9.4 Conciseness & Identifying Cohesion-Breaking Sentences

The final group of Compositional Analysis tasks tests three related editing skills: trimming wordy phrasing down to its concise equivalent, spotting the one sentence that breaks a paragraph's focus, and catching capitalization or punctuation errors. All three skills reward the same instinct — noticing when a sentence does not belong, whether the problem is length, topic, or a mechanical error.

Conciseness: Cutting Wordiness Without Losing Meaning

STEP conciseness questions typically present a sentence padded with filler phrases, then ask which revision expresses the same idea in fewer, clearer words. The core rule: strong revisions delete words without deleting meaning; weak revisions either still contain filler or accidentally drop necessary information.

Common wordy phrases and concise replacements:

When comparing answer choices, check each one for two failure patterns: (1) it still contains a filler phrase from the list above, just reworded, or (2) it is short but has quietly cut a detail the original sentence needed. The correct choice keeps every necessary fact while removing only the padding.

Identifying the Sentence That Breaks Cohesion

A well-built paragraph stays focused on a single controlling idea, and every sentence should either state that idea or develop it with a relevant detail. STEP's cohesion-break questions insert exactly one sentence that violates this focus in one of three ways: it is off-topic (discusses something unrelated to the paragraph's subject), it contradicts the paragraph's point, or it introduces a random, disconnected fact that does not build on anything else in the paragraph.

Worked example paragraph:

"Coral reefs support roughly a quarter of all marine species despite covering less than one percent of the ocean floor. (1) Reef-building corals rely on a symbiotic relationship with tiny algae called zooxanthellae, which live inside coral tissue and supply energy through photosynthesis. (2) Rising ocean temperatures can cause corals to expel these algae, a process known as bleaching. (3) Many tourists enjoy snorkeling near coral reefs during summer vacations. (4) Once bleached, corals are more vulnerable to disease and may die if warm conditions persist for too long."

Sentence (3) breaks the paragraph's cohesion. The paragraph's controlling idea is the biological relationship between corals and algae and what disrupts it; sentences (1), (2), and (4) all directly build that scientific narrative, describing the symbiosis, the cause of bleaching, and its consequences in sequence. Sentence (3), about tourists snorkeling, introduces an unrelated recreational detail that does not develop the biological point and interrupts the cause-and-effect chain running from sentence (2) to sentence (4).

Capitalization Rules Tested on STEP

• Proper nouns are always capitalized: specific people, places, organizations, nationalities, and languages (Sarah, Riyadh, King Saud University, Saudi, English).
• Common nouns are not capitalized, even when they sit next to a proper noun: "engineering," "university," and "fall" stay lowercase unless they are literally part of an official name ("King Saud University" is capitalized because it is one proper name; "she studies engineering" is not, because "engineering" is a field of study, not a name).
• Seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter) are not capitalized in ordinary use, unlike days of the week and months, which always are.
• The first word of every sentence is capitalized, regardless of what part of speech it is.
• Titles are capitalized only when used as part of a name ("Doctor Amina" or "President Lincoln") but stay lowercase when used generically ("she became a doctor").

Punctuation Rules Tested on STEP

• Comma splices occur when two independent clauses (each capable of standing alone as a sentence) are joined with only a comma. Fix a comma splice by replacing the comma with a period, a semicolon, or a comma plus a coordinating conjunction (and, but, so, or, nor, for, yet).
• Semicolons join two closely related independent clauses without a coordinating conjunction ("The flight was delayed; the crew apologized to passengers"), or separate items in a list that already contains commas.
• Apostrophes show possession (singular: "the professor's office"; plural ending in s: "the professors' lounge") or mark a contraction ("it's" for "it is," never for the possessive "its").

Keep these rules in mind whenever an error-identification question asks you to find the one sentence with a mechanical mistake rather than a cohesion problem — the two question types look similar but test different underlying skills.