Curated OER
Eliminating Wordiness
Why use 50 words when 15 gets the same point across? Use an online interactive webpage to fine tune the writing skills of your middle schoolers. As they read 10 sentences, they eliminate as many words as possible...
Curated OER
Eliminating Wordiness: Exercise 3
The focus of this writing instructional activity is to have writers revise and edit a three-paragraph passage to eliminate wordiness and repetition. The paragraphs are quite long, and this should take most students quite a while to...
Curated OER
Eliminating Wordiness: Exercise 1
In this writing exercise, learners are given a series of sentences and asked to rewrite them to eliminate wordy phrases and clauses, repetition and passive voice.
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...
Curated OER
Wordiness Worksheet 1
In this grammar instructional activity, learners rewrite ten sentences eliminating extra words and combining short sentences into longer ones when necessary.
Curated OER
Eliminating Wordiness: Exercise 2
In this writing exercise, students are given five pairs of sentences and are asked to combine each set to make one concise sentence.
Pickett's Mill Elementary
Test Taking Hints and Strategies for Standardized Tests
Process of elimination is a valuable test-taking strategy, but what else can we teach our class about taking tests? Present a resource that promotes healthy eating and sleeping before taking a test, as well as suggesting reading the...
University of North Carolina
Conciseness
Twitter has helped people learn to express their ideas in as few words as possible, but away from the 280-character limit, writers still struggle with keeping their writing short and to the point. Conciseness is the focus of a writing...
Mathematics Vision Project
Module 2: Systems of Equations and Inequalities
The brother-sister pair Carlos and Clarita need your class's help in developing their new pet sitting business. Through a variety of scenarios and concerns presented to the siblings, the learners thoroughly explore systems of equations...
San José State University
How to Recognize and Eliminate Passive Voice
This handout presents the appropriate times to use the active voice and the passive voice with examples and a short exercise. After reading through the information and examples, pupils transform passive sentences into active sentences.
A...
Curated OER
Excessive Nominalizations
Eliminate unnecessary nominalizations from your middle schoolers' writing! After reviewing a reference page for the -tion ending (and when it can be excessive in writing), students rewrite eight sentences to change nominalizations to a...
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...
Virginia Department of Education
Editing and Proofreading
This task is best utilized after a rough draft revision is completed. Writers pair-up and identify when the author uses the passive voice, clichés, and wordiness. Basic examples for the revision points are provided for the...
McGraw Hill
Saying More with Less
In this sentence revision worksheet, students rewrite each sentence to eliminate wordiness. Students are encouraged to use shorter, more concise terms and make each word meaningful in the sentences.
Curated OER
Sentence Revision
High schoolers review the procedures for revising sentences. After viewing a PowerPoint presentation, they read a handout of common wordy phrases and discover how to jazz up their writing. They complete a worksheet in which they revise...
Curated OER
Social Movements in American Politics
Learners explore American social movements. For this writing skills lesson, students read Orwell's "Politics and the English." Learners then apply the rules for writing that are included in the piece. Students follow-up by completing a...
Curated OER
Editing
Are your writers ready to edit their papers? Present them with these editing tips including reading papers out loud, varying sentence openings and lengths, and using action verbs. While the tips are worthwhile, consider supplementing the...
Curated OER
Media Literacy Unit - Part 4
Seventh graders study how advertisers use techniques to sell their products. In this persuasive media lesson, 7th graders analyze media messages to find the advertiser's purpose. They examine different advertising techniques and their...
Curated OER
Rewriting Bloated Sentences
In this online interactive grammar activity, students answer 10 short answer questions regarding inflated sentences. Students may submit their answers to be scored.
Online Writing Lab at Purdue University
Purdue University Owl: Exercise : Eliminating Wordiness Exercise 3
This Purdue University OWL (Online Writing Lab) provides practice with revising writing by having students read and revise a passage to reduce redundancy and wordiness.
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...
Other
Writing for Business and Pleasure: Eliminate Wordiness to Write With Power
This how-to site gives writing tips for business writing. Brief explanations are provided for how to revise writing to ensure that redundant pairs, redundant modifiers, redundance categories, meaningless modifiers, and wordy expressions...
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...
The Write Place
Literacy Education Online
Literacy Education Online (or LEO) is a great place to start if you need help with your writing. The homepage is organized around kinds of problems or questions you might have concerning your writing. Find your problem, click on the...