Use accurate, controlled and effective language to express ideas clearly and precisely in your responses.

What this dot point is asking

One of the course criteria assesses the accuracy and effectiveness of your own language. This is easy to overlook because the rest of the course points your attention at other people's writing. But every response you produce is also a text, and it is marked partly on how well it communicates. Two students can have equally good ideas and receive different results because one expresses those ideas with control and the other buries them in tangled sentences. This page is about the writing you do, not the writing you analyse.

Accuracy comes first because errors distract a reader from your argument. Control of grammar, punctuation, spelling and sentence boundaries lets your ideas land without friction. You do not need ornate prose; you need sentences that say exactly what you mean. A clear, correct sentence that states a precise claim will always beat an ambitious sentence that collapses under its own clauses. When you proofread, hunt first for the errors that change or obscure meaning, such as a misplaced negative or an unclear pronoun, before worrying about smaller slips.

Precision and word choice

Effective language is precise language. Vague words such as interesting, good, shows and a lot signal thinking that has not been finished. Replace them with words that commit to a meaning. Rather than writing that a technique is effective, say what it does: it unsettles, sharpens, isolates, reassures. The right verb often carries an entire analytical point, so choosing it carefully is not decoration, it is thinking. Precision also means matching the strength of your claim to your evidence, using words like suggests, implies and invites when the text hints, and stronger words only when it states.

Metalanguage, the technical vocabulary of English, is part of effective expression. Naming devices, forms and structural features accurately shows command of the subject and lets you write more economically. But terminology must be used correctly and in service of a point. A misused term, such as calling any comparison a metaphor, does more harm than using none, and a list of correctly named devices with no analysis is empty. Aim for accurate terms doing real work inside sentences about effect.

Register, tone and economy

Your writing should sit in a formal but readable academic register. That means full sentences, no slang, and no chatty asides, but also no padding that hides your meaning behind grand sounding phrases. Economy is a virtue: if a sentence can lose three words without losing meaning, it is stronger for the cut. Sentence variety helps too, since a run of identical sentence shapes flattens emphasis, while a short sentence after several longer ones can land a key point hard.

Leave a few minutes at the end of any timed response to read your work slowly. Most expression marks are lost to fixable slips, and a clean, precise final read can recover them.