Concise technical writing: Is that really necessary? transcript

all right so another thing i would recommend that you do to make your writing more concise is to look for statements of the obvious and unnecessary information so whenever you find statements of the obvious you can cut those that's an easy cut and also irrelevant information you can cut sentences to entire paragraphs by finding irrelevant information and just taking it out so this is an easy way to cut text so just omit obvious material and omit any explanations that you have written that are not necessary what are some examples of obvious or unnecessary let let's look at a couple high microbial diversity has been observed in almost all environments that have been examined well you can't observe microbial diversity in environments that have not been examined so that have been examined is not necessary so we could just say high microbial diversity has been observed in almost all environments now if there are a lot of environments that have not been observed yet i think that should be pointed out but it needs to be done in a different way a second example is numerous studies on polysaccharides for microorganisms including bacteria fungi and microalgae have been carried out that entire sentence is a statement of the obvious and i think the reason the authors wrote this sentence was just to have something to attach their references to but i would suggest that you don't write a sentence that's just you know that that obvious attach the references to specific sentences that say something that's more relevant to the conversation observations in this study reveal distinct variations in the values of physical chemical parameters of the lake throughout the year yeah again i feel like this is a statement that is completely obvious and it's just there as a place to place their reference for table one so i would suggest placing the reference for table one in a sentence that has some specific result from table one so the first time you mention some result from table one then you can reference table one but putting a sentence that's just obvious like this you know of course there's going to be physical variations in a lake throughout a year that is really you know text that doesn't need to be there another example of statements of the obvious would be something like this where there are unnecessary words or phrases prior to the start of this project the xyz team will draft submit and obtain irb approval for the study well before you get irb approval of course you have to draft the application and you have to submit the application it's not necessary to say that you're going to draft and submit the application you just need to say you're going to obtain irb approval so you can completely take out those three words and you might say it's only three words but three words per sentence over a lot of sentences over a manuscript or a grant proposal adds up to quite a few words and it could mean the difference between a paragraph on 12 lines or a paragraph on 11 lines some other examples of unnecessary words or phrases prolonged exposure to elevated temperatures induces conformational changes that affect enzyme 3d structure that's redundant because conformational changes by definition are changes that affect enzyme 3d structure so we don't need that phrase the first part of this sentence can be eliminated based on the results obtained in the present study now anytime you see that you can basically strike it out and just go directly to the result both algorithms improve the accuracy of hyperspectral modeling to varying degrees a total of eight classes of algae just say eight classes of algae with varied seasonal distributions were identified as part of the study okay so you don't need to say as part of the study that's obvious so we can make this sentence you know about half as long as it was the fourth example here severe acute respiratory syndromes coronavirus ii or sars kobe 2 is the main cause of coronavirus disease well it's the only cause of coronavirus disease so we can take out maine which has turned to become an international concern worldwide so we can take out the turn to so just say coronavirus disease has become an international concern and we don't need worldwide either because international and worldwide mean the same thing so we can make this sentence four words shorter you