Memorandum To: Professor Malone

From: Chris Salcido

Date: January 23, 2020
Subject: Project 1

This Memo presents my writing analysis of previous work as outlined in the Project 1
instruction. I have scrutinized my paper for Concision, Precision, Directness, and Noticeable
Errors.
Concision
Concise writing explains topics without adding unnecessary words. Concise writing mitigates the
waste of time and should be incorporated into technical writing.
Redundant words I habitually add too many words when trying to express the severity
of a situation. I used two ways to express the same things in the following sentence:
The ship was *thankfully very salvageable because it was not totaled according to a 2013
Report to Congress by Naval Sea Systems Command (NSSC 2013).
I could have shortened the sentence by not including the fact that the ship was not totaled,
since I had already stated that the boat was salvageable.
Dead Phrases I use phrases at the beginning of some sentences that don’t have to be
there in order to add fluff or seem informed. As an example:
Like any case study, it is appropriate to look at the events leading up to the event and
after looking back, a discussion on what a necessary course of action would have looked like.
I didn’t need to add “Like any case study” because the reader was reading many case
studies at the time.
Unnecessary Modifiers In another attempt to add expression, I use a lot of unnecessary
modifiers.
“…the grounding of the USS Port Royal was incredibly embarrassing for the US
Navy…”
I used the word really in several occasions of my paper, like here. I could’ve left them
out and achieved my goal.
Precision
Papers need to cater to the intelligence level and information requested of their audience.
Technical Level I do a good job of adding esoteric words that I know my audience will
understand.
One of the words I do not explain is the “drydock” which my Navy ROTC audience will
understand refers to the state under which a ship can be repaired without the presence of water.
Leaving out an explanation saves my reader time and lets them read more fluidly.
Consistency When I use words in reference to the Commanding Officer of the boat, I
always made sure that they refer to his ability to give commands and not his rank (Captain).
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The words “skipper” is consistently used throughout the paper when talking about the captain’s
fault in the grounding of the boat.
To continue being consistent, I never referred to his rank.
Depth It was critical for me to be in depth when talking about what happened during the
grounding of the boat since my readers needed the information to not make the same mistake.
I gave a very thorough explanation of the incident in the fifth paragraph that placed the
blame on the right people and explained the different systems that failed the users.
To be more vague, I would have excluded the names of the navigation systems used by
the sailors during the incident.
Directness Putting down words that get to the point and enrich a writers message bolster what
the writer is trying to say and makes it easier for the reader to get a sense of what they’re
supposed to feel.

Active Verbs I wrote using lazy verbs for a lot of the paper because I was under a time
crunch to meet a specific word count and didn’t have time to reread my work for style errors.
“The skipper, as in most incidents, would prove pivotal in the disaster (Bowman 2017).”
This was an example of a time when I could’ve gotten rid of the word “would” and
instead could’ve used an active verb like “proved” since the skipper was guilty and proven is
lawful term
Active Voice I use lazy voice when I am scrambling to write something and in the
following example, I lacked creativity:
“US Naval ships have been in the news recently”
I could have found a verb that put the sentence into an active state and reflected my
intended message.
Topic Position I failed to give the reader opening sentences to paragraphs that
consistently reflected what was going to be included.
“The USS Port Royal was in drydock in Pearl Harbor for 4 months, undergoing $18
million of repairs (Cole 2009), right before it was to conduct Sea Trials in January 2009.”
What followed this opening sentence did not give any more explanation about how the
amount of time spent in drydock effected the sailors or how the price of the repairs affected the
decision making of the captain. To make the sentence a true topic position, I would have
included these things in the paragraph instead of talking about the captain’s arrival.
Stress Position I tried to tie one paragraph to another by using sentences that would also
close out their previous paragraphs. I successfully did this in the following example.
“The skipper, as in most incidents, would prove pivotal in the disaster (Bowman 2017).”
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This sentence ended my last paragraph that talked about the late arrival of the skipper to
his boat and prepped the reader to go into the next paragraph that talked about his bad leadership.
I did not continue this trend of precise stress positions because most of my paragraphs jumped
from topics that were semi-difficult to correlate.
Noticeable Errors There are instances that are just flat out mistakes in editing that the author
does not spot before publishing their work.

Error 1 In my very first sentence, I left the remnants of another idea for my opening sentence in
the middle of what I decided to publish.
“US Naval ships have been in the news recently due to serious mishaps that incur
extremely costly damages, both monetarily and the grounding…”
The error is that the sentence includes the phrase “,both monetarily” that doesn’t relate to
any idea in the proceeding sentence. This is how I would fix it:
“US Naval ships have been in the news recently due to serious mishaps that incur
extremely costly damages, one being the grounding…”
This fix brings the two parts of the sentence together nicely.
Error 2 I capitalized a word where I shouldn’t have in the first paragraph.
“Basic tenants of Navigation…”
The word Navigation is not capitalized, even in a navigation class, so I would fix the error by not
capitalizing the word “Navigation”.
Error 3 Spelling errors were corrected by Microsoft word, but I was supposed to check if the
words being used were correct.
“Under the conditions that the USS Port Royal found itself, near ½ mile of the Honolulu
coast line…”
The word of was used in this sentence instead of the word off. This was a simple mistake
that I could have fixed had I reread the paper several times, carefully examining each wrd.

Conclusion
I believe that it is possible to use the reflections I demonstrated in this memo to get my
writing to better standards. I will use a similar analysis of this paper to adjust it before I turn in
my final copy next Friday.