A Sense of Style Flashcards
Style
Effective Use of Words to engage the mind
To become a better writer
read great writers, reverse engineer how they produced that effect.
Good writing starts strong
Not with cliche or banality, but with something that provokes curiosity
Varied Writing
Studies of writing quality, a varied vocal and the use of unusual words were two features that distinguish sprightly prose from mush.
Writer like Cinematographer
A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates there viewer’s perspective on an ongoing story—deliberate use of transitions —colons, dashes, block quotations, can help create lively prose.
Best word choice
The best words pinpoint an idea better than an alternative, but echo it in its sound and articulation, the meaning of the word.
Advanced Word Choice
Don’t be afraid to send a reader tothe dictionary, just reign in the use of standout wordstightly, and make sure they are well earned.
Avoid Abstractions
The habit of submerging the individual into abstraction leads to lack of understanding and frustration.
Typists wanting to work in an office— not denial of economic opportunities
Stylish Writing Summary
Fresh wording and concrete imagery over abstract summary and cliche, an attention to the reader’s vantage point and the target of their gaze, the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against the backdrop of simple nouns and verbs, use ofparallel syntax, the occasional planned surprise, the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement, the use ofmeter and sound to resonate with meaning and mood.
They write as if they have something important to show.
Guiding metaphor of Classic Style
the writer can see something the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. Seeingthe world. Purpose of writing is presentation, motive is disinterested truth.
Success in Classic Style
It succeeds when it aligns language with truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. Classic prose: no need to argue for the truth, justpresent it.
Classic Style is
concrete and cooperative—refers to the world around reader in clear terms, and trusts the reader to connect the dotswithout bloated explanation.
Classic style is not
obvious— the writer has worked hard to find something worth showing and the perfect vantage point from which to see it.
When you cannot avoid Abstract concepts
attempt to explain them as if they were objects and forces that would be recognizable to anyone standing in a position to see them.
Classic writing makes a reader feel
Like a genius, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.
Good writers avoid difficulty
don’t flout the difficulty of acquiring knowledge orthe imperfect models we see the world through, they artfully conceal it for clarity’s sake.
Goal of Classic Style
is to make it seem as though the writer’s thoughts were fully formed before he clothed them in words.
Table of Content Preview
Previews that read like a table of contents are there to help the writer not the reader. Those terms mean nothing to the reader and they can’t keep them in their mind for long.
How to frame information in Classic Style
Good writing takes advantage of a reader’s expectations, it accompanies the reader on the journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence or narrative arc.
Use of Signposts in Classic Style
The art of classic prose is to signpost sparingly, as in conversation, and with a minimum of discourse. One way to introduce a topic is to open with a question. Or treat the content in a passage of writing as if its happening in the real worldand can be seen with one’s eyeballs.
Including the reader in the endeavour: let’s begin with proper names. Mow that we have explored the jungle… let us
this chap discusses the factors that cause names to rise and fall in popularity vs. what makes a name rise and fall in popularity?
Signposting
I’mgoing to tell you somethings. The first thing I’m going to tell you is that a beaver is under your feet.
The Summary
should not be copying sentences from every other paragraph and pasting it at the end. The summary should be self contained, acoherentpassage of prose in its own right. should stand alone as if the material being summarized had never existed
compulsive hedging
almost, apparently, comparatively, fairly, in part, nearly, partially, predominantly, presumably, rather, relatively, seemingly, so to speak, somewhat, sort of, to a certain degree, to som extent, i would argue.
When necessary, instead of hedging, qualify
spell out the circumstances in which the statement does not hold, rather than leave your self waffling room as to the true meaning of the word.
the effect of “john is honest” vs “john is very honest”
Don’t turn descriptors from categorical to gradual out of habit
Window into the World
In classic prose, the writer must work to keep up the impression that his prose is a window onto the scene rather than a mess of words.
Avoid cliches like the plague
Itdoesn’t create novel images in the reader’s mind to interact with but lets the reader fall back on recitation which results inlimpid prose.
Visual Sense
Make sure what you say makes visual sense
Direction of Classic Prose
In classic prose the writer is directing the gaze of the reader to something in the world they can see for themselves. And good writers reach for fresh similes and metaphors that keep the reader’s cortexes lit up
Minimize Abstractions
They cannot be seen by the naked eye.
metaconcepts: concepts about concepts.aspirational level, prejudice reduction model,
Nominalization
turning a word into a noun. adding suffix —ance, —ment, —ation, —ing instead of affirming an idea, you affect its affirmation. Zombie nouns, they have nosubjects, used in passive construction. Often pronouns i you me are helpful. One never loses track of oneself. Facilitates the conversational style that classic style reccomneds.
Passive voice
allows the writer to directthe reader’s gaze.clears minor characters from readers attention. Readers attention often starts out on the entity named by the subject of the sentence. passive and active lets the writer shift which is in the reader’s mentalspotlight.Avoid it without a specific purpose. Reader is forced to imagine an effect without a cause.
Habits that result in limp prose
metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, cliches, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts,zombie nouns andunnecessary passive
Curse of Knowledge
The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know
The better you know something, the less your remember how hard it was to learn.
Hanlon’s Razor
Never attribute with malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
An explanation without an example
s little better than no explanation at all. sometimes a second is useful allowing the reader to triangulate meaning.
think outside of functional fixedness
not its use, but what it is. when we learn something, we think more about the use we put it to, and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of.
To see if prose is clear
Show a draft of your writing to people who are similar to your intended audience and find out whether or not they can follow your writing.
Why Writing is rewriting
Only after formulating a thought, often poorly, can a writer thenfree up the cognitive resources needed to make the sentence grammatical, graceful, and , most important, important and transparent to the reader.
Syntax
The code that translates a web of conceptual relations in our heads into an early to late order in our mouths. the rules of syntax, along with the rules of formation, make up english grammar.
A writer must constantly reconcile the two sides of word order
A code for information, and a sequence of mental events.
Parts of Speech
Verbs:marry, write, jump, think
Nouns (and pronouns): man play, she he
Prepositions: In, around, underneath, before, until
Adjectives: Big, red, wonderful, interesting
Adverbs:slowly, frankly, impressively
Articles and other determinators: The, a, some, this, that, many, one, two, three
Coordinators: and, or, nor, but, yet, so
Subordinators: that, whether, if, to
Each word is slotted into its place according to its category,because the syntax specify to the order of categories.
head: core of the sentence
object: the noun phrase following the verb.
All verbs have subjects,
determiner: which one, how many
Determiner and modifiers are not interchangeable
Noun: ability to appear after a determiner, the requirement to have an oblique rather than direct object, the ability to be marked for plural number and genitive case.
Neural Cost of Trees
give language its power to communicate the links between ideas. but this comes at a cost, which is the extra load it imposes on memory. It takes cognitive effort to build and maintain all those invisible branches and its easy for reader and writer alike to fall back into one thing after another.
Agreement errors
The easiest way to repair an unbalanced coordination is to zero in on the second coordinate and then force the first coordinate to match it by sliding itsquantifier into a more suitable spot.
Confusing sentence trouble shoot
Strip a sentence down,find the gap and reconstruct the deep structure.
Case
adornment of a noun phrase with a marker that advertises its typical grammatical function, such as nominative case for subjects, genitive case for determiners, and accusative case for objects, objects of prepositions, and everything else
Nominativepronoun: he she we they and who used for subjects
Accusative pro: him her us them and whom used for objects
Every time a writer adds a word to a sentence
he is imposing not one but two demands on the readeR: understanding the word, and fitting it into a tree.
Light Verbs
have, bring, put and take—often do nothing but create a slot for a zombie noun.
Long Sentences
good writers often use long sentences, but they do it by arranging the words so that a reader can absorb them a phrase at a time, each phrase conveying a chunk of conceptual structure.
Even when sentence structure gets complicated, a reader can handle it, because the geometry is mostly right branching. In a right branchingtree, the most complicated phrase inside a bigger phrase comes at the end of it, that is, hanging from the right most branch This mean that when the reader has to handle the complicated phrase, her work in analyzing the other phrases is done and she can concentrate her mental energies on that on
Left Branching modifiers
a modifier phrase can be moved to the beginning—in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus married his mother. Front loadedmodifiers can be useful in qualifying a sentence, in tying it to information mentioned earlier, or simply in avoiding the monotony of one right branching sentence after another. As long as the modifieris short, it poses no difficulty for the reader. dangerous if the modifier becomes complicated, with one branch packed inside another.
Problem of writer to reader
is that the order in which thoughts occur to the writer is different from the order in which they are easily recovered by a reader.
Structural Parallelism
a syntactic tree lingers in memory for a few seconds afterthe words are gone, and during that time it is available for the reader to use in parsing the next phrase.
Reading aloud
reading a sentence aloud can pinpoint confusing syntax
Avoiding Garden Paths:
Say the sentence out loud.
Punctuate a sentence properly.
Keep words that add syntactic structure: that, which, who
subordinators and relative pronouns.
The— a clear marker of a noun phrase.
Avoid placing words next to one another that mimics another meaning: the man who hunts ducks out on weekend. if this is unavoidable, set up a context in which the reader can easily parse the right interpretation of the word.
Structural Parallelism: a syntactic tree lingers in memory for a few seconds afterthe words are gone, and during that time it is available for the reader to use in parsing the next phrase.
Attachment to phrase next door
Readers like to absorb words into the phrase they are working on for as long as they can, rather than closing off the phrase and figuring out somewhere else to place the incoming words. Since readers tend to link a phrase to the words that came just before it, they will misunderstand a sentence when the writer had a more remote association in mind.
the man who hunts ducks out
Pull unrelated (but mutually attracted) phrases apart
Writers need to look in both directions, and shunt phrases around to keep them from dangerous liaisons with an inappropriate next door neighbour.
Rules of English Syntax
force him to put the subject before the verb and the verb before the object.
A noun can be modified
either by a prepositional phrase on the right or by a naked noun on the left: data on manufacturing, manufacturing datastrikes by teachers vs teacher’s strikes.
Save the Heaviest for Last
its cognitively taxing to work on a big heavy phrase while holding in memory an incomplete bigger phrase it’spart of. A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on your mind. light before heavy
Topic, then comment. Given, then new
more precise version of “put emphatic words of a sentence at the end” . People learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge, They don’t like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later. Topic then comment and given then new orderings are major contributors to coherence.
Ways toconstruct a sentence to boost coherence and the balancebetween subject action object andcognitive loads
Passive Voice: agent of the event can go unmentioned. it allows the doer in the sententence to be mentioned later than the done to.
Helps implement two principles of composition when they would otherwise be stymied by english syntactic structure. Passive allows a writer to postpone the mention of a doer that is heavy, old news, or both. Can unburden memory by shortening interval between filler and gap.
avoid active when a heavy phrase with new information is forced into the beginning of a sentence just because it happens to be the agent of the action and that’s the only place an active sentence will let it appear.
Tools to rearrange phrases while preserving their semantic roles.
Basic Order: Oedipus met Laius on the road to Thebes Preposing: On the road to Thebes, Oedipus met Laius
Basic Order:
The servant left the baby whom Laius had condemned to
die on the mountaintop
Postposing:
The servant left on the mountaintop the baby whom Laius had condemned to die.
Double Object Dative:
Jocasta handed her servant the infant
Prepositional Dative:
Jocasta handed the infant to her servant
Basic Construction:
A curse was on the kingdom
Existential: There was a curse on the kingdom
Clause as Subject:
That Oedipus would learn the truth was inevitable
Extraposed Clause:
It was inevitable that Oedipus would learn the truth
Basic Construction: Oedipus killed Laius Cleft: It was Oedipus who killed Laius It was Lauis whom Oedipus killed
Basic Construction:
Oedipus killed Laius
Pseudo Cleft:
What Oedipus did was kill Laius
Choice of Verb as Writer’s Resource
Some verbs have a counterpart which narrates the same scenario but fills its grammatical slots (subject, object, oblique object) with different role players (the mover, the thing moved, the source, the recipient)/ The menu of verbs can give the write several options on where to place a given new, light, or heavy phrase.
jocasta gave the infant to her servant–
The servant received the infant from Jocasta
She robbed her uncle of a cigar–
She stole a cigar from her uncle
Morris sold a watch to Zak–
ZAK bough a watch from Morris
I substituted margarine for the lard—
I replaced the lard with margarine
The vandals fled the police–
The police chased the vandals
The goalie sustained an injury from the onrushing forward–
The onrushing forward inflicted an injury on the goalie
Writer’s Job
A writer’s job is to encode a web of ideas into a string of words using a tree of phrases.
Arc of Coherence
How to Ensure that readers will hasp the topic, get to the point, keeptrack of the players and see how one ideas follows from another.
Big Problem of Writing is Coherence
we don’t know why one clause follows another. not a syntactical problem. Whenever one sentence comes after another, readers need to see a connection between them. Hunger for coherence that drives the entire process of understanding language.
Building an orderly tree and placinggiven before new information apply to paragraphs and books as well as sentences.
Paragraphs lighten the cognitive load
by chunking different aspect of an idea, allowing a reader to keep a smaller amount of information in his mind as he reads through—juggling less chunks
a visual bookmark that allows the reader to pause, take a breather, assimilate what he has read, and then find his place again on the page.
Carve a notch above a sentence that does not elaborate or follow from the one that came before.
lay an intuitive trail through the territory
a scheme for stringing the units into a natural order that allows readers to anticipate what they will encounter next.
No sentence is an island
nor is a paragraph, section, chapter or book. All of them contain links to other chunks of text.
The challenge to the write is to use lexical and syntactic resources so that a reader can graft the information in a series of sentences into his web of knowledge without getting tangled up in either.
Coherence begins
With the writer and reader being clear about the topic.
This corresponds to the small territory within the vast web of knowledge into which the incoming sentences should be merged.
A reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it.
Telegraphing Behaviour
A reader also needs to know thepoint of the text. he needs to know what theauthor is trying to accomplish as she explores the topic. Behaviour is often only understandable once you know the actor’s goals.
Writers often resist telegraphing their point at the outset. theyshouldn’t
Keep the Reader
in view of the reader, as actors or object, think about forming a sentence and how an object will effect the arc of coherence for the reader.
It is always easier for a reader to follow a narrative if he can keep his eyes on a pro who is moving the plot forward, rather than on a succession of passively affected entities or zombified actions.
How to keep topic string in view for the reader
Usetemporal modifiers and passive voice to alter the sentences and keep the subject of the topic string in view for the reader.
Entities being introduced for the first time vs known entities
Entities being introduced for the first time: indefinite article—a, some, or appear without article at all—plural unknowns
known entities—the this that these those, or a genitive noun
Pronouns for coherence
Pronouns such as he, she they and it, do more than save keystrokes, they tell the reader this entity is known.
Mologophobia
naming the same thing with different names. confusing to the reader.
Wording should not be varied capriciously, because in general people assume that if someone uses two different words they’re referring to two different things. And wording should never be varied when a writer is comparing or contrasting two things. But writing should be varied when an entity is referred to multiple times in quick succession andrepeating the name would sound monotonous or misleadingly suggest that a new actor has entered the scene. When wordingis varied, only certain variations will be easy for the reader to track. the second label is acting as pseudo pronoun, so it should mimic pronouns in two ways. it should be more generic than the original noun, applying to a larger class of entities. Also, the second label should easily call to mind the first one, so the readers don’t have to rack their brains thinking about what the writer is referring to.
Why do Zombie Nouns Exist?
Zombie (anticipation, cancelation) nouns exist in the english language because they serve the same role as the pronouns, definite articles and generic synonyms we have just examined: They allow a writer to refer to something a second time (in this case a situation or event) without tedium or confusing repetition.
The problem with zombie nouns is that knowledge cursed writers use them on first mention because they have already been thinking about the event, so they find it easily summarized by a noun. They forget their readers are encountering the event for the first time and need to see it enacted with their own eyes.
How to Form Arcs of Coherence
Consistent thread of sentence topics
Orderly way of referring to repeated appearances,
The logical relationship between one proposition and another.
Examples, explanations, violated expectations, elaborations, sequences, causes, and effects are arcs of coherence that pinpoint how one statement followsfrom another. Not so much components of language as components of reason, identifying how one ideacan lead to another in our train of thought.
ways in which one though can lead to another
Resemblance, contiguity in time or place, cause or effect
Resemblence
a statement makes a claim that overlaps in content with the one that came before it. The most obvious are similarity and contrast.
typical connectives similarity: and, similarly, likewise, too
contrast: But, in contrast, on the other hand, alternatively
similarity and contrast link two propositions that are similar in most way but differ in at least one way. They call the reader’s attention to the similarities or difference. These relations may be conveyed withoutusing a a connective word: all the writer has to do is write the statements using parallel syntax and vary only the words that indicate the difference.Many writers blow the opportunity and capriciously vary the wording as they compare two things.
Rule of one variable: parallel syntax is just the rule of one variable applied to writing. If you want readers to appreciate some variable, manipulate the expression of that variable alone while keeping the rest of the language unchanged.
Elaboration
Asingle event is described in first a generic way and then in specific detail. There are four relations that fall into two neat pairs, depending on which event the author wishes to mention first.
Elaboration: (typical connectives: that is, in other words, which is to say, also, furthermore, in addition, notice that, which, : colon)
Exemplification—a generalization followed by one or more examples (typical connectives— for example, for instance, such as, including)
Generalization—one or more examples, followed by generalization (typical connectives: in general, more generally)
Exception—can be introduced either generalization first or exception first.
Generalization first—(however, on the other hand, then thereis)
Exception first—(Nonetheless,nevertheless, still)
