强调
Highlights from Chapter 4 <<Style – Toward Clarity and Grace>> by Joseph Williams
1.
If you begin a sentence well, the end will almost take care of itself.
So the first step toward a style that is clear, direct, and coherent lies in how you manage the first few words of every sentence.
2.
When you utter a sentence, your voice naturally rises and falls.
When you approach the end, you ordinarily raise your pitch on one of those last few words and stress it a bit more strongly than you do the others.
This rising pitch and stress signal the end of a sentence. We’ll call that part of a sentence its stress.
3. Managing Endings
1) Trim the end.
In some cases, we can just lop off final unnecessary words until we get to the information we want to stress, leaving that information in the final stressed position.
2) Shift less important information to the left.
One way to revise for emphasis is to move unimportant phrases away from the end of a sentence to expose what you want to emphasize.
Occasionally, when we shift a phrase, we may have to separate subjects from verbs or verbs from objects.
Example: The data that are offered to establish the existence of ESP do not make believers of us for the most part.
Correction: For the most part, the data that are offered to establish the existence of ESP do not make us believers.
3) Shift important information to the right.
Example: Moving the important information to the end of a sentence is another way to manage the flow of ideas.
Correction: Another way you can manage the flow of ideas is to move the most important information to the end of the sentence.
4) Extract and isolate.
When you put your most important ideas in the middle of a long sentence, the sentence will swallow them up.
A way to recover the appropriate emphasis is to break the sentence in two, either just before or just after that important idea.
4. Some Syntactic Devices
1) There.
If you begin too many sentences with “There is” or “There are,” your prose will become flat-footed, lacking movement or energy.
Example: There are a few grammatical patterns that add weight to the end of a sentence.
Correction: A few grammatical patterns add weight to the end of a sentence.
2) It- shift.
By using it as a fill-in subject, you can shift a long introductory clause that would otherwise have been the subject to a position after the verb.
Example: That domestic oil prices must eventually rise to the level set by OPEC once seemed inevitable.
Correction: It once seemed inevitable that domestic oil prices must eventually rise to the level set by OPEC.
3) When All Else Fails.
If you find yourself stuck with a sentence that ends flatly because you have to repeat a phrase you used in a previous sentence, at least try changing the phrase to a pronoun.
4) Avoid ending a sentence with meta discourse.
Example: The opportunities we offer are particularly rich at the graduate level, it must be remembered.
Correction: The opportunities we offer are, it must be remembered, particularly rich at the graduate level.
5. Nuances of Emphasis
When you introduce a technical term for the first time or even a familiar but very important term design the sentence it appears in so that you can locate that term at the end, in its stress, never at the beginning, in its topic, even if you have to invent a sentence simply for the sake of defining or emphasizing that term.
6. The System of Clarity
A sentence is more than its subject, verb, and object. It is more than the sum of its words and parts. It is a system of systems whose parts we can fit together in very delicate ways to achieve very delicate ends if we know how.