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February 28 - March 6, 2020
syntac- tical
syntactical
Unweaving the Rainbow,
Good writing starts strong.
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”
A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world.
Betraying Spinoza,
We find the little girl in the photograph endearing not because the author has stooped to telling us so with words like cute or adorable but because we can see her childlike mannerisms for ourselves—as the author herself is doing when pondering the little alien who somehow is her.
I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether?
A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer’s perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts.
The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation, a phenomenon called phonesthetics, the feeling of sound.
The Warmth of Other Suns,
Good writing finishes strong.
The authors of the four passages share a number of practices: an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary; an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze; the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs; the use of parallel syntax; the occasional planned surprise; the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement; the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.
The authors also share an attitude: they do not hide the passion and relish that drive them to tell us about their subjects. They write as if they have something important to say. But no, that doesn’t capture it. They write as if they have something important to show. And that, we shall see, is a key ingredient in the sense of style.
The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.
Clear and Simple as the Truth.
The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity.
A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation.
Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.
Stylish Academic Writing
Hanlon’s Razor:
Immortalized in Unix fortune cookies everywhere.
The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.
The curse of knowledge is insidious, because it conceals not only the contents of our thoughts from us but their very form. When we know something well, we don’t realize how abstractly we think about it. And we forget that other people, who have lived their own lives, have not gone through our idiosyncratic histories of abstractification.
The amount of abstraction that a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of her readership.
We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions. Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images,
I am told there are writers who can tap out a coherent essay in a single pass, at most checking for typos and touching up the punctuation before sending it off for publication. You are probably not one of them. Most writers polish draft after draft.
Too many things have to go right in a passage of writing for most mortals to get them all the first time. It’s hard enough to formulate a thought that is interesting and true. Only after laying a semblance of it on the page can a writer free up the cognitive resources needed to make the sentence grammatical, graceful, and, most important, transparent to the reader. The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader.
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,
Should not be superscript.
A theme or topic may run through a long stretch of writing. People, places, and ideas may make repeat appearances, and the reader must keep track of them as they come and go. These connections, which drape themselves from the limbs of one tree to the limbs of another, violate the neatly nested, branch-within-branch geometry of a tree.2 I’ll call them arcs of coherence.
Like the mass of cables drooping behind a desk, the conceptual connections from one sentence to another have a tendency to get gnarled up in a big, snaggly tangle. That’s because the links connected to any idea in our web of knowledge run upwards, downwards, and sideways to other ideas, often spanning long distances. Inside the writer’s brain, the links between ideas are kept straight by the neural code that makes memory and reasoning possible. But out there on the page, the connections have to be signaled by the lexical and syntactic resources of the English language. The challenge to the
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Coherence begins with the writer and reader being clear about the topic. The topic corresponds to the small territory within the vast web of knowledge into which the incoming sentences should be merged. It may seem obvious that a writer should begin by laying ...
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Another group of people got the same passage but with a new tidbit slipped into the instructions: “The paragraph you will hear will be about washing clothes.” The level of recall doubled.
Related to main point about reading comprehension in Natalie Wexler's book The Knowledge Gap.
Make sense? How about with this clue: “The sentences are about making and flying a kite.” Stating the topic is necessary because even the most explicit language can touch on only a few high points of a story.
Similar to point about comprehesion made in Natalie Wexler's book The Knowledge Gap.
Together with the topic of a text, the reader usually needs to know its point. He needs to know what the author is trying to accomplish as she explores the topic. Human behavior in general is understandable only once you know the actor’s goals.
Joseph Williams’s excellent Style: Toward Clarity and Grace,
The exact place in which the point of a text is displayed is less important than the imperative to divulge it somewhere not too far from the beginning.
In addition to a consistent thread of sentence topics and an orderly way of referring to repeated appearances, there is a third arc of coherence spanning sentences, and that is the logical relationship between one proposition and another.
David Hume, in his 1748 book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
“There appear to be only three principles of connections among ideas, namely Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect.”
Coherence depends on more than mechanical decisions such as keeping the topic in subject position and choosing appropriate connectives. It depends as well on impressions that build up in a reader over the course of reading many paragraphs and that depend on the author’s grasp of the text as a whole.
The Remnants of War,
many prescriptive rules originated for screwball reasons, impede clear and graceful prose, and have been flouted by the best writers for centuries. Phony rules, which proliferate like urban legends and are just as hard to eradicate, are responsible for vast amounts of ham-fisted copyediting and smarty-pants one-upmanship.
adjectives and adverbs.
ain’t.
and, because, but, or, so, also.
between you and I.
can versus may.
(Gotcha! He should have written may.)
He should have written should!
may
Should be might.
