Page 258 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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Table 10.2 Common Usages of ‘Make’ and ‘Do’
Make Do
make a mistake do good
make a speech do one’s best
make a promise do one a favour
make an excuse do wrong
make haste do a lesson
make fun of do a problem
make progress do business
make an experiment do exercises

Such minor errors can ruin your written communication. Given the con-
straints of space, here we have collated only the ‘top ten’. But if you avoid
these, remarkably clear would be your written communication.

Sentence Clarity: Mistakes to Avoid
For good written communication, grammar alone does not help though.
Grammar can help you with parts of speech, their usage, and so on. What
you need in addition is appropriate communication. Hence, here we collate
a brief discussion of factors that affect sentence clarity. If you follow these
principles, your written communication would be able to convey clearly
your message to its receiver, that is, your decoder.

i. Avoid incomplete sentences.
Sentence fragments suit the advertising discourse alone. If your writ-
ten communication has too many of these, it will not be effective
either for your learners or for your colleagues.
ii. Do not pack into a sentence two or more unrelated ideas.
e.g., His brother was a sturdy fellow, and he was a good sprinter.

Who is a good sprinter here? The brother? He? Avoid such
confusion.
iii. Avoid choppy sentences.
‘
e.g., Naidu read our invitation. He visited our school. He saw for him-
self the efficacy of the Froebel method. He praised us to skies.’
Such chopped and cut-n-dried sentences make reading a tedious
job. Avoid them. Instead write, ‘As per our invitation, Naidu vis-
ited our school and praised our efforts to introduce the Froebel
method of education’.

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