: Re: Requesting A Writing Critique, Hopefully More Focused In light of the questions I've been asking here and the questions I've had about my writing, I thought of a good candidate to try and be

@Angela458

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A few thoughts about the first two paragraphs:

There is a very interesting future [weak opening] to the use ["future
to the use" is awkward] of information technology in business and how
business views information technology. I believe that [superfluous]
general demands in business as well as user demands [vague] will
change and shape the computer industry in the years to come [cliche].

Right now in history [wordy], the computer industry is at its point in
development [awkward] similar to that of automobiles in the era of
Henry Ford. Before their widespread acceptance, automobiles were
feared as the “horseless carriages” that thundered down the paths that
horses and stagecoaches took by the people [garden path] who were
hesitant to accept the new technology.

I won't offer a rewrite, but here are a few things to consider.

You can often rework a sentence that begins with "there is" so that it's more active. In the opening of an essay you'd like to engage the reader immediately; "There is a very interesting..." doesn't do it well. This is in part a "show, don't tell" issue. More than that, the first paragraph actually doesn't say very much, and it slows things down with preliminaries. I think it would be okay to skip it and start with the second paragraph, which is much more concrete.

The two paragraphs are a bit wordy. For example, "right now in history" could be replaced by "today", and "in the years to come" (aside from being a cliche) could be replaced by "in the future". Some "the"s are are superfluous: "the “horseless carriages”", "the people". Some words are repeated too close together: "that thundered down the paths that".

The writing also has vague spots. I don't know what "general demands in business" are, for example, or "user demands".

The garden path issue has to do with sentence structure. "Automobiles were feared as the “horseless carriages”... by the people who were hesitant to accept the new technology." But the subordinate clause makes it confusing: "that thundered down the paths that horses and stagecoaches took by the people..." It reads as though people are (ungrammatically) taking the horses and stagecoaches.

The second paragraph has an unexpected transition between its two sentences. We go from "industry" and "Henry Ford", suggesting a focus on manufacturing, but then we read about the experiences of the users of technology. That might be clarified or smoothed out.

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