How to Say Nothing in 500 Words

The introduction in "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words" is at least this many paragraphs long:

12

This part of the essay most clearly indicates that the target reader is a college student in a freshman composition class:

After dinner you get out the portable typewriter that you got for high school graduation

The introductory strategy in "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words" consists of

An essay within an essay

Paul Roberts

Author of "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words"

The author believes that if a student writer applies the nine strategies effectively, the content will be 500 words that

Deliver strong, interesting, and throbbingly alive ideas that take the reader with him or her and earn a grade that is better than a D

The author recommends that students reach the 500-word length minimum and earn a passing or high essay score by

Digging up real content.

Job

Finding the argument, the approach, the angle, the wording that will take the reader with him is the writer's

Abstraction

In order to slip out of this, good writing constantly moves from the generality, the abstract statement, to the concrete example, the facts and figures, and the illustrations

Polysyllables

Roundabout phrases against which a writer should guard because they slip in to rob writing of its crispness and force

Excessive Timidity

Some of the padding in freshman esays is to be blamed not on anxiety about the word minimum but on this

One purpose that comes through in the essay is to show writers

That they are expected to make their writing interesting.

English

The author of "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words" taught in this subject area

Second Person

The essay titled "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words" is written from this point of view

Alfred Simkins

The fictionalized football center roommate who plays second string, is not talented enough for the pros, and has not benefited enough academically to succeed, and thus gets used by the college

Words

The most slippery and elusive and treacherous raw material with which anyone can build

Which sentence captures the author's main idea?

There are some things you can do which will make your papers, if not throbbingly alive, at least less insufferably tedious than they might otherwise be.

Pat Expressions

Those sentences that come to a writer whole, or in two or three big, doughy lumps