Style

“Style: Toward Clarity and Grace” by Joseph M. Williams explains many problems people have with writing. One being coherence, which is something I have trouble with.

"In the scene when Chief Whitlock is racing out of the hotel to avoid being caught once out the door he ditches the case of money he just retrieved in a dumpster. Then quickly reaches for his badge and tells the hotel security chasing him the guy they are after is still inside and that he’ll take the back and they should go upstairs. Good thing the hotel security don’t really know who they’re chasing. There is a lot going on in this scene. So here it is broken down."

This is a paragraph from a scene analysis paper I did in the English 200 class I took at Schoolcraft College. It doesn’t really have coherence. When revising the paragraph, I had to keep revising my revision because I wasn’t saying what I had even meant to say; I was saying what I interpreted from the original paragraph. One sentence made me cringe before I revised the paragraph. “Good thing the hotel security don’t really know who they’re chasing.” It is the word don’t, it doesn’t sound right.

"In the scene, Chief Whitlock dumps the case of money in a dumpster. He turns around, grabs his badge, shows it to the hotel security, and says the guy is still inside; he’ll take the back and they should go upstairs. Good thing the hotel security didn’t know who they were chasing. Following is the breakdown of the scene."

With the revision, I tried to talk more in the active voice and make it more coherent. The original, I felt was kind of choppy, and I wasn’t clearly stating what I meant. I have been told the majority of people think logically, and I didn’t put the scene in logical, chronological, order. In the revision, I take the reader through the scene step by step, rather than a jumbled mess. I also avoided starting a sentence with so in the revision.