Written Communication.

The outline names six sentence parts. You need to be able to label each one in a short sentence, which is exactly what the chapter exercise asks you to do.

A noun names something. A pronoun stands in for a noun. A verb expresses an act, occurrence or mode of being. An adjective describes or modifies a noun. An adverb modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb or a whole sentence. A preposition combines with a noun or pronoun to form a phrase.

Adverbs answer questions such as when, how long, where, in what direction, how, and to what degree. In “We slowly moved toward the house,” the word “slowly” is the adverb and “toward” is the preposition.

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought. It typically contains both a subject and a predicate, begins with a capital letter and ends with a punctuation mark. A good sentence is short, simple, concise and unmistakably clear to the reader.

Complete sentences matter because of who reads your writing. Your written communication is one of the factors used to evaluate your competence. It may be seen by a diverse audience, including your agency, the criminal justice system and the public. It may also serve as a source document for judicial and administrative proceedings.

People often speak in incomplete sentences, and a listener can ask what was meant. A reader usually cannot. When someone writes the way they talk, two serious errors show up: sentence fragments and run-on sentences.

A fragment is only a piece of a sentence, such as “The mirror in the hall closet.” It is missing a subject or a verb. A run-on is two or more sentences written as one, such as “The speeding car skidded around the turn it went into the ditch.” Fix a run-on by splitting it into two sentences, joining the parts with a semicolon, or rewriting it with a connecting word.

A modifier is a word or set of words that qualifies or limits another word or set of words. A misplaced modifier attaches itself to the wrong word, so the reader gets a meaning you did not intend. “We saw many swimming pools flying over California” puts the pools in the air. The fix is to place every modifier as close as possible to the word it modifies: “While flying over California, we saw many swimming pools.”

A double negative is two negative words in the same clause. Use these one at a time, not in pairs: no, not, never, none, no one, nobody, nothing, nowhere and neither. The words barely, scarcely and hardly are also negative in meaning and should not share a clause with any of them. “Nobody saw nothing” becomes “Nobody saw anything.” “I can’t hardly see” becomes “I can hardly see.”

In the active voice the subject performs the action. In the passive voice the subject receives the action. Use the active voice, because the sentence is clearer and stronger. “A stray bullet hit a bystander” is better than “The bystander was hit by a stray bullet.” The passive voice may be necessary when the actor is not known.

Quotation marks enclose direct quotations, not indirect ones. If you give someone’s exact words, you must use them. If you are not quoting verbatim, do not.

Do not use slang or jargon unless you are quoting it for a purpose, such as a statement made by a suspect. Write “traffic crash,” not “10-50.” Avoid nonstandard abbreviations. If you do use one, write out the full word first and follow it with the abbreviation.

The outline also lists words that are often confused, such as accept and except, affect and effect, cite, sight and site, elicit and illicit, its and it’s, and their, there and they’re. It warns against wordy phrases and “deadwood.” Police reports are not prose. Write “now,” not “at the present time.” Write “speed,” not “rate of speed.” Write “facts,” not “true facts.”