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INTRODUCTION
Students at Janus Pannonius University from Pécs have the opportunity to attend the Writing and Research Skills seminar where everyone can learn about and improve writing skills. For the sessions students have some writing tasks to do, for example: preparing essays on topics suggested by the teacher or chosen by the students; and accomplishing a small-scale research paper.

During the Fall 1998 semester we used for several times William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Non-Fiction, which was a great help for us in forming our writing style.

Zinsser is a free-lance writer, the author of humorous and non-fiction writings. He was a teacher as well: he taught even at Yale University. His main teaching and conception on writing well is to write as simply as possible and to avoid clutter. Cluttering is when a writer expresses ideas, thoughts with the help of more words than needed making confusing sentences. Simplicity is quite the contrary of clutter: it shows clear thinking. Clear and simple sentences are easy to understand but it is not always easy to produce them. Zinsser says: “Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time” (Zinsser 1998, 12).

In the chapter entitled ”Simplicity” from the book On Writing Well, Zinsser presents two pages of an earlier version of the same book and I found the way he simplified his sentences very exciting.

I thought it would be interesting and useful for me as well as for other students to compare the two versions and to see how a professional writer gets his final edition.

METHOD
As its title itself shows, the chapter ”Simplicity” deals with the importance of simple and clear writing and explains that “the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components” (Zinsser 1998, 7).

As an example for how to simplify sentences, the author shows the reader on pages ten and eleven a piece of draft, an earlier version of the final, edited work. On the two pages of the draft we can see a text and a lot of corrections on it: words and sentences crossed out, some new words written between the lines replacing something dropped out.

I wanted to know how many words were dropped out from the text and how many were substituted with new words and expressions, so I counted every item from both versions. I was also curious to find out if the content of the final version changed as compared to the content of the draft.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
According to Zinsser, the draft shown on pages ten and eleven was already the fourth or fifth version and he could still find a great number of unnecessary words in it.

There were 538 words in the text shown on the two pages of the draft, and after the author revised it once more, he left out 123 elements, which means that almost one fourth of the text (22.8 % exactly) was left out finally. In spite of the large number of omitted words from the draft the final text does not change in meaning, it has the same content and meaning but it is shorter and more simple, thus it is easier to follow and to comprehend the ideas the author shares with his readers

There were only seventeen additions or substitutions. Zinsser replaced several phrases or even sentences with shorter terms, for example: constructions of a definite article and a noun were replaced by personal pronouns; sentences were substituted with verbs; adjectives were left out where the noun carried the meaning of the adjective; noun phrases were replaced by nouns and long verb phrases with short verbs with the same meaning. In three cases he left out complete sentences without any replacement.

A very common problem of both professional and amateur writers is the use of redundant adjectives, I mean the use of adjectives that are not necessary for the understanding of the noun they belong to. That is why I expected adjectives to be the most numerous among those items that were crossed out but I was wrong. They were on the third place on the list. The group of verbs was the leading one of the list containing different parts of speech. The most frequent types of omission were: the verb ”to be” and verbs in the infinitive form. See Table 1 to find out about the number of words belonging to different parts of speech.

Part of speech The number of left out items
Verbs 28
Pronouns 20
Adjectives 15
Adverbs 14
Nouns 13
Articles 8
Conjunctions 3
Others 22
Table 1: The number of omitted words belonging to certain parts of speech in decreasing
order

Zinsser considers revising to be very important. Revising our writings we can realize how many words and phrases can still be omitted, changed or replaced by shorter ones. He says: “Be grateful for everything you can throw away” (Zinsser 1998,18).

Simplicity assumes brevity and clarity of thoughts and expressions, clutter is everything that can be left out without altering the meaning of what we want to express.

CONCLUSION
Simplicity makes a writing valuable. Sentences with many unnecessary elements in them, very elaborate and confusing sentences, or simply: cluttered sentences, will make the reading difficult.

Zinsser in his work gives several writing tips for those who want to improve their writing style, for those who would like to learn how to be simple in our writings. He convinces us to revise all the time what we write and to drop out as many elements as needed. The most important thing according o him is to be as simple and clear as possible.

Everyone who wants to be read must think first of all of the reader, “this elusive creature” (Zinsser 1998, 9), whose attention must be captured. If the reader gets lost among the confusing ideas of a writing, he will stop reading.

Cluttered sentences make the reading difficult. Simple sentences are easy to understand and we must always try to simplify for the sake of good writing and for the sake of better understanding.

We must try to substitute long subordinate clauses with some verbs that contain the same meaning, to use adverbs and adjectives where they are required, to be attentive at nouns that already carry the meaning that can be expressed also with an adjective.