Introduction

It is said that long sentences cause us to lapse into the use of passive voice which risk us

making tense and punctuation mistakes. In both education and business, writing concisely is a

valuable skill and is one that requires writers to shorten their sentences, since we often find

ourselves using more words than necessary. As such, trimming the linguistic fat by shortening

sentences will help writers communicate clearly. Likewise, writing unnecessarily long sentences

that include superfluous words and elaborate constructions does not add to readers understanding

but rather takes away from it. When we write shorter, stronger sentences our audience/readers will

be more able to understand your work easier. When writing a good document, the writer should

not assume that having grammatically correct sentence can do the trick, instead bad sentences are

grammatically correct. Though, the writer highlighted key ways to trim and improve your writing

skills, I found it difficult to follow the flow of his article. Likewise, the use of unfamiliar and

misplaced words or slangs acted as a form of distraction, causing the reader to lose the point the

writer tried to convey.

Here, I will discuss the implications of the passive voice and nominalizations for business

writing by presenting two guidelines. Rigorously applying these guidelines can shorten a text by

up to 30%, without losing information and yet improving clarity in the process. What’s not to

like?

Summarizing the article

The article “Five Quick Ways to Trim and Improve Business Writing journal information”, by

John Clayton; seeks to address how to improve business writing journal information by trimming

excess words using five quick ways. It can be said that the internet today has made it interesting
for us to get work done at a faster past and likewise; making it easy to read and absorb the tone

loads of information that is available. This has changed the way people find information and put

them together but more so, it has impacted the way businesses view their writing needs. As the

author stated in the article, “whether you’re writing an e-mail, a project that has a specific limit or

an executive summary for a report, we all experience the same thing—this is the challenges of

limiting the length of our document without losing its meaning” (Clayton, 2008). He believe that

business writing needs to be relentlessly concise and still be able to deliver complex information

clearly and persuasively. In pointing this out, Clayton presented five quick and effective ways

when trimming and improving your business writing, namely; examining your structure, sticking

to specifics, formatting for quick understanding, downshifting your tone and cutting and combine.

Clayton suggested that writing to a business audience can cause the best writers to adopt a formal,

bureaucratic tone but if we decide to shift to an informal tone, then we will would write more

concisely. While this article present a significant argument to show that using different ways to

cut the length of your document without losing the essences of what you are writing there were

particular limitation to his writing. This article addressed the research problem as to whether using

five quick ways to trim your document would improve your business writing.