The AWC Twitter Competition 2016-17

The rules of the AWC Twitter Competition are simple. Every two weeks, the AWC team posts a long and cumbersome sentence.  All students and staff at NUIG can compete by posting a shortened version on Twitter (https://twitter.com/awcnuig). The challenge is not to lose any important information while reducing the word count. The most elegant version wins. Sentences will be posted in English and in Irish.  There will be at least three rounds throughout March, with prizes ranging from €5 to €15.

The competition aims to start a conversation about good writing style. Writers are often advised to condense their writing. As the author of The Elements of Style explains, this does not require writers to ‘avoid all detail and treat [their] subjects only in outline, but that [they] make every word tell’ (Stunk 24). Ideas should be expressed in the least possible number of words, and superfluous words should be avoided.

By putting this advice at the core of the competition, we hope to transform our Twitter page into a place of mutual learning. We will watch cumbersome sentences transform into elegant ones, and we invite everyone to join in the conversation by commenting on the process.

@AwcNuig

This week's prize is €10, the deadline is 18 March, and the cumbersome sentences are below.

1. I have travelled extensively, and, having compared the amount of precipitation around the world, I can safely confirm that the weather here in Galway, which is a city in the west of Ireland, which is already a rainy place is really unpredictable sometimes and really generally rainy and more rainy than Dublin which, in spite of what most people think,  actually has the same amount of rain as Rome, which is considered a sunny place, and Galway is also really foggy and sometimes it also hails or snows in the city of Galway.

2. Rith siad go tobann gan choinne i dtreo an tsiopa a bhí ar chúl na leabharlainne móire, foirgneamh mór nua a bhí nua-thógtha le déanaí.

Works Cited

William Stunk. The Elements of Style: the Original Edition. Dover Publications, 2012.