Peculiarities of prose style

As the memo of August 9 said, because of the gas shortage, try to use the telephone as much as you can instead of making personal visits.

Remember, as Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." The more sophisticated your audience, the more

likely they are to be put off, rather than impressed, by inflated prose.

d. Intensity: Intensity is the degree of emotional content of a word—from objective to subjective, mild to strong, euphemistic to inflammatory. It is common, for example, for wildlife managers to talk about harvesting deer rather than killing them. Choosing a less intense word or phrase can avoid unnecessarily offending or inciting your readers; however, it can also be a means of avoiding responsibility or masking the unsavory nature of the situation. As George Orwell says in "Politics and the English Language": "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. . Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness."

Achieving the appropriate level of intensity is as often a question of choosing the more intense as it is of choosing the less intense word. Ultimately, you must rely upon your own sensitivity to the language, to your topic, and to your audience to guide you in making the appropriate choices for a given context.

e. Level of Abstraction: According to Strunk and White,

If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on anyone point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers. . .are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

For example, if we move down in the hierarchy of abstraction from thing to plant to tree to birch to gray birch, we can see that each step offers the reader a clearer picture of what's being discussed.

The general and the abstract do have their place. There are times, for example, when we want to talk about "humankind" or "life on Earth," but it's often wise to support the general with the specific, the abstract with the concrete: "Carl Sagan's research suggests that a nuclear winter would destroy all life on Earth—every tree, every flower, every child."

f. Sound: All other things being equal, you may want to choose one word rather than another simply because you like its sound. Although what you're writing may never be read aloud, most readers do "hear" what they read via an inner voice. Hence, the "sound" of your writing can add to or detract from its flow and, thus, influence the reader's impression of what you've written.

g. Rhyth: Although rhyth is quantifiable, most writers rely on their ear for language to judge this aspect of their sentences. Like sound, rhyth in prose is often an "all-other-things-being-equal" consideration. That is, you wouldn't want to choose the wrong word simply to improve the rhyth of your sentence. However, rhyth can contribute to the flow of your writing, and a sudden break in rhyth can create emphasis. Hence, you may choose one synonym over another simply because it has more or fewer syllables and, thus, contributes to the rhyth of your sentence. Even an occasional bit of deadwood may be justified if it contributes to the rhyth of your sentence.

Finally, note that rhyth is especially important in parallel structures and is often a factor in sentence-to-sentence flow; that is, you must read a sequence of sentences in context to judge their rhyth.

h. Repetition: Using the same word to refer to the same thing or idea is desirable when it contributes to transition and coherence. For example, substituting commands for translators in the second pair of sentences below provides a smoother transition:

This section describes the commands used for translating programs written in the four languages mentioned above. These translators create object-code files with a filetype of TEXT from programs written by the user.

This section describes the commands used for translating programs written in the four languages mentioned above. These commands create object-code files with a filetype of TEXT from programs written by the user.

Sometimes, however, repeating the same word can become awkward, tedious, or confusing. Alternating between a pronoun and its antecedent is one obvious way of avoiding the tedious repetition of the same word to refer to the same thing. You can usually help to avoid confusing your readers by not using the same word (or variations of the same word) to mean two different things in one sentence or in two closely related sentences:

no: Output from VM is displayed in the output display area.

yes: Output from VM appears in the output display area.

8. Avoid Overusing Word Modifiers

Avoid overusing adjectives and adverbs. These modifiers have their place, but in the most vigorous prose, action is expressed in verbs, and the agents of that action are expressed in nouns. This principle applies to both ornate, pompous modifiers and to such commonplace intensifiers as really, pretty, and very.

One of the best ways to avoid overusing modifiers is to select specific, self-modified nouns and verbs—ones that don't require adjectives and adverbs to supplement their meaning. For example, you might replace long black car with limousine or ran very quickly with sped or bolted.

9. Clarify the Logical Relationship Between Your Ideas

In order to make your writing coherent and the transitions between your ideas smooth, you must clearly express or imply the logical relationships between your ideas. If you fail to do so, one idea is simply juxtaposed with another, and readers are left to make the logical connections for themselves. In this situation, experienced readers will suspect that you have not clarified the logical relationships between your ideas because you don't know what those relationships are—or worse, because there aren't any.

There are a variety of ways to express or imply logical relationships; some of the smoothest and most subtle use the very structure of the sentence. For example, you can use the principle of order and emphasis (see #4) to indicate that one part of the sentence is more important than another; you can use subordination (see #6) to indicate that one idea is less important than (or subordinate to) another; and you can use parallelism to indicate that two or more ideas are of equal importance.

You can also use punctuation to indicate the logical relationships between ideas. For example, you can use a colon to indicate that what follows is a further explanation of what's just been said; you can use commas to indicate whether or not a clause restricts the meaning of the sentence; and you can use dashes to indicate that the enclosed material is important to the discussion and should be emphasized.

 Скачать реферат