5 Ways to Eliminate Deadwood for Direct and Concise Writing

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil, Truman Capote once said. In other words, what we cut out of our writing is sometimes more important than what we put in. So lets continue to cut the clutter. How do we stop wasting words and get to the point? Here are five more strategies to apply when revising and editing essays, memos, and reports. Use Active Verbs Whenever possible, make the subject of a sentence do something. Wordy: The grant proposals were reviewed by the students.Revised: The students reviewed the grant proposals. Dont Try to Show Off As Leonardo da Vinci observed, Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Dont presume that big words or lengthy phrases will impress your readers: often the simplest word is the best. Wordy: At this moment in time, students who are matriculating through high school should be empowered to participate in the voting process.Revised: High school students should have the right to vote. Cut Empty Phrases Some of the most common phrases mean little, if anything, and should be cut from our writing: all things being equalall things consideredas a matter of factas far as I am concernedat the end of the dayat the present timedue to the fact thatfor all intents and purposesfor the most partfor the purpose ofin a manner of speakingin my opinionin the event ofin the final analysisit seems thatthe point that I am trying to maketype ofwhat I am trying to saywhat I want to make clear Wordy: All things being equal, what I am trying to say is that in my opinion all students should, in the final analysis, have the right to vote for all intents and purposes.Revised: Students should have the right to vote. Avoid Using Noun Forms of Verbs The fancy name for this process is excessive nominalization. Our advice is simple: give verbs a chance. Wordy: The presentation of the arguments by the students was convincing.Revised: The students presented their arguments convincingly. Or . . .The students argued convincingly. Replace Vague Nouns Replace vague nouns (such as area, aspect, case, factor, manner, situation, something, thing, type, and way) with more specific words—or eliminate them altogether. Wordy: After reading several things in the area of psychology-type subjects, I decided to put myself in a situation where I might change my major.Revised: After reading several psychology books, I decided to change my major.

The Aeneid By Publius Virgilius Maro - 1712 Words

The Aeneid was written by Publius Virgilius Maro, also referred to as Virgil. He was a Roman man born in northern Italy, in around 70 B.C.E. Virgil, who known for his poetry, especially his earliest work, wrote The Aeneid which was known as his greatest work. His gained his knowledge from studying Greek and Roman authors. Although Virgil studied both cultures his work was more so influenced by the Greek culture, his work was written with the use of common themes that Greek writers used for so many years. He was especially known for writing method in which he borrowed from Homer. The Aeneid, which was unfinished at the time of Virgil’s death, was crafted from an existing tradition surrounding Aeneas that extended from an ancient Greek poet.†¦show more content†¦For the purpose of this paper, the heroes that will be discussed are Achilles and Aeneas. Although they have similar backstories they have different personalities in many ways. Through the readings, one would kn ow that both Achilles and Aeneas are the sons of a Goddess. Achilles was the son of Thetis who is the Goddess of the sea, while Aeneas is the son of Venus, also known as Aphrodite, who is the Goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility (Sayce 35). Making both of them sons of goddesses makes them perceived at a higher standard than others would be. It also makes one feel that they should act a certain way because of the fact that they are slightly superior to other characters within the stories. Aeneas understands this more than Achilles does and carries himself different. Aeneas is illustrated more so as people person while Achilles is more so the individual. Aeneas has more ties to others besides himself, especially when he lands in Carthage. Aeneas meets Dido, Queen of Carthage, and they both fall in love with one another. Even with the hesitation with their relationship, it was destined that they would get together, especially considering â€Å"Dido resembles Diana, [and] Aenea s resembles Apollo: thus Dido and Aeneas are thereby shown to be both of equal status and equally matched to each other† (Sayce 31). Even before met he, during the Trojan war, Aeneas had his father and his son to motivate him in everything that he didShow MoreRelatedEdmund Spenser vs. Virgil and Ariosto Essay1986 Words   |  8 Pagesto read and understand poets such as Ariosto and Virgil, both of whom his works are frequently compared to. Born in 70 BC, Publius Virgilius Maro ranks among the greatest Roman poets who ever lived. With only a few Latin poets attempting to write an epic before him (Naevius and Ennius), Latin literature reached its peak wit the publication of the Aeneid shortly after Virgil’s death. His epic heavily influenced succeeding poets throughout Western literature. Ever since people have compared

Amazon Web Services Free Essays

AMAZON WEB SERVICES CASE ANALYSIS SNEHA KATKURI Amazon’s core business of selling goods (ranging from books to fresh food and electronics to fashion cloths) through its e-commerce portal has seen exponential growth which necessitated a need for a massive storage and computing infrastructure that is always available and is resistant to failures. After building this, it is intuitive for Amazon to open up the infrastructure and sell it as a commodity. This helps Amazon not only to attract more customers to this new product but also to build new infrastructure thus benefiting its core business. We will write a custom essay sample on Amazon Web Services or any similar topic only for you Order Now The unmatched economies of scale at Amazon offer huge cost effciencies through a combination of high-volume, low cost procurement thanks to bargaining power of buyer Amazon. In addition, constant technological innovations in design, operations and management of the data centers help Amazon reduce the prices of its AWS offerings. Because of cheaper service provision, there is a flood of new customers for AWS. However, with the advent of new competitors like Google Cloud Engine, there is an increasing stress on Amazon pricing. But, given that any typical business needs both scalable computing and storage, AWS, which offers a complete basket of services is a preferred choice for customers. Furthermore, the investments on AWS improved Amazon’s core business by helping it introduce value-added services. In 2007, Amazon introduced cloud- based music service to sell MP3 songs and a web- music player. Even though other competitors like Google announced a similar service, the music content available on Amazon was significantly cheaper and attracted more customers. Amazon Cloud Drive introduced almost simultaneously, runs on AWS (S3) service. The Kindle device sold by Amazon has a huge competitive advantage over Nook in the market thanks to up to 5GB of cloud- based free storage for storing books and personal documents. This also reduced the manufacturing cost of the device by getting rid of microSD card slot. Amazon AppStore, that runs on AWS, built to sell Android apps is a popular value added service to the recently introduced Kindle Fire device. Often, the prices of these apps are way lesser than those of competitors like Google. Instant Video is another massively popular service which helped Amazon build a huge eco system of content like music, books, apps and video that is vital for the success of a tablet device in the current ever- changing market extremely crowded with numerous devices from various manufacturers. Amazon has an advantage over competitors in this market because they were the first to market and so have had more experience and time to work out the kinks. Their 99% uptime guarantee for the S3 service is a testament to the fact that they have experienced issues in the past and have learned from them to the point of being able to offer guarantee to the users. Also, because designing and building such huge cloud infrastructures requires vast amount of resources, competitors need precious time to catch up. In addition, Amazon itself is a very big customer for AWS. Hence, strengthening AWS is a natural choice for Amazon which is in its own business interest. For other players in the market, for example, RackSpace, a huge uncertainty exists in planning new initiatives and introducing new services on its cloud products. Also, AWS is a product evolved from Amazon’s existing infrastructure unlike some competitors’ alternatives which had to be built from scratch, in turn giving a huge lead time to Amazon in cloud computing. Moreover, huge costs involved prohibit existing clients of AWS to switch to a new, yet cheaper, alternative. Furthermore, Amazon has learnt the imperatives and modalities of implementing and maintaining a network out of their business need and so as a consequence has better insight of flexibility some real world situations need. Thus I think though Amazon is giving up its competitive advantage of software competency by offering AWS services, it is in turn proving to be profitable to the Company in the long run. How to cite Amazon Web Services, Papers