Now that you've got strong verbs and short phrases, you're set, right?

Well, no. The next step is to make sure your writing is specific rather than vague. Vagueness occurs for a variety of reasons:

1) Terms with "fuzzy" meanings:

When do we use brook instead of stream?
When does a stream become a river?
When does a hill become a mountain?

Remember: Use precise terms whenever possible.

2) Terms with too many possible meanings:

Consider the word chair. This noun can be applied to a bewilderingly wide variety of objects and vary in the materials and forms that a chair may take. There are historical styles such as Windsor, Chippendale, and empire chairs; there are dining room, kitchen, and lawn chairs; there are settees, recliners and rocking chairs. There are dentist's chairs, barber chairs, thrones, and bucket seats in cars. There are also stools and even stumps that are called chairs. Although the definition of chair, a separate seat for one, is common to all of these objects, there still exist questions of application. Is, for example, an ottoman a chair?

3) Terms with indeterminate referents (the thing the word refers to)

"Sally's book" is vague because it could refer to a book she has written, a book she is writing, a book she owns, a book she is reading, and so on.

Most often, indeterminate referents are a problem with pronouns - especially "this," "these," "that," and "those."

Consider a sentence: "Even though the economy appears to be in a recession at the moment, especially in terms of the stock market, many individuals continue to invest in stocks every day. This means that stock brokers are still making money."

What, specifically, does "this" refer to? Is it simply the fact that people keep investing? Or the fact that they are investing during a recession? Or the fact that there is a recession?

Remember: pronouns have to refer to nouns; they can't refer to entire phrases or ideas.

4) Terms that are too general:

A term like "cat" can refer to any of a large number of different mammals, from domesticated Siamese to decidely non-domesticated white tigers.

"Somebody wants to talk to you" doesn't tell you, with any degree of clarity, who's waiting in the office.

Other terms, like "fuel-efficient" may depend on the criteria applied. The standards you apply (30 mpg, 20 mpg, 50 mpg) determine the precise meaning of the term.

5) Terms that are inherently vague.
Some words in our language are inherently vague. Mass expressions like "heap," "some" are vague. Similarly, terms like short and tall, thin and fat, small and large are vague.

Such terms share three traits:

They are borderline cases. Consider "tadpole," for example. If you study a time lapse film of a tadpole turning into a frog, we would see many images where the creature looks more tadpole-ish than froggish and vice versa.

They lack clear conceptual boundaries. Although everyone knows when it is day and when it is night, it is difficult to say when day becomes night. Terms like tall and short are vague because there is no clear boundary between what is tall and not tall. Terms like large and small are also vague for the same reason, but they have a further complication as well. Tall is vague in one dimension--height. Large is vague in height and volume.

They are susceptible to what is called the sorities paradox. Consider the term "short," for example. If we say that a man is short who is 5' 2", then having an individual who is 5' two and one one-hundredth inches is also short. The addition of this length is not enough to alter our use of "short." This lack of a sharp boundary is part of what makes a term like short vague. Now imagine that we have a very long line of men, each of whom is one one-hundredth of an inch taller than the one before him. If there are 700 men in the line, then the last man will be 5 eight and one one-hundredth of an inch tall. (This is the average height of a man in the U.S.) Because this infinitesimal amount doesn't matter in applying the term, it follows that everyone in the line will be "short."

The bottom line? Be as concrete as possible.

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