User:Skakkle/tirade

You can almost never go wrong making the sentences of the previous version shorter. lol seriously, look at my edits. That's my whole MO.

You can fix bad & obscure content too!

Make sentences shorter

Use your gut. Find a sentence that's too long & hard to understand. Find the multiple statements contained within it. Try chopping it into pieces. Then lightly edit those pieces to make it work grammatically. If you wanna edit the substance a bit, you can do that too, but it's not necessary. Usually, the grammatical fixes needed to chop sentences down will help you see which clauses really convey any worthwhile meaning. You can quickly see what's an unneeded flourish.

Long ass sentences are not helpful for readers to actually learn about subject matter. I'm not sure where the convention came from of writing so many sentences so long. Sometimes it makes sense and reads OK. But usually, the tone becomes insufferable very quickly.

articles on esoteric, academic & high-theory topics are often poorly or opaquely written

As you're chopping, you will likely quickly see which sentence portions are not illuminating anything. In some of the more esoteric topics related to social sciences or golly forsaken critical theory- such sentence portions are simply puffing up the concepts of the field. Invariably, these passages are buzz-wording, passive-voicing-with-no-agent, and obfuscating so hard the copy becomes 90% gobbledygook. Cut the fat and state plainly the meaning that was hiding in the original copy. Clarify the substance. Separate what the article itself is saying, from that which a quoted person, or a discipline is saying.

Avoid passive voice

I'm sure this is somewhere in the style guide. Often, you should AVOID PASSIVE VOICE. When a contributor uses passive voice, it creates a tone that attributes something to no one at all. Sometimes that tone is appropriate, and different subject matter areas should be treated in various different ways. But mostly, I think readers wanna read something concrete. Subject, verb, object, with a transitive verb. It's a pretty simple style to employ, but is often very effective.