Ch.7: Choosing Verbs
• Base form (infinitive)
• Present tense
• Past tense (-ed)
• Past participle (-en)
• Present Participle (-ing)
I always have trouble with passive voice, so I’d like to focus on that section of chapter 7. However being alerted to my overuse in the past has caused me to notice it more frequently when I’m writing. While reviewing my paper, I found several:

Passive: “According to Bakhtin and Harvey, it has become clear that the reader (listener) is not a static entity.”
Corrected: “According to Bakhtin and Harvey, the reader (listener) is not a static entity.”
The second sentence is much clearer and to the point. Reducing the crowded meaning and length of the sentence allows for a smoother sentence that is much easier on the reader and still gets the same point across.

Passive: “The song was first performed in 1984, however Cohen had been struggling to write the song for at least two years beforehand”
Corrected: “The song was first performed in 1984, however Cohen struggled to write the song for at least two years beforehand”
Just changing the clause in question from passive voice to a simple past tense construction makes the sentence flow better.

Ch. 8: Choosing Adverbials
Adverbial-the term that names function in a sentence.

I use the opening adverbial several times in my paper:
• In order to deconstruct this affect…
• Let’s get back to the…
• In order to further dissect this concept…
I feel that at this stage of writing, using opening adverbials not only helps to guide the reader but it helps to keep me on track as well. It also reminds me where I’ve been and where I’m headed.

I’d like to experiment with the movability of subordinate clauses.

Example: In order to deconstruct this affect [influence], it is necessary to examine some of the ways influence can be established.
Alteration #1: It is necessary to examine some of the ways influence can be established in order to deconstruct this affect.
Alteration #2: By examining some of the ways influence is established, this affect can be deconstructed.
I’m not really too fond of these changes, but there are a great deal of other options I didn’t try. Unfortunately, without the preceding sentence, most of the alterations create dangling modifiers.