Thea writting review 1 pdf

Redundancy

Avoid redundancy. Try to keep your sentences as suc￾cinct as possible without losing meaning. Make every

word and phrase count.

Take a look at the following examples of redun￾dant phrases and replacement words you can use for

concise writing:

NOT BUT

during the course of during

in the event that if

in the near future soon

plan in advance plan

past history past

green in color green

true facts facts

Unecessary Sentences

and Sentence Order

In the multiple-choice writing portion of THEA, you

will need to identify sentences in a passage that do not

support the main idea. On the essay portion, you

should avoid writing sentences that are not on the same

general topic as the rest of the paragraph.

The order of the sentences in a paragraph is just

as important as the order of the paragraphs in an essay.

For example, if you are writing about money parents

will save, put all the sentences on money together. Pro￾vide transitions for your sentences, just as you did with

your paragraphs. You can join sentences with transition

words such as besides, second, lastly, or you can put in

topic sentences.

Try rearranging the paragraph on parents in a

logical order. You have two topics: money and peace in

the family. So add a topic sentence to announce the first

idea:

First, uniforms would save parents money.

The fake survey you added at the end of the para￾graph reports statistics on both money and peace, so

that’s a great way to tie the two topics together. The rest

of the sentences should all fit under one of the two top￾ics. If you have something that doesn’t fit, just leave it

out.

Run-On Sentences

Before you move on to problems with words in the next

lesson, take a look at a problem sentence from the sec￾ond body paragraph on school uniforms.

Children who dress differently are alienated

from cliques at school and left to feel like out￾siders and are teased unmercifully and end up

losing a lot of self-esteem.

Do you see that this sentence goes on and on? It

should have been divided into at least two sentences.

If you wanted to join the two above sentences, you

could do it with a semicolon; if you used a comma,

you’d have a sentence fault called a comma splice. The

same is true of the sentence you just read. For more on

fixing your punctuation and word problems, keep

reading.

The Punctuation,

Capitalization, and

Word Doctor

You will need to know correct punctuation for both the

multiple-choice and the essay portions of the Writing

section. In the multiple-choice section of the THEA,

you will need to be able to identify punctuation errors.

In the essay section of the THEA, you will need to be

able to use punctuation correctly. This lesson will help

you do both.

–THEA WRITING REVIEW–

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