Everything the adaptive question bank can teach and test in Precise Expression, from foundations through advanced practice. Work through it in order, or start practising and let the questions find your level.
A. What precision is
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Shorter is usually clearer, but a cut that removes a real qualification trades accuracy for length.
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Lexical, structural, referential and scope ambiguity are four different defects with four different repairs.
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Every imprecision makes the reader guess, and a guess is a place your meaning can be replaced by theirs.
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A precise sentence admits one plausible reading; if you can construct a second, the sentence is not done.
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Detail beyond what the claim supports is its own error, because it implies knowledge you do not have.
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Formality and precision are independent axes; the formal word is frequently the vaguer one.
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Vague phrasing is often a way to avoid committing, which makes it an ethical question as well as a stylistic one.
B. Denotation, connotation, and near-synonyms
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Denotation is the definition; connotation is the attitude the word carries, and only one of them is in the dictionary entry.
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"Thrifty", "frugal" and "cheap" denote the same behavior and pass three different verdicts on it.
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Synonym lists hide the constraints — intensity, formality, agency — that make substitution wrong.
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Words have habitual partners; a grammatically valid but uncollocated pairing reads as non-native or as emphasis you did not intend.
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Softening a term reduces its felt weight, which is sometimes kindness and sometimes concealment.
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Choosing the harshest accurate label is a persuasive move disguised as a factual one.
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Picking the word whose sense-range most closely fits, rather than a broad word plus modifiers.
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A verb like "proves", "suggests" or "is consistent with" states a strength of evidence, not a stylistic preference.
C. Specificity and the abstraction ladder
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Every referent can be named at several levels of generality, and each step up loses information.
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The classic rule: prefer the definite to the vague, the specific to the general, the concrete to the abstract.
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"Thing", "aspect", "factor", "area" and "issue" are placeholders where the actual noun should be.
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Naming the instance is usually more informative than naming its category, and always shorter than both.
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Asserting a quality ("the process was inefficient") is weaker than the detail that would let a reader conclude it.
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The right level of detail is set by what the reader must do with it, not by how much you know.
D. Wordiness and redundancy
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"There is" and "it is" openings postpone the subject and bury the verb one clause deeper.
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Doubled near-synonyms ("first and foremost", "each and every") signal emphasis and add no content.
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Modifiers already contained in the noun: "advance planning", "past history", "unexpected surprise".
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"Very", "really", "quite" and "extremely" dilute rather than strengthen, because they replace a stronger word.
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Three or more stacked prepositional phrases force the reader to hold an unresolved structure.
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"Due to the fact that", "in order to", "for the purpose of" each collapse to one word.
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Openers like "It is important to note that" delay the sentence's actual claim.
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Almost every "the fact that" construction hides a subordinate clause that wants to be a phrase.
E. Conciseness as a revision procedure
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Delete the candidate words, reread, and restore only what the sentence provably lost.
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Merging two short related sentences often removes a repeated subject and a weak connective at once.
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Reducing a relative clause to a phrase ("which was written by" → "by") without changing the relationship.
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Which idea goes in the main clause is a claim about relative importance, not a layout decision.
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Every qualifier either carries uncertainty you can defend or is padding; there is no third case.
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Comparing word count against retained meaning is what distinguishes editing from deleting.
F. Nominalization and hidden verbs
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Turning a verb into a noun ("decide" → "decision") and then needing a weak verb to carry it.
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Find the buried action and make it the sentence's main verb; the surrounding scaffolding then falls away.
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"Make", "conduct", "perform", "provide" and "give" are the tells that a real verb has been nominalized.
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Nominalization deletes the actor as a side effect, which is why it dominates institutional prose.
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Stacked noun modifiers ("user access request review") hide every grammatical relation between them.
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A nominalization is correct when the process itself is the topic being discussed.
G. Voice and agency
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Active order puts the actor in the subject position, so responsibility is readable without inference.
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The passive permits dropping the actor entirely, which is precisely why it is used to avoid naming one.
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The agentless passive as a rhetorical move: grammatically complete, informationally missing a party.
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Adding "by whom" to a passive is the diagnostic that reveals whether the actor was ever there.
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In procedures, the reader must know who acts at each step, which passives systematically obscure.
H. When the passive is the precise choice
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When nobody knows who acted, the passive states exactly that, and an invented subject would be false.
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Keeping the paragraph's topic in the subject slot can require a passive, and cohesion is worth it.
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English puts new information last; the passive is the tool for moving the new thing to the end.
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Some fields require the passive for method description, where the actor is deliberately irrelevant.
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Not every "was" is a passive; "was tired" is a linking verb, and mistaking it produces bad edits.
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Blanket passive-hunting rewrites correct sentences into worse ones, which is why the rule needs the test.
I. Tense, aspect, and time precision
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Tense states when something held, which makes it a factual commitment rather than a stylistic habit.
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Simple past closes an event; present perfect connects it to now, and the difference is often the point.
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Reported speech and nested clauses shift tense in patterned ways, and breaking the pattern changes who claimed what.
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Drifting between tenses inside a passage makes the timeline unrecoverable.
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"If X happens" and "if X had happened" assert different things about the world.
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Progressive versus simple aspect marks whether an action is ongoing or finished, which readers use to infer status.
J. Modality, hedging, and commitment
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"Must", "should", "may", "might" and "can" form a graded scale of obligation and possibility.
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"You must be careful" (obligation) and "that must be the cause" (inference) use one word for two systems.
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A hedge that reports real uncertainty is more precise than a confident claim, not less.
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Hedging to avoid being wrong rather than to describe uncertainty transfers the risk to the reader.
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"It may possibly appear that" hedges the hedge and communicates no level of confidence at all.
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"Clearly", "obviously" and "of course" assert agreement instead of earning it, and invite the opposite.
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Matching the strength of the verb to the strength of the evidence is the whole discipline in one move.
K. Quantifiers and vague measurement
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"Some", "many", "most" and "several" span ranges wide enough that two readers disagree about the same sentence.
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"Twice as likely" without the base rate is compatible with a change from rare to slightly less rare.
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"Faster", "cheaper", "better" require a stated comparison class or they assert nothing checkable.
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The number of digits you print is itself a precision claim, and an unearned one is a lie about your measurement.
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A range communicates both the estimate and its uncertainty; a point estimate silently discards the second.
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"Often", "rarely" and "occasionally" are read as different rates by different readers, and by the same reader in different domains.
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"About", "roughly" and "up to" have distinct meanings, and "up to" bounds only one side.
L. Comparison precision
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"Our tool is more accurate" omits the second term, which is the half that carries the information.
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"Her results were better than the control group" compares results to a group rather than to results.
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Every comparative implies a reference set; leaving it unstated lets the reader pick a flattering one.
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Two items take the comparative, three or more the superlative, and the slip changes the claimed scope.
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"Unique", "complete" and "fatal" resist degree modification, so "more unique" signals the wrong word was chosen.
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Both sides of a comparison must be grammatically parallel or the reader pairs the wrong elements.
M. Modifier placement and scope
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A modifier attaches to the nearest plausible target, which is often not the one you meant.
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An introductory phrase whose implied subject is absent from the main clause attaches itself to whatever is there.
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A modifier between two elements that could plausibly modify either, leaving the sentence genuinely two-way.
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Moving "only" through a sentence produces a different true claim at every position.
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Sentence adverbs modify the whole clause; verb adverbs modify one action, and the placement decides which.
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Whether a clause narrows the reference or merely adds detail is the difference between two different sets.
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In "old books and papers", whether "old" reaches "papers" is undecidable without restructuring.
N. Pronoun reference
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Two candidate nouns and one pronoun is the single most common referential failure in edited prose.
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"This" pointing at a whole previous clause, where the reader must decide how much of it is included.
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Reference decays with distance; a pronoun three sentences from its noun needs the noun back.
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Number and person agreement are what let a reader eliminate wrong antecedents automatically.
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After an enumeration, a pronoun can point to the list, its last item, or the whole discussion.
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"It is raining" and "it broke" use the same word for a placeholder and a referent.
O. Singular they and generic reference
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The standard, style-guide-endorsed pronoun for a generic or unknown person, and for a person who uses it.
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The historical default excluded half of every referenced population and misled readers about who was meant.
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The paired construction is accurate but heavy, and it still presupposes exactly two options.
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Recasting the sentence in the plural removes the problem without any pronoun decision.
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For a specific person, the precise pronoun is the one that person uses, which is a factual matter.
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Switching strategies between paragraphs makes the reader wonder whether a different group is meant.
P. First person, stance, and attribution
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"I" marks which claims are yours, which is information the impersonal alternative deletes.
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"We" can mean the authors, the field, the reader-and-writer, or humanity, and readers resolve it differently.
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Institutional "we" is a stance choice; it hides whether one person or an organization is committing.
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Recasting to avoid first person usually installs an agentless passive and loses the attribution entirely.
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Signalling whether a statement is yours, a source's, or a summary of a debate is a precision requirement.
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Fields differ on first person, and the norm is a convention about attribution, not about modesty.
Q. Punctuation that changes meaning
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A comma before a relative clause converts "the ones that qualify" into "all of them, which qualify".
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The final comma in a list resolves ambiguity in the cases where the last two items could be read as one.
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Joining two independent clauses with a comma leaves their logical relation unstated.
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The semicolon asserts a close relationship between two complete statements without naming it.
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A colon tells the reader that what follows delivers what the first clause set up.
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Dashes raise an interruption's prominence; parentheses lower it, and the choice ranks the content.
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"Small business owner" and "small-business owner" describe different people.
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Quotation marks around a term signal distance from it, which readers correctly read as a judgment.
R. Sentence structure and clarity
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Material inserted between subject and verb forces the reader to hold the subject in memory.
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Long introductory material before the main clause delays the point past the reader's patience.
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Coordinated elements must share grammatical form, or the reader mispairs them before noticing.
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A subject that cannot logically perform its verb ("the purpose studies…") produces a sentence with no coherent claim.
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A sentence that starts in one grammatical pattern and finishes in another leaves no complete reading.
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Long, complex elements belong at the end, where the reader has already anchored the structure.
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"And/or" and unparenthesized boolean prose create genuine multi-reading ambiguity in rules and criteria.
S. Cohesion: given before new
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The start of a sentence tells the reader what it is about; putting new material there disorients.
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The end of a sentence carries emphasis, so what lands there is what the reader remembers.
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Opening with known information and closing with new information is what makes a paragraph feel connected.
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A paragraph whose sentences share a subject reads as one argument rather than several.
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"However", "therefore", "meanwhile" and "moreover" each assert a specific relation, and the wrong one misdirects.
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The first sentence promises the paragraph's scope, and every later sentence is checked against it.
T. Jargon, terms of art, and definition
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A term of art has a fixed meaning worth keeping; jargon is a habit worth replacing, and audience decides which is which.
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Defining at first use, inside the sentence, costs a clause and saves every subsequent misreading.
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Expanding on first use only helps if the reader will still be holding it later, which long documents cannot assume.
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Technical metaphors ("surface", "spin up", "onboard") drift in meaning and fail for outside readers.
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Jargon can make a vague claim sound measured; the term looks technical while the underlying statement is not.
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The same word is precise for one reader and opaque for another, so vocabulary is a function of audience, not of the topic.
U. Consistency of terms
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Fixing one name per concept is the cheapest precision gain available in any document.
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Varying the word for stylistic freshness makes the reader ask what changed, because normally something has.
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Long documents accumulate near-synonyms until nobody can tell whether three terms name three things.
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Capitalization or formatting to mark a term as defined tells the reader which word is load-bearing.
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A glossary serves reference lookup; inline definition serves the reader who is reading straight through.
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Inconsistent source terms multiply into inconsistent translations, so consistency is a downstream cost too.
V. Register and tone
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Frozen, formal, consultative, casual and intimate registers, each with its own vocabulary and syntax.
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Latinate vocabulary, nominalization, passive voice and third person cluster together as one dial.
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Contractions lower formality without lowering precision, which is why most modern style guides allow them.
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"You" makes obligations unambiguous, and is the single largest register decision in instructional writing.
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A register that does not match the situation reads as sarcasm, condescension, or evasion.
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Humor depends on shared context, so it degrades fastest for exactly the readers who needed the sentence most.
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"Click Save" and "the user clicks Save" describe the same act to two different readers for two different purposes.
W. Bias-free and person-first precision
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Naming the actual group rather than a broad umbrella is a precision improvement before it is a courtesy.
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Naming the person before the characteristic, so the characteristic does not stand in for the person.
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Some communities prefer identity-first phrasing, so the precise choice is the one the group uses.
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Mentioning a characteristic that is irrelevant to the claim implies it is relevant, which is a false implicature.
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Reporting the level of specificity your data actually supports, rather than collapsing to a convenient category.
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Accepted terms shift, and using a superseded one dates the writing and distracts from the claim.
X. Commonly confused pairs, as classes
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Pairs distinguished only in writing (their/there, its/it's) fail spellcheck and must be resolved by function.
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Pairs split by word class — affect/effect, advice/advise — resolve by asking what slot the sentence needs.
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Lie/lay and rise/raise divide on whether the verb takes an object, which the sentence itself answers.
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Fewer/less, number/amount and many/much all turn on whether the noun can be counted.
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That/which and who/whom sit on grammatical distinctions, one about clause type and one about case.
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Imply/infer, lend/borrow and teach/learn each encode who is doing what to whom.
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Comprise/compose, contain/consist and include/constitute encode which side is the whole.
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Literal/figurative, continual/continuous and disinterested/uninterested are distinctions people are actively losing, which is why the class matters more than the pair.
Y. Global English and translation-safe phrasing
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Idioms carry no compositional meaning, so they fail for second-language readers and for machine translation alike.
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"Take up", "put off" and "run through" each have several unrelated senses that context must disambiguate.
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Sports, holiday and pop-culture references are precise only inside the culture that supplies them.
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Shorter, more explicit syntax survives translation; heavy subordination compounds every ambiguity in it.
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Optional "that" and dropped relatives are recoverable for native readers and genuinely ambiguous for others.
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Dates, decimal separators, units and address order differ by locale, so a bare number can be read two ways.
Z. Diagnosing imprecision in your own draft
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Reading aloud exposes stacked modifiers, lost antecedents and unfinished comparisons that the eye skips.
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Deliberately looking for a second reading of each sentence is the only reliable way to find structural ambiguity.
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Marking each sentence's single claim shows where two claims were smuggled into one structure.
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Replacing a word with a candidate synonym and asking what changed reveals what the original was carrying.
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Scanning only for the main verb and its actor catches nominalization, agentless passive and faulty predication in one pass.
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Marking every claim as checkable or not converts vague quantifiers and bare comparatives into a to-do list.
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