English 11.67
Unit 1: Irish Creation of Irish Culture
Writing Exercise: Concision

Examples drawn from Terence Brown's
Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-1985

1) For the following excerpt, determine the most important information present, and excise the rest. Your goal involves reducing the present text down to only seventy-five words. You may reword and rephrase clauses and phrases, but do not add new meaning to what already exists.

"In this rural world, at least since the famine years of the 1840s, two phenomena had been observable as aspects of the social organization of the countryside -- a high average age of marriage accompanied by an extraordinary degree of apparent pre-marital chastity and the massive haemorrhage of emigration. Some simple statistics highlight these. The 1926 Census revealed that in Ireland there was a larger proportion of unmarried persons of all ages than in any other country in which records were kept. In 1926 80 per cent of all males between the ages of 25-30 years were unmarried, with 62 per cent of males between 30-35 years, 50 per cent of males between 35-40 and 26 per cent of males between 55-65 also unmarried. The figures for women, whilst not quite so amazing, were also very high" (Brown 19).

2) For the following excerpt, determine the most important information present, and excise the rest. Your goal involves reducing the present text down to only fifty words. You may reword and rephrase clauses and phrases, but do not add new meaning to what already exists.

"Crucial to the institutional and popular achievements of the Church in the period following the Famine until very recent times was the role played by Catholicism in confirming a sense of national identity. The Church with her recently regularized rites and practices offered to most Irishmen and women in the period a way to be Irish which set them apart from the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles, meeting the needs thereby of a nascent Irish nationalism at a time when the Irish language and the Gaelic culture of the past were enduring a protracted decline" (Brown 28).

3) Take the bold-faced sentence in the following passage and, without adding new detail from the surrounding text, fluff up the sentence with wordiness until it assumes 2-3 times its present size (20-30 words). You might employ overly general descriptors, unnecessary prepositional phrases, etc.

"Political life in the newly independent Irish Free State [following the Treaty of 1921], even int he immediate aftermath of a revolution, reflected in obvious ways the essential conservatism of the pre-dominantly rural Irish electorate. Law and order were rigorously maintained and the books carefully balanced" (Brown 45).

4) Take the bold-faced sentence in the following passage and, without adding new detail from the surrounding text, fluff up the sentence with wordiness until it assumes 2-3 times its present size (20-30 words). You might employ overly general descriptors, unnecessary prepositional phrases, etc.

"The gaelicization of education was, in contrast, systematically attempted. It was determined that all teachers leaving training colleges should be expected to have a knowledge of Irish: preparatory boarding schools were established to prepare young people for careers in the teaching profession which would emphasize the language; school inspectors were required to study Irish and no further appointments were offered to individuals who lacked proficiency in Irish . . ." (Brown 49).

5) For the following excerpt, determine the most important information present, and excise the rest. Your goal involves reducing the present text down to only twenty words. You may reword and rephrase clauses and phrases, but do not add new meaning to what already exists

"For Foley the greatest crime perpetrated by cnesorship was not the undoubted injury done to Irish writers, nor the difficulty experienced by educated men and women in getting hold of banned works, but the perpetuation of cultural poverty in the country as a whole, left without the leaven of serious contemporary literature" (Brown 77).

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu