Style Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 11E Joseph M. Williams Solution ManualStyle Lessons in Clarity a
INSTRUCTOR’S MANUAL
to accompany
STYLE
Lessons in Clarity and Grace
Eleventh Edition
Joseph M. Williams University of Chicago
Revised by Joseph Bizup Boston University
Preface
In this manual, Joe Williams gives us not a dry-as-dust pedagogical guide but a rumination on teaching and style that is at once learned and personal. Writing for an audience of fellow teachers, he explains his views with a frankness that is at times bracing. To change too much would be to sap the manual of its personality and force. For this reason, I have reconciled the manual with the new edition of the book it accompanies but have made few other changes. Like Greg Colomb, who revised the last editions of Style and this manual, I’ve let Joe be Joe, and allowed him to address the teachers who use his book in his own words and in his own way. Like Style itself, this manual is written in the first person, and the speaker remains Joe Williams.
Joseph Bizup Boston University
Some Preliminaries
I teach writing differently from the way many others do, especially those who think that we cannot teach students directly and so can create only the circumstances in which they learn on their own. Some focus on the role of conscious knowledge in the composing process. Since no one writes by rule, they argue, we only get in students’ way when we force on them declarative knowledge that cannot improve the tacit, non-conscious processes of writing. Others take an ideological stance: we should shrink from an authoritarian position that pretends to have privileged knowledge that we impress on our students as if they were a “colonialized” people; better to let them, in cooperation and collaboration with their fellow students, work out their own understanding of what counts as good prose and to discover on their own why readers admire the writing of others more than theirs.
The former group has an important truth on its side, but one that it misapplies. It is true that key parts of the writing process are and need to be entirely tacit: far from being improved through conscious intervention, those processes in fact degrade when students try to interpose rules or other conscious controls. Hence, students tend to draft less successfully when they consciously focus on grammatical correctness than when they don’t. The mistake is in assuming that what we teach are only those tacit moments. In fact, the act of writing comprises many processes, some tacit but many conscious as well. The material in Style is primarily directed at the latter, helping students know not only what to plan before they draft, but how to assess and improve what they have after they draft. It is not intended, nor is it presented, as a body of rules that students should consult sentence-by-sentence as they draft.
The second group makes a far more dangerous mistake. I fear that many avoid direct teaching because they have convinced themselves not just that they have nothing worth teaching (something about which they may be right), but that no one does. This second proposition is, I believe, entirely wrong, and has contributed to a dumbing down of American education. I believe we can, in fact, teach things students cannot learn on their own, or at least not quickly things they will be happy to know. And far from coercing them into a homogenized discourse in the service of the state or global business, when we teach them to think and write in ways that respect readers’ needs, and thereby to earn readers’ respect, we enable them to subvert the order of things more radically than we do by indoctrinating them into the ideology de jour. When we
teach them to think and write in ways that are not just useful but actually liberating, we give them the power to change the order of things in ways that they not we think best.
I cheerfully admit that I could be wrong, but my experience and judgment tell me that indirect approaches to writing fail more often than they succeed and that they encourage a disdain for hard work and hard thinking. I believe that among many other aspects of writing, a clear and direct style is one of those qualities that yields to actual knowledge, and that its secrets can be shared.
What follows are observations about each chapter. Some provide theoretical background, some provide hints about teaching the material, and the last part of each offers some “answers” not in the book. Few of your students’ answers will perfectly match mine. Some will be better. In any case, take the answers here only as opportunities for comparing and contrasting possibilities.
LESSON 1 Understanding Style
STYLE AS IMAGINED ALTERNATIVES
To understand the style of any piece of prose, we have to imagine plausible alternatives to it and how those alternatives would affect the way we understand and feel about what we read. Judging style well is like judging the quality of anything basketball, banjo playing, or wine. Before we can judge any experience, we must imagine how the event that occasions it could plausibly vary and thereby give us a different experience, for better or worse.
In fact, we cannot fully experience anything until we develop what we might call “critical imagination.” To experience fully any instance of wine, banjo playing, or basketball, we have to drink a lot of good and bad wine, listen to a lot of good and bad banjo playing, and watch a lot of good and bad basketball. We understand a particular experience only by comparing it to one we can imagine (or remember) having, and we can imagine (or recall) experiences only by having a lot of them.
Compare the following paragraphs:
In regard to style, we have to read a lot of unclear writing before we can understand why some writing seems clear, and a lot of clear writing before we can understand why other writing is not. Only then can we experience a particular passage as one alternative from among a range of imaginable possibilities. Only by imagining what is not but could be, do we recognize what is.
In regard to style, there is a need for reading a lot of writing characterized by a lack of clarity before an understanding of clarity is possible, and a lot of writing characterized by clarity before an understanding why other writing has a lack of clarity. Only then is there the possibility of understanding the experience of any particular passage as a plausible alternative from among a range of plausible choices and a recognition of what it is through the imagination of what it is not but could be.
Only when we can imagine something like the second paragraph and compare it with the first can we recognize its style.
The principle of “imagine and compare” underlies this book. Almost every example here appears in two versions, or invites you to imagine another. I work hard to avoid saying about either version that it is simply “good” or “bad,” because I can imagine contexts in which the example you just read might be judged “good” as an example, for example. Instead of calling a style “good” or “bad,” I encourage judgments like more or less “readable” or, more expansively, like “makes a reader work hard for no good reason” or “makes it easier for the reader to get through the sentence.”
That may sound like waffling relativism, but it only reflects the complexities of any rhetorical situation. What is good or bad depends on what a writer is trying to accomplish in a specific situation for specific readers. But if we must allow that less readable sentences may have their role in effective prose, we can also describe a base-line default style that reflects deeply entrenched cognitive preferences, at least among readers of English. That is the style I prefer and will consistently recommend.
We can, in fact, reliably predict that some features of style make readers work harder than do other features, and those predictions define a base-line style against which other styles vary in greater or lesser degrees. While I acknowledge some variation, I admit no untethered free play in our judgments about style. In that respect, for those of you who might care about such matters, this book is qualifiedly but clearly foundationalist. I rest this claim on work variously called “cognitive semantics,” “prototype semantics,” or “cognitive rhetoric.” I cannot rehearse the details of its argument, so I will only summarize and cite references. If you are uninterested in theory, skip to the discussion of Lesson Two.
A PRIMER IN PROTOTYPE SEMANTICS
It goes like this: Much of our thinking is based on manipulating categories at higher and lower levels of generality: the category of “word” consists of the subcategories “noun,” “verb,” “adjective,” etc. The category of “noun,” as the standard ninth-grade definition goes, consists of the sub-sub-categories, “persons,” “places,” and “things.” But the category of “noun” also includes abstract nouns derived from verbs (like “refusal”) or from adjectives (like “depth”), as well as nouns that are just abstractions, like “ambition.”
Basic-Level Categories
But while these categories and subcategories are logically equal regardless of their generality or content, we experience different categories in different ways. Certain ones are basic-level categories, categories that seem particularly easy to visualize, manipulate mentally, imagine, think about, and reason about. These categories feel perceptually more “well-bounded” than the higher, more abstract, less visualizable category to which they belong. Simply put, these categories are the first (moving from abstract to concrete) for which we have well-defined images.
For example, the category of objects called implement is not a basic-level category because we have no well-bounded image of an “implement.” Nor do we have a well-bounded image of the next category down, “tool,” and so the term tool does not name a basic-level category either. We do, however, have a well-bounded image for the next set of categories down called saw, hammer, screw driver, and so on. So the categories of objects named by those terms are at the basic-level
Here’s the point: There is good evidence that our minds work with the basic-level category called hammer more efficiently than they work with more general categories called tool or implement. And often, the categories one more level down in specificity are so particular that we can’t imagine them either (unless we have special knowledge of them), like the categories called hacksaw, coping saw, miter saw, and so on. In other words, basic-level categories have a special place in our cognition. .
Prototypes in Basic-Level Categories
Even though all of the members of a basic-level category that we call hammer are equally “good” hammers logically, we typically treat one member of that basic level as cognitively special. When most of us think about saws, we are likely to call to mind a handsaw (unless we have some special interest in another kind of saw, in which case we might think of it instead). For most of us, there is one kind of “saw” or “hammer” or “chair” or “bird” that would count for us as a most typical saw, hammer, chair, or bird. For those of us who have lived in North America all our lives, a robin is closer to our idea of a typical bird than is a penguin or ostrich, just as a maple tree is a more typical tree than a curtain fig tree, or a dining room chair is a more typical chair than a beanbag chair.
The technical term for these most typical, most representative imagined members of a basic-level category is prototype. Prototypes are culturally dependent, but the fact that we have prototypes at all seems to be a universal of human cognition.
This contradicts traditional taxonomic theory. In classical taxonomic theory, no particular level of a taxonomy is “privileged.” Nor is any particular member of any set. But in real-life thinking, basic-level categories and certain members of basic-level categories have a privileged place in our mental activities: We reason about them better, faster, and more confidently.
Prototypes in Language and Style
Much the same appears to be true in language, and particularly in style. Some nouns are more typical nouns than others not abstractions such as ambition or relationship, but those familiar categories of person and thing: mother and car, familiar concrete nouns that have perceptually well-bounded images. Some verbs are more typical verbs than others, not abstract verbs such as seem or do but verbs that name common actions such as throw and kiss, verbs that fit the ninthgrade definition that “a verb is an action word.” Similarly, some subjects are more typical subjects. And it turns out that they also fit two ninth-grade definitions of subject the “doer” and “what the sentence is about”: The horse jumped over the fence. That sentence is about the horse, and it did the action. A sentence like That powerful ambition predicts prideful dominance seems to overgeneralize is a perfectly good English sentence, but it is not a really good example of one.
We might wonder why ninth-grade definitions of noun, verb, and subject have endured so long, when they are self-evidently wrong. The noun resemblance surely does not name a “thing,” at least not in any ordinary sense of a thing. Seem is a verb, but surely it names no “action.” And the subject of this next sentence is surely neither a “doer” nor “what the sentence is about”:
In regard to Social Security, it is unlikely that there will be significant reform any time soon.
The sentence is not about it but about Social Security, the object of a preposition, and it surely is not a “doer.” How can it be that such self-evidently unsatisfactory definitions have endured for so long? I believe it is because those definitions define “prototypical” nouns, verbs, and subjects, the most representative nouns, verbs, and subjects. As a result, when we read sentences that consist of prototypical parts of speech and sentences whose structures are close to prototypes a .
human doer as a subject does something to some object we understand such sentences faster, remember them better, and process them more efficiently.
Now this is important: None of this has anything necessarily to do with the length of a sentence or with its complexity, as measured by the number of words or clauses in it. A short simple sentence can depart quite markedly from the prototype:
The confusion of lust with love often leads to unhappiness.
The teachers and students welcomed the new high-school principal.
Though both sentences have the same number of words, the first makes us work harder than the second because it and its components are more “distant” from a prototypical sentence consisting of prototypical words.
Prototypes and Judgments
It is important to keep in mind here that the second sentence is not intrinsically “better” than the first; rather, we simply don’t have to work as hard to understand it. Sometimes, we equate “working hard” with “bad,” and “working less hard” with “good.” But there are many occasions when we just have to work hard, because some ideas are more complex than others and because some subject matters are more foreign to us. Ease and goodness often correlate, more often than most authors want to think. But the correlation is not perfect, and in this book, I do not claim that it is. What I do claim is that we can lay down a kind of “default” style that, all things being equal, readers read most easily. Some have denied that claim, but I believe they are wrong.
Now that’s the simple version of the theory that informs most of this book, especially Lessons 3 through 6. Rather than develop this argument in any more detail, I will let the rest of the book do that by demonstration. As we shall see, what counts as “clearer” (not necessarily “better”) and “less clear” (not necessarily “worse”) is simply another way of saying whether we force the reader to struggle or not. If we want readers to struggle, so be it. The question is then not just what we gain by making readers sweat, but what our readers themselves might gain from doing so. The most readily available account of these matters is still George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, (The University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 39–67). Lakoff also provides an extensive, though now dated, bibliography.
SYSTEMS AND SPECIFICITY
A final note: This book is based on systematic principles of style. I have ignored matters of vocabulary. There are 500,000 or so words in English, most of them with more than two meanings. I can’t imagine what anyone could say about word choice that would be useful and not banal: Keep a dictionary close by and look up words you don’t understand? It’s not the words that we don’t understand that cause us grief, it’s the words we think we do but don’t. I can’t think of any generalization more unsubstantial than “Choose the right word, the one that expresses your meaning exactly” as if we ever deliberately choose the wrong word, the word that expresses our meaning inexactly. As a consequence of focusing strictly on what is systematic or at least what I can describe systematically I have ignored some matters of style because I can think of no good generalizations that are true, substantive, and most important, useful. .
In the last few editions of this book, I have included material on units of discourse larger than a sentence: paragraphs, sections consisting of groups of paragraphs, sections consisting of subsections, and the whole document. Though the organization of sentences seems qualitatively different from the organization of paragraphs and larger units of discourse, I think that at a very general level of analysis, well-formed sentences and well-formed larger units share a structural feature: They all open with a short segment that frames what follows by stating a topic or point that the rest of the unit expands on, supports, explains, etc. This is a generalization that I have not seen made elsewhere, but it appears to be reliable. If it is, then there is also a prototypical unit of discourse: a short opening segment that frames and introduces what follows, followed by a longer segment. Though one can easily imagine other ways of organizing units of discourse larger than a sentence (just as we can imagine birds other than a robin), that pattern seems to be the one we all cognitively prefer.
LESSON 2
Correctness
ARGUING ABOUT CORRECTNESS
There is little to say about correctness that has not been said, endlessly. The biggest problem in teaching usage results from sliding down a slippery slope argument that fails to make plausible distinctions. This particular slippery slope, interestingly, inclines for both the most uninformed conservatives (some of our colleagues) and for the most uninformed radicals (some of our students):
If we give up on split infinitives and impact strictly as a noun, we face rampant illiteracy and incoherence.
If I can split an infinitive and use impact as a verb, then what’s wrong with ain’t and double negatives?
THE FOUNDATIONS OF JUDGMENTS ABOUT USAGE
The conservative objection can be answered in three ways:
The Argument from Authority
Let’s look at what the most conservative handbooks say. I refer you to the first or second edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage for any of the matters discussed here (the third is judged too permissive by conservatives, even though it is also the most reliable of the three for its scholarship). Most conservatives are shocked to find that even the second edition is so liberal.
The Argument from Fact
Pick several writers whom you admire and look at their actual usage. This restricts the “usage” argument to only those writers already qualified as respectable. If we begin with “Let’s see what the usage of ‘most’ people is,” we give the game away, because the standard answer will be some version of “We’re not most people,” an answer that, in fact, I happen to agree with. I am not a democrat where matters of style and usage are concerned, but I base my distinctions on grounds quite different from those who speak ex cathedra, ipse dixit: I base my judgments about usage on the systematic linguistic behavior of those whom we would judge to be skilled writers and of their careful readers.
Note two things: First, “deliberate and systematic” excludes from our consideration random errors. That I commit a grammatical howler from time to time does not make that howler acceptable. Even though Shakespeare may have used an incorrect singular verb because its plural subject was distant, he simply made a mistake that he would have corrected had he thought about it. Second, we have to make sure we don’t let someone beg the question here: “William Buckley never splits infinitives, and he’s a good writer, so let’s see if he splits infinitives well, how about that, he doesn’t, so split infinitives must be bad.” There are many good writers who do.
The Argument from History
These matters have been debated for hundreds of years, but otherwise good writers still ignore them, and the language has not collapsed (of course, some will claim it has).
MAKING DISTINCTIONS
The second problem failure to make distinctions is illustrated by the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary (1969), now revised. In its preface, it defines “non-standard” forms as “forms that do not belong in any standard educated speech” and maintains that such forms “are recognized as non-standard not only by those whose speech is standard, but even by those who regularly use non-standard expressions.” The editors include under this definition ain’t, seen as a past tense form, and don’t with a singular subject all accurate judgments. But they also include irregardless, disinterested as synonymous with uninterested, and where, as in I see where the President has proposed new taxes, three judgments as wrong as the first three are right. The editors have confused small matters of usage with matters that identify social dialects. They have simply failed to make crucial distinctions in kinds of linguistic variation.
SOME THINGS TO DO
One thing I do in these matters is assign students to look for particular features of usage in the New York Times, Harper’s, and so on. They will never find a double negative. But they will find on the editorial page and Op Ed page many examples of sentences beginning with and and but. Negative evidence is always tricky, but the fact that double negatives never appear, while sentences beginning with and or but do does not mean nothing.
LESSON 3 Actions
SOME PRINCIPLES OF STYLE
In everything that follows, these principles apply:
1. Readers come first.
While I must satisfy myself with what I write, my main concern is my readers. I do not express myself to my satisfaction until I am sure that they can understand what I have written without having to expend gratuitous time doing so. This does not mean that I do not want them to think hard, nor does it mean dumbing down, condescending, catering, pandering, or changing in any way the substance of what I want to communicate. Complex ideas often require complex prose, so complex ideas often require readers to work hard. But I want my prose to require readers to work only as hard as they must to fully understand my ideas. Anything more is presumptuous and self-indulgent; anything less is condescension. We are the worst judges of our own writing. If a reader thinks a sentence is unclear, it is regardless of what we think.
2. Most of the words we use to describe style do not describe style but rather how we feel about it.
When we describe some prose as “clear,” we do not refer to what is on the page but to how we respond to it. When we say prose is “clear,” we mean “I can understand this easily.” The problem is to locate what it is on the page that makes us feel as we do.
3. Only by systematically trying out different options can we understand what options are available and develop a sense of which options most readers prefer.
4. There is no such thing as a perfect sentence.
5. Stylistic analysis and revision take us beyond the kind of cosmetic surgery that makes a sentence merely more presentable; it makes us think hard about what we mean.
Done thoughtfully, stylistic revision comes close to brain surgery: When we think hard about clarity, we think hard about thinking. We realize that when we can say things in different ways, we think of different things to say. In other words, style is not just decorative; it is intellectually generative.
SOME PRINCIPLES OF TEACHING
These principles have kept me from getting foolishly entrenched in a particular revision of any particular sentence, and they justify having students change clear sentences into less clear ones how else can they know whether a sentence they have written will give a reader no difficulty until they can imagine a plausible alternative that will?
My strategy is this: We work our way through a passage, first locating those patches that make us feel even just a bit uncomfortable. We then try to characterize the passage with the usual impressionistic language clear, direct, turgid, abstract, readable, impersonal, and so on. Then we try to locate what it is in the sentence, on the page, that might make us feel that way. That often requires that I offer the alternative, because many students take what is given as what must be, especially in published prose. They often need an alternative that they cannot imagine. I provide it as a way to show them that alternatives exist. After a while, they learn imagine alternatives too.
From the beginning, I lay down the “first seven or eight words” rule:
The secret to a clear style is in the first seven or eight words of a sentence. Get those straight and the rest of the sentence usually takes care of itself.
To apply that principle, I simply have students underline the first seven or eight words of every sentence, not counting short introductory words and phrases such as in the beginning, therefore, and so on. Then we look for subjects. If that subject is an abstraction, particularly a nominalization with several phrases attached to it, I have them turn the nominalization into a verb and revise the sentence, using the verb instead, even when I think the revision might make the sentence worse. When they find they cannot improve the sentence by changing the nominalization to a verb, we try to explain why (it is usually because the nominalization refers to a previous sentence or because the nominalization is the main character of the story more of that in Lesson 4). Only then do they understand that style is not a matter of mindless rule, but of principled judgment.
They often surprise me with their inventiveness and find a revision I did not expect, often better than the original sentence. So to anticipate their inventiveness (and to avoid having to say “I’m wrong, you’re right” more than a few times), I keep everything tentative, insisting that we just “try out” a revision to see what happens. In that way, I do not lock myself into a claim that I have to squirm out of. So my constant refrain is, “Let’s just give it a try and see what happens.”
Despite these strategies to avoid flatfooted judgments, there are some principles that are strongly predictive: when we find a clump of nominalizations at the beginning of a sentence, particularly as a subject, we can almost always change at least one of those nominalizations into a verb, find a new subject, and create a clearer sentence. So the first seven or eight word test is this: If we find clumps of nominalizations at the beginnings of sentences, especially in two or three sentences in a row, that’s a sign that a reader will judge that patch of writing to be less clear than sentences that avoid those nominalizations.
I also point out that every time we replace a verb with a new verb derived from a nominalization, that new verb is always more specific than the verb it replaces. Conversely, every time an action is expressed in a nominalization, the verb that replaces the verb we nominalized is always more general, less emphatic.
ON THE MATTER OF “VOICE”
Finally, some students worry that if they write in the ways I advocate, they will sound monotonous. My answer goes like this: Almost all sentences have the same structure: subject/verb/object. But we don’t complain that all sentences are monotonous. If a reader is absorbed in the content of a text, that reader will not notice, much less care, how many nominalizations and so on a writer uses, until that writer uses too many.
Moreover, it is simply not the case that a style that is basically an agent-action kind of style is monotonous. I recommend the Gettysburg Address as an example. It has the fewest nominalizations of any major public text that I know. It is in fact amazing how few there are. It also has a relentless agent-action style, but few critics complain of its monotony.
A related fear is that if students follow these principles, they will lose their own “voice.” I offer three answers:
• First, virtually no one will adopt every one of these principles and apply them mechanically to every sentence he or she writes. Every writer will write in ways that are unique to that writer. No book of this kind will ever wholly replace a writer’s voice with mine.
• Second, voice is as much a matter of substance, of content, as it is of sentence structure. What a writer says is as much a part of that writer’s voice as how it’s said.
• Third, voice depends on word choice, on diction, on vocabulary, as much as it does on sentence structure. To be sure, the writer who avoids useless abstraction will choose words more concrete than a writer who does not avoid abstraction. But two writers who write in an agent-action kind of style will choose not just different agents and different actions, but different words to express similar agents and similar actions.
The principles of clarity influence voice only to the degree that they will make some voices clearer than others.
SOME THINGS TO DO
1. Have students exchange nominalized sentences to see whether they can change the revisions back to the clearer originals.
2. Have them write sentences using nominalizations from Exercise 3.1. Have them exchange papers again to revise each other’s sentences back to their original forms.
3. Have them go through old papers for problems you have covered. Have them revise, then bring the originals to class to exchange with other students. Have them revise each other’s prose, then compare revisions.
4. Find some professional writing and revise specific verbs into nouns. Exchange revisions, revise each other’s passages, then compare revisions with the original. .
5. Let students create their own fractured fairy tales (or other familiar texts). Each student should rewrite a fairy tale, using as few action verbs and as many nominalizations as they can (“Once upon a time there was a walking through the woods by Little Red Riding Hood and some lurking behind a tree on the part of the Big Bad Wolf.”) Then have students read their fractured tales aloud.
LESSON 4
Characters
ON THE USE OF CHARACTERS
The use of characters varies in three ways: where they are expressed, how often they are expressed, and what kind of characters they are.
1. Where are characters expressed? Is the central character expressed in a subject or elsewhere? Compare:
The president criticized Congress because it failed to enact a program that would help small businesses hire teenagers.
Criticism of Congress by the president was based on its failure to pass programs to help in the hiring of teenagers by small businesses .
To the degree that we locate central characters in positions other than the subject of a sentence, we make readers work harder.
2. How often are characters expressed? Are the characters named frequently and explicitly or are they left only implicit? Compare:
The president criticized Congress because it failed to enact a program that would help small businesses hire teenagers .
Criticism of Congress by the president was based on its failure to pass programs to help in the hiring of teenagers by small businesses .
We could delete those characters:
Criticism was based on a failure to enact a hiring program to provide help in hiring.
To the degree that we displace characters out of subjects, we make readers work harder. To the degree that we also delete characters, we make readers work harder yet.
3. What kind of character is the character? The third variable turns on the kind of characters. We can tell stories about humans, inanimate objects (see Lesson 12 for a story about car parts, pp. 192-193), abstractions that we know about (free speech, truth, thought), abstractions that are special to a community of discourse (recovery in equity for lawyers, nominalizations for stylists), or abstractions that are invented for the text (see the passage on prospective and immediate intention on p 51). .
So we have three considerations in regard to character:
1. Are they subjects?
2. If not subjects, how many are expressed elsewhere?
3. What kind of characters are they human, inanimate, common abstractions, specialized abstractions?
THE PRINCIPLE
To the degree we build a story around human characters as subjects, the text is more readable. To the degree we tell stories about abstract ones, we make readers work harder. To the degree that those abstractions are specialized to particular readers, we make readers outside that community work harder still. Not all texts that tell stories about abstractions can be translated into a style dominated by human agents as subjects. But most can. And to the degree that we can tell stories about abstractions while using as few other abstractions as possible, the text will be more readable.
For example, in the passage on prospective and immediate intention, the problem is partly with these two unfamiliar nominalizations, but more so in the other nominalizations. The revision retains the two nominalizations, but avoids others, and thereby tells a story about abstractions in the context of a story about human agents.
Given the two principles, characters as subjects and actions as verbs, the character-principle prevails: When forced to choose between making characters subjects and actions verbs (a choice that is almost never forced), choose the character as subject.
SOME THINGS TO DO
1. Have students analyze a passage to find characters as subjects, starting with the most concrete, including I, you, and we.
2. Have them go through old papers and change the characters that are subjects, just to see the consequences of the change.
3. Have them read professional writing and revise characters to see the consequences of making the change.
4. Have them read old papers for problems you have covered. Have them revise, then bring the originals to class to exchange with other students. Have them revise each other’s prose, then compare revisions.
LESSON 5
Cohesion and Coherence
STYLE AND KNOWLEDGE
More than any other aspect of prose style, cohesion and coherence depend on how familiar a reader is with the subject matter of the text. Some research done at Carnegie-Mellon University suggests why: researchers created a passage on a technical subject, and at certain points they deliberately created problems that made it difficult to understand. They gave the same passage to two groups of readers, one of which had been given some prior reading on the subject matter of the passage. They were then asked to identify where in the text they experienced difficulty. Those who lacked the prior knowledge, of course, more reliably identified those deliberately inserted problems, because when they came to them, they could not call upon their knowledge to carry them over the rough patches.
I believe this also explains why we are our own worst editors, and why we need formal procedures to analyze, diagnose, and revise our own prose. Who knows more about what we wanted to mean than we do? That systematically disqualifies us from being reliable readers of our own prose. We know too much to read our own prose objectively, and so we can never read it as our readers will.
And thus again the seven or eight word rule: Look at just the first few words of every sentence. If we find features A, B, and C, we can predict that our readers will find our prose difficult, regardless of how we might feel about it. If we find features X, Y, and Z, we can predict that our readers will find our prose clear. This test is not 100% reliable, and it ignores a good many other issues having to do with easy reading. But it beats endlessly fiddling with one’s prose without any sense of purpose.
Two contestable issues arise involving topics: Do they become monotonous when repeated, and which of two or more characters should be made a topic?
Writers are far more conscious of repeated topics/subjects than readers are, because readers read usually for content, so they don’t notice when the same subject is repeated a few times. Of course, as the “moral climate” passage (p. 77) shows, topics/subjects can become so obvious that we become aware of them, especially in a series of sentences that are no more than 15–20 words long. But writers usually read what they’ve written more often than any reader does, so it will be the writer who will notice repeated subjects and then assume that readers will too. It is an interesting contradiction: As writers, we don’t notice some things that readers do, and we do notice some things that readers don’t.
Some argue whether topics are determined by the nature of things. One position is that a clever writer can manipulate sentences, particularly verbs, to maneuver any character into the subject of a sentence. Another is that, while that choice is usually available, sometimes it’s not, and often we have to work to get what otherwise would be an object to appear in a subject. The most common way we do that is with a passive verb, but there are others: .
The police questioned him. He was questioned by police. He underwent questioning by the police.
Someone hit him on the head. He was hit on the head. He received a blow to the head.
I take the weaker position here, because when we see two figures, one in motion, the other not, and the one not is being affected by the other, we take the one in motion to be the “natural agent” of the action and the other to be its “natural object.” And that is a prototype for the subject of a sentence. To be sure, we can manipulate these relationships, but it almost always requires a different verb that ascribes more agency to the object.
SOME THINGS TO DO
1. Have students analyze the topics and topic strings in an old paper, or have them exchange old papers and critique each other’s topics and topic strings.
2. Have students distort the sequence of topics in decently written passages. Then have them exchange versions and revise to try to get back to the originals.
3. Have students go through some professional writing and revise characters, not to improve the writing necessarily but to see the consequences of making the change.
4. Have students go through old papers for problems you have covered. Have them revise, then bring the originals to class to exchange with other students. Have them revise each other’s prose, then compare revisions.
LESSON 6
Emphasis
Students often ask what part of a sentence is most important, the beginning or the end. The answer is both, but for different reasons. The beginning contextualizes new information, focuses attention on a limited number of concepts, and thereby defines what a sentence is “about.” Sometimes, though, students think that what a sentence is “about” is at its end. They are not wrong, because it is at the end that we introduce new and therefore salient information that is often developed in what follows. In this sense, the beginning of a sentence exists for the sake of the end, but the end needs the beginning as context.
An analogous principle applies to longer passages. Think of the introduction to any passage not as a single sentence, or even two sentences, but simply as a structural unit that serves a kind of “staging” function, that introduces key concepts and perhaps makes the “point” of that unit of discourse. It doesn’t matter whether that unit is a single paragraph, a sequence of paragraphs constituting a section, or a whole document It looks like this:
The end of the introduction announces the key conceptual words that readers expect to thread through the rest of that unit of text. It does not matter whether that unit is a paragraph and the staging introduction is a single sentence, whether it is a section and the introduction is a paragraph, or whether that unit is a whole paper and the introduction is pages long. The end of the introduction is where readers best recognize the key concepts that the rest of that unit will develop.
At the end of the introduction, readers might also look for (but do not demand) a sentence that makes the “point” of the paragraph, section, or whole. That is, they might expect a sentence that counts as the thesis or claim, a sentence that makes an assertion the rest of the unit supports, explains, or expands on. In paragraphs, some teachers call this a “topic” sentence, but that is too .
general and too restrictive. The first sentence of a paragraph need not be a topic sentence, if by topic sentence we mean point, claim, thesis, and so on. But whether or not a unit’s introduction makes a point, it should announce the themes of that unit. If the point does not appear at the end of the introduction, it usually then appears at the end of the unit.
SOME THINGS TO DO
1. Have students change the words in the stress position of well-written papers to demonstrate how important it is to emphasize the right words.
2. Have them analyze a well-written passage to see how the writer uses the stress position to emphasize certain words.
3. Have them go through old papers for problems you have covered. Have them revise and bring the originals to class to exchange with other students. Have them revise each other’s prose and compare revisions.
LESSON 7
Motivation
The most common global failure of relatively inexperienced writers occurs when a writer writes “about” a topic, but has no point to make in regard to it. It is the kind of paper that elicits the “So what?” response: “Why am I reading this? What’s the point?” The writer may even have a point, but that point might still invite, “So what? Why should I care about that?”
To be sure, for many students it is no small achievement to get just that far, to have any point to support, whether it is worth supporting or not. But at some point in their writing careers, students must be introduced to the idea that readers have to care about what they read, that writers can’t expect readers to have a pre-existing interest that can be depended on to motivate them, and that writers have a responsibility to create an interest, a motive to read.
In this lesson, I lay out what may seem like a formulaic, mechanical way of writing introductions to create that motivation. An overwhelming number of introductions in professional writing have the three-part structure of a condensed fairy tale.
1. A fairy tale traditionally opens with a stable condition:
Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood was walking through the woods to Grandma’s house.
2. Something then destabilizes that condition in a way that has threatening consequences:
When suddenly, the Wolf jumped out from behind a tree, frightening Little Red Riding Hood.
3. Something eventually happens, usually at the end, to remove the threat and restore an enhanced stability to the scene:
The woodsman arrived just in time to save Grandma and Little Red Riding Hood.
This pattern, with its movement from stability to instability to restored stability, is common in literature and music. It is also typical of introductions in most kinds of professional writing, from newspaper stories, to magazine features, to business memos, to academic articles. In academic writing, that the middle step the destabilization has to be spelled out in detail. Doing that can be extraordinarily difficult, not just for inexperienced writers but for experienced ones as well Likewise, in academic writing, the restoration of stability usually comes at the end of the introduction in the form of a point or main claim that resolves the instability.
Here are the three steps to writing a professional introduction:
Step one. Most articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers open with at least a sentence or two that establishes some shared, unproblematic common ground. In academic writing, this common ground can consist of many paragraphs called a “literature review.” It is there not just to provide context, to locate the writer’s research in a field of research, but specifically to describe some aspect of that research that seems unproblematic.
One of the most debated issues in American history is what happened at the Alamo. Historians have accumulated enough evidence to provide us with a reasonable picture of what actually happened, as opposed to the popular stories we read or see in movies.
Step two. The writer then moves to step two, destabilization, typically with a but or however. This next step itself has two steps.
1. This first sub-step describes some aspect of that seemingly unproblematic research as in fact being at least incomplete, at worst wrong. The writer might point out some gap in understanding, some uncertainty, an ambiguity, a contradiction, something incomplete in the earlier research. The incompleteness need not be a flaw: It might be some hitherto unexplored implication or an overlooked possibility. This step can typically be expressed as a question, an utterance that implies ignorance: “Why has the story of the Alamo become such an important part of American popular history?” It is written as something we do not know:
But while we might know better what actually happened, we do not know why this story of a defeat has become such a powerful story in American folklore.
2. The second sub-step explains why it is important to remedy the incompleteness or the error. This step answers the question, “So what? Why should I care?” If we can resolve the incompleteness or correct the error, we will see something in a clearer light and understand some larger issue better.
If we understood its mythical appeal better, we might better understand how such stories become so popular, an understanding that might even give us insight into our national character.
Step three. The last step is the point of the document, the answer to the question in the first substep of step two, “Why has the story of the Alamo become such an important part of American popular history?” Some writers only promise a resolution at the end of the introduction, implying that they will offer it at the end of the paper.
The reasons are many, but the main reason involves a sense of the importance of self- sacrifice and hope for the future.
That sentence does not clearly state a point, but it does introduce what seems to be a pair of themes that the rest of the paper will develop: the importance of self-sacrifice and hope for the future. .
Some articles in the popular press do not answer the question but only pose the problem. These can be called “problem-posing” arguments.
One common suggestion for saving Social Security is to raise the retirement age from 67 to 69 or even 70. What no one has seriously considered is the consequences of having 70-year-olds driving trucks, lifting bricks, running machinery.
The rest of the article goes on to lay out the consequences of the destabilizing event.
Often, the opening common ground goes on for several sentences. Sometimes, the writer will lay out the destabilizing condition and then destabilize that.
One common suggestion for saving Social Security is to raise the retirement age from 67 to 69 or even 70. common ground What no one has seriously considered is the consequences of having 70-year-olds driving trucks, lifting bricks, running machinery. destabilizing condition There is clearly an increased risk of accidents due to slower reaction time and less robust physical condition, not just on the job but with the general public.cost But as ominous as those physical risks are, what could be even worse is the idea that retirement is so far away for just about everyone that we end up conceiving of our lives as just one long stretch of work, and then we die.greater destabilization than the first.
After that introduction, the writer would then lay out the psychological costs of postponing retirement to age 70.
So not every introduction opens with these elements, but almost all use at least one or two of them, and most use all of them.
When students first try to create introductions around this model, they will have two problems. First, all their introductions will sound the same. But that’s because they will know too little to devote more than one sentence or so to each of the steps, making the structure of their introductions painfully obvious. As they write longer, more knowledgeable papers, that lock-step pattern will evolve into something more satisfying.
Second, students with little experience in the subject will have a hard time answering that “So what?” question. You can help them find a suitable answer to “So what?” if you create assignments in which they have, or at least can imagine, readers who will genuinely find what they say illuminating. Short of that, you can only assure them, as they learn more, they will eventually understand how their answers in fact do have consequences on the larger understanding of their readers.
LESSON 8
Global Coherence
Coherence, like clarity, exists not on the page but in the mind. We experience it most fully when we aren’t aware of it, when in reading a text, we don’t feel “off track” or “lost.” Coherence is like the experience of good health; we rarely notice it until we become aware of its absence.
ELEMENTS THAT ELICIT THE EXPERIENCE OF COHERENCE
Our sense of coherence depends on many elements, some of which are in the text and therefore under the writer’s control, and some of which are not and therefore beyond the writer’s control. Probably the most powerful influence on our sense of coherence is how much we know about its subject matter. We can read a very ill-structured text easily if we know a lot about a text’s subject. We can impose on it a structure that we create out of our prior knowledge. That is something writers can’t control, except by choosing their audiences carefully and writing only for those who already know a lot about their subjects. That is one reason why a text can seem well-written to one person and badly written to another.
But there are ways that writers can help readers through a text so that those readers feel that they can see the shape of the whole.
Sentence-level Elements
In Part Two of this book, I covered three factors that readers not deeply familiar with the content of a text look for in order to experience it as coherent. The first has to do with individual sentences.
1. Basic sentence clarity. When readers find it difficult to unpack individual sentences, they have a difficult time holding any line of development in mind, no matter how well-organized the text might be otherwise. This quality of clarity relies on short, simple, concrete subjects followed by verbs expressing important actions.
The second and third factors have to do with sequences of sentences.
2. Old-new. Even when a sentence might have short, concrete characters as subjects and specific actions as verbs, sentences can seem hard to follow if they consistently open with new information. When that happens, a passage of such sentences can seem disorganized, choppy, to lack flow.
3. Consistent topics. When the subject/topic of a passage keeps changing, readers can fail to grasp what a whole passage is “about.”
These three factors are important in creating a not-consciously-felt experience of coherence, but they are not more important than several other considerations discussed in this lesson.
Discourse-level Elements
1. Perceived logical flow. This element is familiar to all teachers and crucially contributes to the reader’s experience of coherence. A perceived logical flow in the sequence of parts can happen, but only when readers first recognize the discrete parts of a document. To that end, I have found it useful to require students first to make visible the divisions among the major sections of their papers (and subdivisions, in a long paper), either by inserting headings that state the concepts that uniquely distinguish each section or simply by adding an extra space between the sections.
I also encourage them to use explicit transitions between sections as a way of forcing them to reflect on why they have ordered the sections of their paper as they have. Those visible signals help readers grasp the structure of a paper, but they also force writers to analyze their own work in ways that they tend not to.
2. Key concepts as unifying themes. At the same time, I also emphasize the role of points in those sections. A point is the main claim, key proposition, or single sentence in a unit of discourse paragraph, subsection, section, or whole document that states the central idea of that unit.
The particular value of requiring students to use headings liberally is that it forces them to think about what key concepts uniquely characterize each section (or should), and about how those key concepts differ from those in other sections. Once they have identified those concepts and created headings out of them, I ask them to show me how those key terms run through particular sections and the whole. I use the general term theme (as in music) to name those concepts. It is a term that covers not only concepts in topics (typically in the subjects of sentences) but also in other parts of a sentence. A theme is simply a concept that appears through a paragraph, section, or whole, in subjects/topics or in verbs, adjectives, and other nouns.
I also explain that key themes should be named at the end of a unit’s short opening segment. I’ve used different terms to name this short opening segment. The simplest is introduction, but that seems too limited, because it suggests only the introduction to the whole paper. I tell students that every section has to have a short introduction, as well as every subsection and every paragraph. With more advanced students, I use the term opening. (I have also used the term issue in some published articles and teaching materials, but that can be even more confusing.)
Finally, and most important, I urge my students to focus on how they open each section, subsection, paragraph, and especially the whole. The first few sentences of every part and subpart, read together, should add up to a usable summary of the whole paper. If students can’t find such summaries in their papers, their readers are likely to find those papers incoherent.
The point of all this is to force writers to think about two things:
1. Longer texts have parts that have to appear in some order that a reader can discern.
2. Each part must open with a short segment that introduces the key concepts that part will develop. Those concepts might include concepts that will become the topics of the following sentences, but they must include those concepts that make that particular .
section, subsection, or paragraph distinct from all other sections, subsections, and paragraphs in the document.
LESSON 9
Concision
Concision is labor-intensive. When deciding what to cut, we face the problem of knowing whether we are cutting substance rather than unnecessary words, which can be difficult to determine. But if we preserve nuances that readers do not perceive, I think we indulge ourselves at our readers’ expense. The tradeoff for me is always in favor of readers only the words they need and no more, regardless of how I feel. That does not mean that every sentence has to be ten words long and every word one syllable. A lean and sinewy style my candid preference can characterize sentences 50 words long, with most of those words Latinate and French. We must measure concision not by counting words but by the experience of the reader.
I have heard some argue that when we string out an idea through more words than, strictly speaking, we need, we help readers process ideas in a graduated way. That may be so, but I know of no research that supports such a claim.
SOME THINGS TO DO
1. Have students find a passage that seems moderate in tone. Then have them revise it twice, adding hedges to one, intensifiers to the other. Then have them exchange revisions to see if they can revise each other’s work back to the original.
2. Have students revise a concise passage into one that is wordier.
3. Have them revise old papers for problems, then bring the originals to class to exchange with others. Have them revise each other’s prose, then compare revisions.
LESSON 10
Shape
SOME PRINCIPLES OF SHAPE
Of all the aspects of clarity and grace, I am most puzzled over how best to describe the global “shape” of a flowing and reasonably graceful sentence. There are so many exceptions that any general claim about how to construct a graceful sentence can always be disconfirmed. Despite the counterexamples, there are some reliable principles:
1. Get to the subject quickly, then get quickly past the subject to the verb and its object. This means few long introductory clauses or phrases, few long subjects, and no interrupting elements between subject and verb or between verb and object.
2. Continue the sentence after the verb with either coordinations or running modifiers.
3. If you continue the sentence with a string of subordinate clauses, each subordinated to the one before, avoid stringing more than three in a row, and don’t string more than two in a row of the same kind.
Those same principles, I maintain, apply also to phrases:
New regulations have been set by the committee on standards for safety in the plant.
A clear style is necessary to encourage a reader to keep reading to understand a complex argument.
Both of those feel stringy; these are less so:
New regulations have been set by the committee on plant safety standards.
A clear style is necessary if you want a reader to keep reading in order to understand a complex argument.
Is it possible to write a long and graceful sentence that contradicts any one of these principles? Of course, especially when a sentence begins with an introductory adverbial clause such as “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary. . . .” Is it possible to find one that contradicts two of them? Probably. Is it possible to find one that contradicts both more than once? I’d like to see it.
TWO
POINTS ABOUT TEACHING
First, do not let students confuse mere sentence length with shapelessness. More importantly, do not let them confuse clarity with simplistic Dick-and-Jane prose. Long sentences with multiple subordinate clauses can be entirely clear, entirely readable, if those sentences meet all the other .
criteria we have been working on here. Sentences are shapeless and sprawling not when they are long, but when they run on with no internal structure.
Second, allow yourself the benefit of a technical vocabulary for discussing matters of style. In this lesson, I use two terms that appear in no standard grammars I know of: summative modifier and resumptive modifier. Those terms refer to syntactic patterns important in mature prose. Some readers of this book have objected to these terms because they are unfamiliar (teachers as well as students, if you can believe that). Though summative modifier falls into the general category of absolute constructions and resumptive modifiers are a species of appositives, we need those specific terms to distinguish these patterns. I am not inventing terms for their own sake: When we talk about style, we need words to refer to elements that we think are salient in describing how style works. Without words like nominalization, metadiscourse, topic, and stress, we would have to find circumlocutions for the same concepts.
SOME THINGS TO DO
1. Have students rewrite a passage consisting mostly of short sentences into one with longer sentences by combining the short sentences. Then have them rewrite a passage consisting mostly of long sentences into shorter ones. (See Lesson 10 for more on this.)
2. Have them go through old papers for problems you have covered. Have them revise, then bring the originals to class to exchange with other students. Have them revise each other’s prose, then compare revisions.
LESSON 11
Elegance
Nothing could be more foolish than to reduce elegance to mere rule. Nevertheless, some patterns so characterize mannered writing that students who aspire to more than mere clarity can profit from practicing them. The most common structural feature, of course, is balance and antithesis. Another is a sense of rhythm and cadence whose exact description has eluded me all my life. Then there is the judicious choice of words and, finally, a gift for metaphor.
SOME THINGS TO DO
1. I think the most productive exercise to develop a more elegant style is imitation. Find several longer elegant sentences, break them out schematically as I have done with the examples in this chapter, and have students write sentences of their own, following the structure of the example. It is useless, I think, simply to give students sentences and ask them to imitate those sentences. They often cannot see the structure they are supposed to imitate; it must be visibly laid out for them.
LESSON 12
The Ethics of Style
RESPONSIBILITY
The ethical issues in this lesson are who’s responsible for dense prose, and whether some prose is intrinsically difficult because its subject is. As for the first who’s responsible most students resist being style cops. But only readers can make writers pay more attention to their writing. I try to make it a matter of future responsibility. Students have read difficult writing; in fact, they have often been required to do so. If they don’t like it, then later in their lives, when they have the authority to judge the writing of others, they ought not shrink from the responsibility of judging and expressing their judgment. But with that responsibility goes the responsibility to know what they’re talking about. I find it useful to have students bring in passages that they had trouble reading, revise them, and then rehearse what they would say to the writer.
Most important, I have students practice explaining their responses from the perspective of the reader, rather than from that of the text or the writer. Not “You are unclear” or even “This paragraph is unclear,” but rather “I had a difficult time understanding this paragraph.” It can be turned into a game: Have someone respond to someone’s writing and have the rest of the group listen to how often the critic slips from “I didn’t see how this part connects to that part” into “This part seems disorganized” or “You didn’t explain how you saw this part connected to that part.”
NECESSARY DIFFICULTY
I have tried to make necessary difficulty a non-issue by laying down some assumptions early on that, if accepted, make the issue of necessary difficulty first a matter of individual cases and second, always open to question. We understand what we write better than our readers do, or at least we like to think so. That means or at least it has meant in my experience that I have never written a sentence that could not be made a little sharper, clearer, and more direct. If I were to write something and claim that what I have written is exactly what I want to say, without spending time trying to make it clearer, then I would judge myself to be a fool, unworthy of serious readers. And if I were to fail to take seriously the responses of readers who have said, “I have a problem reading this,” then I would consider myself not only a fool but a charlatan.
Now, some in effect reply, “I don’t care. I write to express myself exactly, and if it is hard to understand, so be it.” And I am inclined to answer, as I have, “OK by me. Have a good day.” And I turn to the next thing I have to read. What is problematic here is that some students don’t have the luxury of telling a writer to get lost. If I choose not to read what I think will offer me less than my time is worth, I pay the cost of having to understand what that writer said secondhand, a luxury not available to students required to read prose of the most difficult sort. Some of our well-known colleagues who know that fact exploit the discrepancy in power between them and their readers by indulging themselves at their readers’ expense.
SOME THINGS TO DO
1. Have students rewrite a passage from one of their textbooks or from a scholarly article. Then have them practice explaining to the imagined author why they have rewritten it as they have.
2. Discuss a passage of middle-level difficulty postmodern prose and discuss whether it has to be as difficult as it is.
APPENDIX I
Punctuation
The organization of this appendix will seem odd to those accustomed to teaching punctuation by marks: first periods, then commas, semicolons, and so on. But that has always seemed to me an odd way to teach the subject. Since questions about correct punctuation invariably arise in the context of use, it seems to me to make more sense if students think about those contexts: about ends, beginnings, and middles of sentences (in that order). Beyond that, there is not much new here, except perhaps a more liberal view of so-called “comma splices” and independent clauses joined by coordinating conjunctions alone. The exercises at the end are, again, intended to provide plausible alternatives. If you are looking for someone who punctuates quite freely, disregarding a good many so-called rules, but who is nevertheless considered to be a superb writer, I recommend the prose of the travel writer Jan Morris.
APPENDIX II
Using Sources
Here I have collected two kinds of advice on using sources: how to avoid the appearance of plagiarism and how to weave quotations into a text.
The section on plagiarism deliberately takes plagiarism as not something the writer does, but as what the reader thinks the writer is trying to do take credit for someone else’s work. This is, I think, in the spirit of a book based on how readers judge prose. The final test for plagiarism is this: could a reader read what you’ve written and recognize his or her ideas or words? If so, you’ve plagiarized. If a reader could read what you’ve written and remember having read it somewhere else, you’ve plagiarized. It’s not rocket science.
The section on quotations covers some mechanical requirements for quotations that students often do not know. It also offers advice on how to use quotations so that they contribute to the writer’s own argument, rather than stand as inert testimonials to the fact that the writer has done some required research.
4b. Verbs: claim, watch, tend, become, able, demonstrated, be. No nominalizations.
6a. Verbs: need, know, are being logged, can save Nominalizations: risk
6b. Verbs: is, provide. Nominalizations: need, analysis, use, projection
3.5
2. When the store increased its prices, it frustrated its customers.
4. Although editorial writers complain that voters are apathetic, they have not suggested how to dispel it.
6. We must analyze how students are using our libraries so that we can reliably project what new resources we need.
3.6
2. The president’s aides attempted to assert that he was immune from a Congressional subpoena.
4. When you analyzed my report, you did not offer data that would support your criticism of what I found.
6. The Pope appealed to the rich nations of the world to assist those threatened with starvation in Africa.
8. When the class agreed on the reading list, they assumed that they would be tested only on certain selections.
10. Fraternities understood that drinking on campus had to be controlled.
3.7
2. When we precisely plot the location of the building foundations, we will reconstruct it more accurately.
4. When a student is not socialized into a field, she may have writing problems because she may not understand how professionals in that field argue.
4.1
2. The student researchers worked hard to have professionals in the field take their research seriously.
4. Residents have increasingly resisted those who would build mental health facilities in residential areas because they believe that the few examples of improper management are typical.
6. The actors performed enthusiastically, but the play lacked intelligent staging.
8. Requiring students to trace transitions in a well-written article can help them write more coherently.
4.2
2. The viewer notices different planes of the painting because the artist has set colors against a background of subtle shades of gray, laid on in thin layers that cannot be seen unless the viewer examines the surface closely.
4. This nation will improve science education sufficiently to provide American industry with skilled workers and researchers only when taxpayers/state governments/the Federal Government [take your pick] provide more money to primary and secondary schools.
4.3
2. The model has been statistically analyzed.
4. We are considering whether to create a database, but have not yet estimated how useful it would be.
6. We intend this book to help readers understand not only how the grammars of Arabic and English differ but also how Arabic vocabulary reflects a different world view.
8. Tissue rejection was studied by methods developed when it was discovered that dermal sloughing increases when cells regenerate.
4.4
2. We wrote these directives as simply as possible to communicate effectively with employees who do not read well.
4. Many Victorian scientists and theologians argued against Darwinian evolution because it contradicted what they assumed about their place in the world. It defined humans not as divinely created but as a product of nature. .
4.5
As you probably have heard, over the last several weeks, some our students have been racially and sexually harassing other students. Even though students also harass other students on other campuses, we are offended when some of our students harass others here. In most of the 10 to 12 incidents here, students have written graffiti or verbally insulted someone. In only two cases did one of our students physically contact another, and in neither case did that student injure the other one. A commitment exists to providing an environment where life, work and study can take place without fear of racial, sexual, religious or ethnic taunting or harassment. It has been made clear that bigotry and intolerance will not be permitted and that a commitment to diversity is unequivocal. Steps are being taken to improve security in campus housing. There is pride here in a tradition of diversity. . . .
4.6
2. The goal of this article is to describe how readers comprehend text and produce protocols about recall.
4. This paper investigates how computers process information in games that simulate human cognition.
6. The Social Security program guarantees a potential package of benefits based on what individuals contribute to the program over their lifetimes.
5.1
2. To demonstrate Abco’s advantages versus competitors, our report will highlight various components of its current profitability, particularly growth in Asian markets. We will base our analysis on revenue returns along several dimensions: product type, end-use, distribution channels, distributor type, etc. We project that the growth of Abco’s newest product lines will most depend on its ability to develop distribution channels in China. Abco will have to develop a range of innovative strategies to support the introduction of new products.
5.2
2. In their natural states, most animals are not competent to create and communicate a new message to fit a new experience. They are able to communicate only a limited number and kind of messages because of their genetic code. Bees, for example, can communicate information only about distance, direction, source, and richness of pollen in flowers. In all significant respects, animals of the same species are able to communicate a limited repertoire of messages delivered in the same way, for generation after generation.
6.1
Your revisions may well differ from these, depending on what you think is most important in each sentence.
2. These studies may produce a new political philosophy that could affect our society well into the 21st century.
4. In recent years, those who have built suburban housing developments in flood plains in various parts of our country have clearly caused extensive and widespread flooding and economic disaster.
6. Economically speaking, however, it is now feasible for students to rent textbooks rather than buy them for required courses, whose textbooks do not go through yearly changes, such as mathematics, foreign languages, and English.
6.2
2. The apparent issue here is whether during contract bargaining, management has the duty to disclose the date it intends to close down its operation. The rationale for this duty to bargain in good faith is to minimize conflict. Though the case law on this matter is scanty, companies are obligated during bargaining to disclose major changes in an operation in order to allow the union to put forth proposals on behalf of its members.
9.1
2. Science needs accurate data if its theories are to plausibly predict the future.
4. Even though gun laws are heatedly debated, we must continue to discuss them.
6. The Insured must provide the Insurer with all relevant receipts, checks, or other evidence of costs that exceed $250.
8. Stop taking the medicine only after you are not dizzy and nauseous for six hours.
10. Cosmologists disagree on whether the universe is open or closed, a dispute that will continue until they compute its mass.
12. If we wish to be independent of imported oil, we must develop oil shale and coal as sources of fuel.
9.3
2. In this section, I argue that we must dispense with plea bargaining because it lets hardened criminals avoid punishment and encourages contempt for the judicial system.
4. We cannot assume that ground snakes in unmapped areas are larger than those in mapped areas.
10.1.
2 Young people will not be discouraged from smoking just because the film and TV industries agree not to show characters smoking.
4. When Congress funded the Interstate Highway System, it did not anticipate inflation, and so the system has run into financial problems.
6. “Reality” shows are the most popular shows on TV because they appeal to our voyeuristic impulses.
8. If carbon monoxide continues to be emitted, world climate will change.
10. We could prevent foreign piracy of videos and CDs if the justice systems of foreign countries moved cases faster through their courts and imposed stiffer penalties. But we cannot expect any immediate improvement in the level of expertise of judges who hear these cases.
12. The music industry has ignored the problem of how to apply a rating system to offensive lyrics broadcast over FM and AM radio. Until it does, stations are unlikely to improve their public image, even if they were willing to discuss such a system.
10.2
These are, of course, only suggested answers.
2. For the last few years, automobile manufacturers have been trying to meet more stringent mileage requirements, a challenge that has tested American ingenuity/requirements that Detroit has strenuously tried to change/hoping that new technologies will provide them with a breakthrough in engine design.
4. Most young people cannot grasp the insecurity that many people felt during the Great Depression, a failure that makes it impossible for them to share their grandparents’ experiences/an insecurity that shaped them for the rest of their lives/believing that the stories they hear from their grandparents are exaggerations.
6. In the Renaissance, greater influence and political stability allowed streams of thought to merge, streams that originated in ancient Greece, in the Middle East, and in Europe itself./ . . . a historical development that both undermined the dominance of religious authority over knowledge and laid the groundwork for everything that we know about the world./ . . . bringing together knowledge and modes of thought that resulted in a new vision of humankind’s potential.
2. While the strong are often afraid to admit weakness, the weak often fail to assert the strength they possess.
4. When parents raise children who do not value the importance of hard work, the adults those children become will not know how to work hard for what they claim to value. 11.2
2. The political campaign plan was concocted by those with the least sensitivity to our most critical needs.
4. Nothing has changed America more than the power of federal government.
