Memorandum

To: Professor Malone

From: Carolina Betancourt
Date: 9-3-19
Subject: Project 1

I have completed the analysis you requested about my pro style on my research report about
cultures influencing a person’s health. My findings about being concise, being precise, and being
direct are presented in the following the following sections.

Be Concise

Being Concise means that it is brief and contains all of the information needed. When analyzing
my writing I looked for unnecessary repetition, redundant words, dead phrases, and unnecessary
modifiers.

Unnecessary Repetition- Although culture was the one of the main topics of my
sentence, I realized the word was used too frequently at the beginning of my sentences.

“Culture influences the way we handle the pain in our lives and how we choose to
care for our health. Cultures share their very own ways of taking care of their
health from techniques they were shown through practices and rituals.”

To fix my mistake I can try to substitute word by using, “Many people”, or even
placing a comma and changing the second sentences.

Redundant words- I found several redundant words throughout my research paper and
noticed I did this more than once in sentences. I realize I do this too much when writing
papers when I feel like I am not writing long enough sentences.

There are many different languages spoken around the world and of course not
everyone can learn them all or be as fluent in multiple languages as others.

Many people already know that different languages exist in different parts of the
world and that it was not necessary to repeat the fact that there are multiple of
them. I would need to remove both of the underlined phrases to fix my error.

Dead Phrases- When analyzing I noticed that the most used dead phrase I used was, “As
I mentioned before.” I used this in several paragraphs and mentioned it seven times
throughout my writing.

“As I mentioned before culture has its ways of influencing us and although there
are many I had found a few that I felt were really interesting and differ from
culture to culture.”
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Using this phrase is not necessary, or makes a difference when trying to repeat
something I had just mentioned.

Unnecessary modifiers- I tend to use unnecessary modifiers because I know that I have
the tendency to use these a lot when I am physically speaking to others.

“This was due to the lack of time it took to actually get a scan because they were
not too sure what was wrong because nothing could be understood.”

Modifiers are used when writing essays, but since this is a research paper it is not
as usual to use.

Be Precise

Being precise means, you are using the correct terms or terminology when speaking to a certain
audience. The terminology I use for this research paper were used accurately and common to
most people since it involved a lot of terms involving cultures.

Technical Terminology Terms Used:

• Religion
• Generations
• Practices
• Rituals
• Language
• Shrines
• Diverse
• Transfusions
• Health Care
• Medication
• Herbs

All of these terms are common when speaking about the different cultures and when
having to involve someone’s care.

Be Direct

Being direct means to be straightforward and to write a straightforward prose.

Active Words: This is not something I struggle with as often because I am always
searching for different verbs to use throughout my writing.

“This has its ways of influencing us, but we have that option to follow these
beliefs or discovering new ways of understanding.”
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I used to word discovering to avoid using words like finding or found out in my
writing.

Stress Position: I do not believe this is as common in my writing, but I did realize I
included this sentence towards the end of one my paragraphs as if I was continuing on to
another topic.

“With all the articles I had read I would have never thought of some of the ways
or different perspectives our own culture could be affecting our health.”

I do not think this was needed in my sentence since I was already done explaining
all of the points and topic of the sentence.

Topic position: This is not something I struggle with in most of my writing due to the
practice I have had to include a topic sentence as the beginning of a new paragraph.

“Religion plays a role in the way we choose to care for our health, and one of the
common examples is the choice a Jehovah Witness has when dealing with blood
transfusions.”

I used this correctly because this is what I started my sentence with and then
continued to include any details or examples about my topic.

Grammatical Errors

Grammatical Errors occur in my writing when I am typing too fast and type before I speak. The
most common errors I make are with comma slicing, but I do very well when it comes to not
writing run-on sentences.

Run-on Sentence: These types of sentences are two sentences that are combined
by using a conjunction.

“This was also performed on females for the same purpose, but the results were
more severe.”

The sentence above showed that I correctly used a conjunction and the comma to
connect both of the sentences.

Comma Slice: A comma slice is when two sentences are combined with a comma, but do
not make as much sense and need to be to separate sentences instead.

“Many cultures share their very own ways of taking care of their health from
techniques they were shown through practices and, I know that in my family my
grandmother believes in treating pain with many different herbs from the way she
was taught from her mother.”
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Replacing the underlined word and comma with a period would be one of the
ways I can choose to fix my error.

Conclusion
Through analyzing my work, I realized that I need to be more concise in my writing.
I need to be able to take more time to review my sentences and have someone proof read
my papers. This project showed me ways I can improve my weaknesses and new ways
and exampled I can use in my writing.
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