L3

This chapter is all about how to create a positive ethos. It begins to talk about how to achieve a positive ethos through tone and style. In order to achieve a positive ethos you must project a confident tone when you speak and write. You must also be able to capture the right words and use them in the right way so you can sound confident and speak with authority. Later it talks about how to make your writing concise. It explains that writing clearly should be to the point of the issue at hand. You must first break old habits of wordiness. And it requires practice and a critical eye for your own style of writing. When you are writing you must avoid somethings. Such as overuse of the passive voice, avoid expletives such as there is or it is, use of prepositional idioms, overuse of relative pronouns, repetition of words and ideas, don’t overuse descriptive words, weasel words, avoid nominalizations, finally avoid redundancies. In the last part of this chapter it explains how to employ efficient editing techniques.