Being Concise

“A sentence should contain no unnecessary words,  a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” – from The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White

One of your classmates has generously donated his post (below) so that we can practice concise writing. Please revise one of the sections below using Strunk and White’s advice. Attempt to keep true to his ideas.

Section 1) After going onto the Skin Care Database and looking up many of my products, I immediately experienced many different emotions. One emotion was relief that my products weren’t “in the red,” but at the same time it sparked a feeling of concern as most of my products were a “moderate hazard” to my health. However, my concern was soon replaced with my questioning of the credibility of this website. How do I know if what these people are saying is really true? After performing a general review of the website, I noticed that the url ends in a .com instead of a .org, .edu, or .gov. Now, the Skin Care Database website is branched off from the Environmental Working Group, whose site ends in a .org. This raises the question of why EWG didn’t decide to end this website in a .org. After performing another look over the homepage of the database, I noticed that the link to subpages such as the FAQ page, are in tiny font compared to the rest of the site, located in the upper right hand of the website. This is easily missed by consumers and clearly the big font and adds can be used as a distraction to pull the attention of the site viewer elsewhere.

Section 2) After this general assessment, I then went on to try and find out exactly what the numbers next to the product mean and represent. I first went to the “About” tab at the top and was redirected tohttp://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/about.php and began to explore this page a little more. Here I found nothing useful to determine what the number next to the product meant. However, at the bottom of the page I stumbled upon equations that determine the amount of uncertainty, further defining exactly what the company means by data gaps. Personally, the equation means nothing to me. There is no way that an average person can come along and derive the same equation or even begin to wrap their mind around how this equation came into existence. This led me to realize that the database is written in a way that targets audiences with a higher intellect level. The vocabulary both for scientific and expository purposes were way beyond my understanding and left me with my dictionary open trying to find the meaning of these words. I have to agree that this adds to the ethos of the website, however an inquiring mind will begin to question because for all they know, the website can be pulling high level vocabulary words in order to sound credible, but they aren’t necessarily.

Section 3–2 paragraphs) The general aesthetics for the database point towards a credible outcome, however, reading between the lines, I can see that the website may not be as credible as it seems. If you wanted to find the sources of the information, you would need to spend a good chunk of time trying to navigate through the site in order to find what you were looking for. Do the authors of this website have something to hide? If not, one would think they would allow easy access to their sources.

The unfortunate reality is, they are trying to push their point. They want companies to begin to monitor their chemical input in their products. But at what point do we draw the line between what is believable and what is credible? The website does a better job of backing us into a corner, afraid of what might happen if we continue to use these products. As people have mentioned before some of us cannot afford these “healthier” alternatives to these convenient products we use today. America is a country that thinks with its wallet, using dollar bills to fuel their capitalistic dream.

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