English assignment ?

by

Humanities

Exercise for Sentence Clarity: eliminating wordiness

Directions:

Revise the following passage, avoiding wordiness and undesirable repetition.

(You can create another Word doc and copy and paste or simply download the

attachment and rewrite the passage below the original.)

A large number of people enjoy reading murder mysteries regularly. As a rule, these

people are not themselves murderers, nor would these people really ever enjoy seeing

someone commit an actual murder, nor would most of them actually enjoy trying to solve

an actual murder. They probably enjoy reading murder mysteries because of this reason:

they have found a way to escape from the monotonous, boring routine of dull everyday

existence.

To such people the murder mystery is realistic fantasy. It is realistic because the people in

the murder mystery are as a general rule believable as people. They are not just made up

pasteboard figures. It is also realistic because the character who is the hero, the character

who solves the murder mystery, solves it not usually by trial and error and haphazard

methods but by exercising a high degree of logic and reason. It is absolutely and totally

essential that people who enjoy murder mysteries have an admiration for the human

faculty of logic.

But murder mysteries are also fantasies. The people who read such books of fiction play a

game. It is a game in which they suspend certain human emotions. One of these human

emotions that they suspend is pity. If the reader stops to feel pity and sympathy for each

and every victim that is killed or if the reader stops to feel terrible horror that such a thing

could happen in our world of today, that person will never enjoy reading murder

mysteries. The devoted reader of murder mysteries keeps uppermost in mind at all times

the goal of arriving through logic and observation at the final solution to the mystery

offered in the book. It is a game with life and death. Whodunits hopefully help the reader

to hide from the hideous horrors of actual life and death in the real world.