I remember more than once when I was a student getting the dreaded AWK in the margins of my papers, and I never really knew what the term meant. Yes, I knew that the teacher was telling me my prose was awkward, but it was always a mystery to me how to fix that AWK.
Most often, I would sit down and tell myself what it was I was trying to say. I’d type, retype, rethink. (At that time in my life, I was not a fan of reading my work to other people.)
It wasn’t until I was teaching graduate courses in Style and Editing that I started to get a grasp on what AWK means. Given to New Information, Characters Doing Action, Making sure that the character doing said action was the subject of the sentence and that the action said character was doing was actually the verb… O, no, I sense an AWK coming on.
Ron Brooks 