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Making Your Points Positively
Using negatives to express an idea in a sentence, while perfectly valid, is seldom the best way when putting a thought to writing. Even when done with enough care, they can still lead to confusion with the wrong audience. Unless you’re confident of your readers’ sophistication in comprehending written English, stating your points positively is always more acceptable solution.
Negative Statements
Need some examples of negative statements? Take a look at these sentences.
Take no more than one tablet a day.
It’s never too late to begin learning.
Both sentences are valid and will pass even the best grammar software. While your writing isn’t likely to suffer with one or two of these in tow, it can easily get confusing when every other statement is structured in the same way. Negative statements, for the most part, require extra thought in the part of the user, making them potentially confusing.
Contrast that to their positive counterparts and you’ll find the statements as much more straightforward.
Take only one tablet per day.
You can begin learning at anytime.
Multiple Negatives
The above examples are considered single negatives, with only one dissenting thought in the whole sentence. Things can get ugly really fast when you’re writing longer sentences and filling it with negative expressions every step of the way.
The device includes none of what makes these types of machines extremely useful, making it no more relevant to the industry lanscape than contraptions fashioned without the future in mind.
Notice how dense that thing turned out with three negative expressions scattered throughout?
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