连贯性
Highlights from Chapter 5 <<Style – Toward Clarity and Grace>> by Joseph Williams
1. Form Beyond Sentences: Five Principles
1) A cohesive paragraph has consistent topic strings.
2) A cohesive paragraph has another set of strings running through it that we will call thematic strings.
3) A cohesive paragraph introduces new topic and thematic strings in a predictable location: at the end of the sentence(s) that introduce the paragraph.
4) A coherent paragraph will usually have a single sentence that clearly articulates its point.
5) A coherent paragraph will typically locate that point sentence in one of two places.
2.
Together, topic strings and thematic strings constitute the conceptual architecture of a passage, the frame within which you develop new ideas. Topic strings focus your reader’s attention on what a passage is globally about. The thematic strings give your reader a sense that you are focusing on a core of ideas related to those topics.
3.
Since we ordinarily write for readers who know much less than we do about a subject, it is always prudent to underestimate a reader’s knowledge and make themes explicit.
4.
How Do Thematic Strings Go Wrong?
1) Too Few Strings.
2) Diffuse Strings.
5.
If a paragraph or passage does not seem to hang together, if it feels vague, out of focus, look at its topic and thematic strings. Its topic strings should be consistent and appropriate. Its thematic strings should be articulated clearly and concisely.
6.
How Do New Strings Start? Signaling Topics and Themes
The principle of design is this: we introduce new themes not anywhere in a sentence, but rather as close to its end as we can manage.
7. Complex Introductions
To be certain that our readers do not overlook the importance of those new topic and thematic strings, we put them into the stress of the last sentence of the introduction.
We have to recognize in paragraphs a more complex introductory segment. To discuss that segment, we need two new terms.
Paragraph = Issue + Discussion
Whether readers are conscious of it or not, they try to divide units of organized discourse – paragraphs, sections, or wholes into two sections;
1) A short opening segment. Toward the end of this segment, in the stress position of the last sentence, readers look for the concepts the writer will discuss in the following section. Those words are often topics, but they must also include themes.
2) A longer following segment-the rest of the paragraph. In this segment, the writer develops-and readers look for new ideas against a background of repeated topics and themes.
8.
Issue is analogous to subject and topic. These three terms name introductory positions that all have the same function: to put before the reader concepts or claims that the writer intends to expand on in what follows. In the same way, the term discussion is analogous to verb and stress. They name the positions
that follow: subject + verb, topic + stress, issue + discussion.
9. Diagnosis
1) At the end of the issue, you introduce a concept that readers take to begin a theme, but you then fail to develop that concept in the discussion.
2) Conversely, you fail to anticipate in the issue important themes that you in fact develop in the discussion.
3) At the end of the issue you introduce a concept that readers think promises a theme, but in the discussion, you develop that concept using terms so varied that readers cannot connect them to your announced theme.
4) You mention in the issue those themes that you develop in the discussion, but you bury the references to them inside a sentence, instead of highlighting them in the stress of the final sentence of the issue.
10. Revision
1) Look at the discussion independently of the issue and ask what themes in fact the paragraph develops. Then revise the end of the issue to include any thematic strings that are present in and important to that particular discussion.
2) Deliberately weave into the discussion whatever important thematic strings you framed in the issue but omitted from the discussion.
3) Delete from the issue whatever you don’t want to develop in the discussion.
11. Intentions and Points
Readers will expect to find in each paragraph and section, and also in the whole, a sentence that will be the logical, argumentative, expository center, a sentence that you could send as the telegram capturing your central idea.
The most common problem that writers have with POINTs is that they fail to articulate them clearly, and so the reader doesn’t get the POINT of a paragraph, of a section, or of the whole document. Or worse, the reader gets the wrong one.
By POINT we mean the specific sentence on the page that the writer would send as a telegram if asked ” Where’s your POINT?”
12. POINTS in Issues
When writers want to be as clear as possible, they locate their POINTS where their readers most expect them: at the end the issue, whether the issue is the issue of a paragraph, a section, or a whole document.
13. POINTS at the Ends of Discussions
Why put a POINT sentence last in a paragraph? Usually, the writer wants to develop his/her argument before making his/her claim. A writer will put his/her POINT sentence at the end of the paragraph because he/she intends to develop, expand, elaborate, explore that POINT in the following series of paragraphs.
14.
Unless you have good reason to withhold your main POINTS until the end, get them out early, right after you get to the end of a reasonably concise introductory issue.
Make sure that a main POINT sentence encapsulates what you take to be your major claim, observation, proposition, idea, request, warning, direction, command a sentence that you would send to your reader if you had only a post card to write it on.
In those encapsulating sentence(s), be sure that you express toward the end whatever thematic or topic strings you want your readers to notice thereafter.
15. The Model Entire
To this figure we add three principles:
1) In the issue, introduce key thematic and topical words in its stress.
2) In the discussion, keep strings of topics consistent.
3) In the discussion, repeat those thematic words or words related to them.