arm yourself with detailed
product information along with solid research about the potential clients. If you
equip yourself with more research than you can actually fit into the paper, you
are in a great position to pick and choose which details closely match the
intended audience.

Complete Experience: Whether they read fact or fiction, todays discriminating

reader wants and expects the author to give them a complete reading
experience. If they want clipped information they can read online forums.
Clearness
Clear writing emanates from a good understanding of the subject and a clear
vision of the goal for the paper, manual, letter or story. Clear writing tends to
be elegant, logically arranged, and easy to follow.
Clear Thinking: Clear writing is a product of clear thinking. Before writers
attempt to explain a product or a process to their readers, they need to fully
understand the product or process themselves. Clear writing omits ambiguous
terms and phrases, uses words that directly convey the writers intent, and
develops only one idea per paragraph.
Transparent Style: Clear writing does not purposefully draw the readers
attention to style. In fact, clear writing is so easy to read, follow, and digest
that most readers wont stop to think about the writers style at all which can
be a good thing. Most often, when a reader stops to think about the person
who penned the article theyre reading, they are not thinking positive thoughts.
They are often thinking: What? Or, What on Earth? Or, I dont get this! There
may be nothing a reader wants to do less than reread a sentence because the
meaning wasnt clear.
Transitions: Clarity includes writing sentences and paragraphs that logically
hang together so that they seem to just magically and sensibly flow. Writers use
transition words to help readers understand the relationship between ideas in
sentences and paragraphs. Transition words like but, yet, moreover, in the
meantime, next, and eventually are important tools for both fiction and
nonfiction writers, who use them like stepping stones to help the reader follow
the writers train of thought.
Familiarity: In addition to being eminently readable, clear writing feels familiar.
Clear writing not only flows, it uses words that are familiar. For instance, todays
writers should use:

before instead of prior to

after instead of subsequent to

use instead of utilize

require instead of necessitate

helpful instead of advantageous

Clear writing promotes clear images in the mind of the reader. Improve the
clarity of your writing by cutting unnecessary words, using action verbs
whenever possible, and choosing concrete terms that not only help
readers easily comprehend but remember what they are reading.
Concreteness

Concrete words and phrases include objects, persons, actions, and behaviors
as mentioned above, concreteness adds clarity to your writing. Writers
can achieve concreteness by choosing the specific over the abstract, the definite
over the vague and the distinct over the uncertain.
Mental Pictures: Although concrete writing is crisp, it doesnt need to seem
stilted; concrete writing uses words that paint pictures for the reader, which
helps make facts, products, people and places more realistic and
memorable. Concrete writing is creative because it shows the reader what is
happening rather than just telling them.
Eschew Generalities: Concrete language avoids generalities, steering clear
from generalnouns and pronouns that can easily confuse the reader. Granted,
concrete writing takes more time and effort than general or abstract writing, but
the rewards are worth it. Consider the writing of wildly popular authors, those
who sell a ton of books year after year after year. Readers continue to purchase
their books because these authors have mastered the art of writing concrete
sentences and paragraphs. They deliberately steer away from generalities,
spending the extra time to make their writing more concrete and authentic.
Like completeness and clearness above, concreteness favors active, descriptive
verbs and modifiers over words that are abstract or passive.
Correctness
At the risk of sounding like your tenth grade English teacher, in order to explain
correctness we need to discuss a couple of common grammatical mistakes.
Note that even if you carefully select concrete words and phrases, and use
active verbs 90% of the time, you will still lose credibility with your readers if
they run into one of these grammatical errors. In this section we will briefly
examine two of the most egregious grammatical mistakes.
A Dangling Modifier is a word, phrase or clause that implies something
different from what the writer meant. This writing error damages flow and
continuity in both fiction and nonfiction. Much of the time, sentences with
dangling modifiers stop readers because they become confused, asking
themselves questions like: Is what I just read correct? Is that really what the
writer meant? This is an example:
Incorrect: While driving home the other night, a tree fell across the road.
Problem: Was the tree driving home the other night?
While driving home the other night is the modifier, and since modifiers like to
latch onto the nearest noun, in this sentence the modifier latches onto a tree.

How do you fix a sentence like this? Insert the missing noun (the driver) or
change the modifier.
Better: While Emily drove home the other night, a tree fell across the road.
Grammar books and online grammar websites offer plenty of good advice for
fixing this problem, along with tips for not making the mistake in the first place.
Parallel structure requires writers to compose lists and series of words,
phrases and clauses in the same grammatical form. Faulty parallelism often
occurs in bullet lists, particularly in presentation and training materials, but it
can crop up anywhere. Once again, this grammatical mistake will cause the
reader to stop because they know something is wrong even if they cant put a
name to it.
Incorrect: She likes to run in the park, sleeping late, and finds joy in making
videos.
Problem: The activities she enjoys [to run in the park and sleeping late and
finds joy in making videos] do not have the same grammatical form.
Correct: She likes to run in the park, to sleep late, and to make videos. Now
the verbs that describe each activity use the same grammatical form.
Also correct: She likes running in the park, sleeping late, and making videos.
Parallel structure means that the items in a list, or the subheadings throughout
a document, are the same part of speech. Remember, an important goal for a
writer is to keep the reader reading. Incorrect grammar and word relationships
will stop most readers, even if they arent sure why.
Conciseness
When you write concisely, you express your opinions, give directions, or explain
a scene using the best words, and often the fewest words, possible. Concise
writing expresses essential ideas without unnecessary words that dont add
anything important and waste the readers time. Concise writing does not
contain useless repetitions or wordy expressions, as explained below.
Redundancy: Useless repetition weakens your writing and wastes the readers
time; it may even be insulting. Useless repetitions include common phrases like
these:
absolutely certain (certainty has no room for doubt, so it is absolute)
advance planning (all planning is done in advance)

close scrutiny (you need to get close to scrutinize)

assemble together (how else can you assemble?)
ATM machine (the M stands for machine)
PIN number (the N stands for number)
completely eliminate (eliminate infers completeness)
each and every (use one or the other)
final conclusion (a conclusion is final)
first began (When he first began ? the word began is enough by itself)
Because these redundant phrases are commonly used in speech, we may not be
able to stop ourselves from saying them, but we need to practice not writing
them.
Wordy Expressions: We hear wordy expressions on television and hear them in
speech, but they have no place in your writing. Like useless repetition, empty
phrases and expressions weaken your writing. You can reduce wordiness by
cutting these phrases from your document:
Due to the fact that (because)
In the event that (if)
At this point in time (at this point)
In the near future (soon)
At the present time (now)
With regard to (regarding)
In the month of June (in June)
Concise writing is clean writing, using only the words needed to express an
idea. When editing your prose for conciseness, aim to cut out words and
phrases that are vague, repetitious or pretentious.
Courtesy
This applies to business and other non-fiction writing. All business
communication (especially emails) should be edited for clarity, conciseness
and courtesy. Courteous communication considers the receivers reaction to the
writers choice of words; courteous communication gets the point across while
valuing the receivers feelings.
In business communication, avoid using negative words like:

Delay, trouble, unfortunate, never, blame, cant, wrong, regret, fault, difficult,
failed, prohibit, neglect, no.
Character
Character (or personality) combines many principles of effective business
communication. Character also applies to fiction writing too, but in a different
way.
In business writing, character closely resembles courtesy, but on a broader
scale. The character of business communication reveals what the writer thinks
about the needs, wants and interests of the readers.
In fiction, writers need to watch that their protagonist remains in character
and doesnt suddenly behave in a way that confuses the reader. I often run
across this writing problem when I judge stories submitted by beginning
writers. In an effort to be entertaining and exciting, the budding author writes
scenes where professional people are swearing and fighting, throwing punches
and using language thats completely out of character for them. I believe a
master of creating and maintaining character consistency was Robert B. Parker:
Spencer never behaves out of character.
Conclusion
Some experts believe writers should spend their writing time as follows:
25% planning
25% writing
45% editing and revising
5% proofreading
Until careful adherence to these Seven Cs becomes habitual, you should use
much of that 45% revision time to guarantee that your writing is clear,
concrete, concise etc. Your readers and editors will thank you for it.
Respectfully submitted,
Ann Gordon
October 2011