充满活力的英文写作
Highlights from Chapter 14 <<Writing Science>> by Joshua Schimel
1.
Good stories are driven by action.
In science writing, the two C’s of SUCCES — credible and concrete — both emerge from showing.
Within a sentence, showing action is the job of verbs and it’s an important job. Good writers use their verbs well, imbuing their papers with life. Bad writers use them poorly, stealing energy from the story, leaving it dull and listless.
There are many ways to overburden your writing, including three notable ways to emasculate your verbs: (1) passive voice, (2) fuzzy verbs, and (3) nominalizations.
2.
Active Voice
The simplest structure for any story is straight OCAR, which gives the reader information in the sequence that they can most easily process: who did it (O), what they did (A), and what happened (R). The sentence structure that most directly matches OCAR is as follows.
Actor-Action-Acted-on
Subject-Verb-Object
Active voice is clear, concise, and direct. It is also visual and evocative. You can see the actors because they are named upfront, and you can visualize the action because it is carried in a verb that immediately follows the subject. Hence, Strunk and White’s commandment: “Use the active voice.”
3.
Passive Voice
Acted-on – Action – Actor
Subject – Verb – Object
This is the passive voice. The passive voice is a powerful tool. It allows you to control who or what, in a sentence, the story is about. It allows you to select the grammatical subject and object of the sentence relative to the actor and acted-on of the story.
4.
Controlling Perspective
Because the passive voice is weaker storytelling than the active, we should avoid it as a matter of course, but it has several good uses. The first is in controlling perspective: who the sentence is about.
5.
Hiding the actor
Sometimes, we don’t want to or need to name the actor. The passive voice can do this. The classic example is “mistakes were made,” which is used frequently by politicians and bureaucrats to dampen the intensity of the action and dodge blame.
Being able to leave the actor off stage is useful for solving a variety of writing problems.
Ex: samples were collected.
We also use the passive to refer to work when the specific attribution isn’t important.
Ex: It has been argued that …
6.
The passive voice is for when you need to make the acted-on the subject of the sentence or when you have an honest reason to avoid naming the actor. Use it for those jobs. Otherwise, listen to Strunk and White: use the active voice.
7.
Fuzzy verbs
We are supposed to be clear, and verbs that show action make writing clear. Verbs that mask the action are weak and can be confusing.
Fuzzy verbs say that something happened but not what; action verbs show you what. Action verbs are powerful, concrete storytelling tools. They make your writing more interesting, which is nice, but also clearer, which is vital.
Weak Fuzzy Verbs: Occur/Facilitate/Conduct/Implement/Affect/Perform
Strong Action Verbs: Modify/ Increase/ React/ Accelerate/ Accomplish/ Decrease/ Inhibit/ Migrate/ Create/ Invade/ Disrupt
8.
Nominalizations
Do not write: We conducted an investigation of the effect of
Write: We investigated the effect of
This process of turning a verb into a noun is known as creating a nominalization. As a result of using a noun rather than a verb to describe action loses energy and gains length, but contains no more information. That is all bad, yet using nominalizations, instead of verbs, is a common failing in academic writing.
Nominalization: Movement/ Difference/ Suggestion/ Interaction/ Analysis/ Development
Verb: Move/ Differ/ Suggest/ Interact/ Analyze/ Develop
9.
Another problem with verb nominalizations is that they are necessarily connected to fuzzy verbs. Because the action is named in the nominalization, and a sentence still needs a verb, it will be weak. Scan your work for nominalizations — there are probably more than you imagined. As a rule, turn them into verbs.
10.
Adjective Nominalizations
There is another form of nominalization: converting an adjective into a noun. Nominalizing adjectives also steals color and energy from writing. They leave it heavy and flat.