Do you ever notice a gap between what you know and what you can do? For example, in my last Technical Writing class the students studied and corrected several unclear sample sentences. We focused on avoiding two typical errors that Japanese writers produce: overusing the passive and overusing nouns. Most students did the workbook exercises very well. However, when I gave them some time to produce a sentence summarizing their own work, many seemed to have forgotten what they’d studied only 10 minutes before.

There is a difference between applying a principle to an exercise in a workbook and to sentences you’ve written yourself. However, I think that if the students had taken a moment to reflect on what they’d just ’studied’ they could have written more natural sentences. In this case, the two principles were

*use a verb to communicate the main idea.
*put that verb into the active voice.

I hope that the students in my class can give themselves a little bit of time to review the classwork before starting their homework. Time spent reviewing is always time well invested. Get your mind into a state of focus where you can apply principles of clear writing to your own sentences. You will write much more elegantly, and your readers will be grateful.