W 031 F

Introduction
At Janus Pannonius University (JPU) in Pécs, Hungary a tutor called Horváth Joe has got a course this term. It is called 'Writing and Research Skills' for those obvious reasons that it aims to develop these skills in the twenty students attending this class. I am one of these students. Earlier in the term one of our assignement was to put together a collection of our esseys, a so-called 'portfolio'.

In this Research Paper I was eager to discover to what extent my writing in the Portfolio follows the guidelines which Zinsser had laid down. I was interested in how concrete the language is in my esseys and how much clutter is in them. I was also interested whether every single word is doing a useful job. Whether my sentences are expressing what I wanted to say? Am I saying everything as concretely and as simply, thus understandable as possible?

According to Zinsser clutter is when our writing is full of unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon in order to inflate what we say and thereby sound important. For example: the laborious phrase which has pushed out the short word that means the same thing, the adverb that carries the same meaning that is already in the verb, or the passive construction instead of using the active one.

I wanted to go over my esseys again and find out how many passive verbs are in them instead of active ones. How many long verbs are there instead of short ones? And how many adverbs and adjectives I used and how many of them are redundant?

Method
For answering these questions I chose four esseys to study from my own Portfolio. All four of them are descriptions, but they deal with different subjects. One, ’How I write’ is describing how I write generally - what my writing habits had been before the beginning of the course in September. The second one, ’Insights into British Life-script 1.’ is about my insights into British life, the third, ’The Sad Story of Szalag’ is an emotional essey reporting a sad story and the fourth, ’Stancomb Farm’ is a place description.

In my study I used the chapters from Zinsser's book, which are called: Simplicity, Clutter, Style and Bits and Pieces.

First I counted the total number of words in these four esseys, then I counted the verbs, adverbs, adjectives and little qualifiers. After these I examined the verbs, the adverbs and the adjectives according to different aspects. I also made charts about my findings not only in numbers but in percentage as well. Finally I analyzed the collected data by looking at every single adverb and adjective whether they are doing any useful job or not. I also counted the verbs according to different aspects: long or short ones, active or passive ones and 'to be'. I made charts about these data too, in order to be able to spot the facts in numbers.

Results and Discussions

’How I write’
Number %
All words 297 100
Verbs 37 12,5
Adverbs 9 3
Adjectives 14 4,7
Little qualifiers 2 0,7
'Insights into British Life - script 1.'
Number %
All words 437 100
Verbs 37 12,5
Adverbs 9 3
Adjectives 14 4,7
Little qualifiers 2 0,7
'The Sad Story of Szalag'
Number %
All words 367 100
Verbs 61 16,6
Adverbs 10 2,7
Adjectives 20 5,4
Little qualifiers 2 0,5
'Stancomb Farm'
Number %
All words 329 100
Verbs 29 8,8
Adverbs 4 1,2
Adjectives 26 7,9
Little qualifiers 2 0.6

The numbers and the percentage in these charts show that in the first two esseys the proportion of the parts of speech are similar, especially those of the verbs and the adverbs. It is because they are both description of the same sort and have about the same amount of action in them. In the essey ’Insights into British Life’ there are much more adjectives, because it’s aim is to introduce British life to the reader and adjectives are more needed for this than for example in the essey ’How I write’. The essey ’The Sad Story of Szalag’ has the most verbs, because lot of action takes place in it. There are not much adverbs, because most of the time the verbs are expressing what had happened. The adjectives are for describing thoughts and feelings. The lowest percentage of verbs can be found in the essey ’Stancomb Farm’ compared to the other three esseys, because it aims to be an objective description of a place, where hardly any action is taking place, only a few in the reader’s imagination. Most of the verbs are forms of ’to be’. But there are even more adjectives than in the essey ’Insights into British Life’, because of it being a vivid description.

I also examined the adverbs and the adjectives from the point of view, that how many of them were used and how many of them are redundant. The results are shown in the following chart.
Adverbs:

Total number Redundant number Redundant %
’How I write’ 9 2 22,2
’Insights into British Life – script 1.’ 15 2 13,3
’The Sad Story of Szalag’ 10 2 20
’Stancomb Farm’ 4 0 0
Adjectives:
Total number Redundant number Redundant %
’How I write’ 14 3 21,4
’Insights into British Life – script 1.’ 32 1 3,1
’The Sad Story of Szalag’ 20 2 10
’Stancomb Farm’ 26 4 15,4

It was difficult to decide which ones are not needed, since I was the writer of the esseys and thus it is hard to be objective, but I have found some examples: In the essey ’How I write’ ’enough’ in the second paragraph, ’extremely’ in the fourth and ’only’ in the last one. In the essey ’Insights into British Life-script 1’ I have found that ’definetely’ in the fifth paragraph and ’really’ in the sixth one are redundant. In the essey ’The Sad Story of Szalag’ I have found that ’heavily’ in the sixth paragraph is not needed, ’terribly wrong’ in the seventh one could be replaced by one word and ’wrong’ in the eightth one is unnecessary. In the essey ’Stancomb Farm’ I have found that ’tired’ and ’long’ in the first paragraph and ’necessary’ in the fifth one are not needed.
With the verbs I examined how many of them are active or passive, long or short and what the proportion of ’to be’ is.

Verbs:
'How I write'
Numbers 'How I write'
% 'Insights
into
British Life'
Numbers 'Insights
into
British Life'
% 'The Sad
Story
of
Szalag'
Numbers 'The Sad Story
of Szalag'
% 'Stancomb
Farm'
Number Stancom
Farm
%
All verbs 37 100 60 100 61 100 29 100
Active verbs 35 94,6 55 91,7 60 98,4 24 82,8
Passive verbs 2 5,4 5 8,3 1 1,6 5 17,2
Short verbs 27 72,9 27 45 32 52,5 13 44,8
Long verbs 2 5,4 5 8,3 10 16,4 3 10,3
'to be' 6 16 23 38,3 18 29,5 11 37,9

Zinsser says in his book that passive verbs weaken our writing, so if we can, we should always use active ones and thus make sure that the reader knows who is doing what to whom.
According to the chart I made my writing in these four esseys satisfy this provisio almost fully.
Zinsser also states, that short verbs are much better, much more expressive than long ones, so if we have short verbs to say what we want to, we should use those instead of the long ones.
According to the chart I fulfilled this condition too in the four esseys studied. Various forms of ’to be’ can be found in all four esseys, but in different proportion. In the essey ’How I write’ the number of the verb ’to be’ in different forms is the less compared to the other three esseys, because here lots of action is described: How I write, what I do while I prepare, plan, write etc. There are more forms of ’to be’ in the essey ’The Sad Story of Szalag’, because although there is action in it, it is not done by everyone. The esseys ’Insights into British Life – script 1.’ and ’Stancomb Farm’ have almost the same amount of forms of ’to be’ in them, because they are both descriptions of the same kind.

The proportion of the little qualifiers is not bad at all. Of course, they can be left out.
Horváth József has reflected on my Portfolio in his comments the same way I did now. Among syntactic errors he has also found the redundant adjectives and adverbs like ’really’, ’necessary’, ’extremely’ etc.

Conclusion
As shown in these four esseys my writing follows Zinsser’s guidelines, although it is not perfect and never will be as Zinsser said it, that no writing exists which couldn’t be changed to a more concrete and clutter-free one than it is.

As shown in the charts the language is on average 73% concrete with regards to the verbs and there are 13,2% redundant adverbs and adjectives in the examined four esseys.