Introduction
Today we will be discussing the basic writing tips or Four Cs of Effective Writing. But First, I’ll try to answer some questions.
- Why Writing or What was the Need for Writing / Four Cs of Effective Writing?
Writing came into development because before writing there were people called Bards, who were remembering things in their memory and they were telling the people orally. As it’s in Human nature to die, people were dying and no one was recognizing such things so the idea came that we should draw something or leave any signs so that the coming generations come to know about their values, and customs through these signs.
They were painted in caves so that the signs or pictures were protected from them.
Now with time, the process of writing increases and is developing day by day. The writing process was getting easy and rules were set for the writing process to understand it completely. As we are concerned with English. So the idea of the alphabet comes and then the sentence, the phrases, vowels, consonants, parts of speech, and many more.
We will be discussing today the concept of Writing / Four Cs of Effective Writing and how your writing can be effective and can be easily understandable.
Different rules are there for effective writing by many scholars. The most effective way is Four Cs of Effective Writing.
Four Cs of Effective Writing
1st C stands for Clarity
2nd for Conciseness
3rd for correctness
4th for completeness
Now we will be discussing each one to get to know about effective writing.
Clarity
Clarity as the name indicates clear. Now it is basically related to 2 ideas.
The one related to handwriting means whatever you are writing must be clear so that someone reading it easily understands it without any difficulty. Good handwriting produces a good effect on the reader.
The second one is related to the clearance of ideas. Whatever you are writing must have a clear idea of what exactly you want to write and what message you want to convey. Use simple words so that the idea must be clearly understood and coherent in your writing which means that the words must flow naturally and there must be a connection between the ideas or sentences.
Simply Clarity means that you must write clearly and must be clear about your ideas. This means writing ideas in simple words.
For example: In Shakespeare’s writing, he is saying that which is translated as
“Mother the stomach u have given birth is containing nothing means empty”. But with the development of language, as it was getting simpler, we can translate this sentence into simple words which is
Mom, I’m hungry.
Note: you can also take Shakespeare’s example in Conciseness.
Conciseness
The other word given to Conciseness is Concreteness which means being specific to your writing.
Conciseness means limiting your words meaning precise in your ideas. Whatever is asked you just answer or whatever you are writing, whatever you are giving supporting details, the ideas must not go anywhere from the main idea.
Conciseness simply means presenting the necessary information about the given topics without giving extra details. Its main goal is to be brief but effective in your writing. Your every word counts here so don’t go for too much detail. Do not repeat the same idea twice by changing the words. By changing the words only the word count increases but not your idea, give supporting detail to your main idea. You should eliminate the extra words used. And most of the time for effective writing we can also use active verbs.
For example when a topic is only related to a Novel and you describe it from the perspective of Poetry or prose it differs from that on that basis. Just write about novels only.
Or for example, if a question is asked about the characteristics of a Novel and you go for its Elements or you go for its historical background, that’s against the rule of conciseness.
In other words, some of the examples are
Simple Concise
Due to the fact that = because
In the vicinity of = near
And many more
Correctness
Correctness refers to the good quality of writing. Good quality of writing means your writing must be and will be clear from any type of mistakes. These mistakes should be grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes, mistakes in the placement of commas or full stops or hyphens, or any other punctuation mark. similarly the tense changes from sentence to sentence. You would write correct sentences lacking all those mistakes. There are three basic steps to be taken in the Correctness of the sentences.
Revise
Whenever you are done with your writing, you must check your writing repeatedly many times because there will be mistakes in the writing especially spelling mistakes are so many there or sometimes tense changes, and many more
Edit
Then after going through your writing, you will correct all the mistakes you have made. Edit means to make it beautiful just like we edit the pictures to make it beautiful, similarly, we remove mistakes from our writings to make it beautiful and easier for the reader.
Proofread
After editing, go for a detailed reading to find out any mistakes and show it publicly. You must clear yourself first and then show it to the public. Here you can also check for missing words or uncleared sentences.
Completeness
Completeness is the C in the 4 C’s of communication. Completeness refers to information the reader wants or whether the information you are writing is fulfilling the need of the reader or not, whether it is complete or not. Here you also look that the information you are providing to the reader is making him or her satisfied or not.
You also look upon your information whether you have provided all the necessary data or not. Here you see whether you have answered the questions or not. Mainly you look up to your data’s questions from the WH questions perspective. They are what, when, where, which, why, how, etc.
These are the 4 basic tactics through which you can improve your writing skills. There are also many tactics taught to us by the experts but the most preferable one is discussed above.