原因和清晰
Highlights from Chapters 1&2 <<Stype – Toward Clarity and Grace>> by Joseph Williams
1.
Some of the reasons for the bad writing are rooted in history, others in personal experience.
Some of us feel compelled to use pretentious language to make ideas that we think are too simple seem more impressive.
Learning to write clearly can help us think and feel and see, and that in fact there are a few straightforward principles not rules that help.
2.
The words we use to communicate our impressions cannot alone constitute a vocabulary sufficient to describe style, but they are part of one, and so before we move on to a new way of thinking and talking about style, we should reflect on how we use those words.
3.
When we revise the abstract nouns into verbs expressing actions, when we make their actors the subjects of those verbs and rearrange the events into a chronological sequence, we create a sentence that we could call “clear” because as we read it, it does not confuse us.
4.
Storytelling is fundamental to human behavior. No other form of prose can communicate large amounts of information so quickly and persuasively.
Prose usually has two central components of a story characters and their actions.
5.
The First Two Principles of Clear Writing:
(1) use subjects to name characters; and
(2) express crucial actions in verbs.
6.
Simple advice about revising: When your prose feels turgid, abstract, too complex, do two things. First, locate the cast of characters and the actions that those characters perform (or are the objects of). If you find that those characters are not subjects and their actions are not verbs, revise so that they are.
7.
A quick method is simply to run a line under the first five or six words of every sentence. If you find that (1) you have to go more than six or seven words into a sentence to get past the subject to the verb and (2) the subject of the sentence is not one of your characters, take a hard look at that sentence; its characters and actions probably do not align with subjects and verbs.
“Feeling” passive arises from passive verbs, abstract nouns, and missing characters.
8.
Some Stylistic Consequences:
(1) write more specifically, more concretely;
(2) avoid using too many prepositional phrases;
(3) put your ideas in a logical order;
(4) use connectors to clarify logical relationships (e.g., because, although, if);
(5) write short sentences;
9.
Subjects and Characters
There are many kinds of characters. The most important are agents, the direct source of an action or condition.
10.
Looking for Nominalizations
(1) When the nominalization follows a verb, with little specific meaning, change the nominalization to a verb that can replace the empty verb.
(2) When the nominalization follows there is or there are, change the nominalization to a verb and find a subject.
(3) When the nominalization is the subject of an empty verb, change the nominalization to a verb and find a new subject.
(4) When you find consecutive nominalizations, turn the first one into a verb. Then either leave the second or turn it into a verb in a clause beginning with how or why.
(5) We have to revise more extensively when a nominalization in a subject is linked to a second nominalization in the predicate by a verb or phrase that logically connects them.
To revise such sentences,
(a) Change abstractions to verbs;
(b) Find subjects for those verbs;
(c) Link the new clauses with a word that expresses their logical connection. That connection will typically be some kind of causal relationship:
To express simple cause: because, since, when;
To express conditional cause: if, provided that, so long as
To contradict expected cause: though, although, unless.