Miles 老师的给高级作家的提示

Miles 老师的给高级作家的提示：关于名词化、过渡、混合隐喻和先发制人的反对……让你的写作更上一层楼！

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Tips for Advanced Writers

So: you’re an English concentrator, and by now, with lots of essays behind you, you feel pretty confident in your writing skills—as you should! This is a good time to take stock of what your writing voice has become, both in terms of what makes your writing uniquely powerful and in terms of the more troublesome tics you might have picked up. Take this opportunity to discover your weaknesses and hone your skills.

The best way to do that is to subject your writing to others’ eyes—teachers, tutors, friends—but there are also tricks you can use on your own. Try re-reading old papers, once you have a bit of distance from the younger version of yourself who wrote them. Try reading new papers out loud, so you can experience the words and sentences in a new, unfamiliar way. Or try re-writing a paragraph from scratch to some new end, especially with an eye to greater concision and clarity. I can vouch for all of these methods personally: I was forced to do these exercises in my upperclassman years, and I was shocked by how much of a difference it made going forward.

As you move from writing close-reading and comparative essays to writing research scholarship, you may find that there are certain kinds of sentences and paragraphs—ones that synthesize critical voices with your own—that you’re not as confident with. If that’s the case, remember that you can use your critical sources in several ways. They can provide you with argumentative ideas, of course, but they can also model how to present those ideas. Figure out which critics you find clear and compelling, and practice writing like they do, from the smallest sentence structures to big essay sections. You don’t have to stick with any of these structures, but they can serve as your training ground.

Outside of these writing exercises, here are a few tips, tricks, and finer points of grammar for next-level writing that I’ve gathered over the years, in conversations with teachers, colleagues, and students. Many of these will already be familiar, but they’re good to recall. Some you may have quibbles with, and that’s fine: writing rules are meant to be broken (occasionally). But in any case, if you’re trying out any of the exercises above—reading aloud, re-writing, imitating a critic, etc.—these are the kinds of details to notice, for fixing syntax or improving clarity.

At the sentence level

• Don’t nominalize, if you can help it.

  • A “nominalization” is a noun that has been adapted out of a verb or adjective, by adding a suffix like -ment, -ance, -tion, -ity or -ing. These are words like “intention” (instead of “intend”) or “fluidity” (instead of “fluid”).

  • Sometimes, when the noun version of the concept is familiar enough, a nominalization is fine: for example, you might sometimes need to use the word “argument” rather than “argue.” But much of the time, going back to the root word is the more powerful choice. “Don’t nominalize,” for instance, is a stronger statement than “Avoid nominalization.”

  • When a nominalization is used as the subject of a sentence, it has a deleterious snowball effect, often forcing you to use “of” and “is” as filler words. This is because nominalizations are abstract concepts and not concrete agents. Compare “The intention of [A] is to do [XYZ]…” vs. “[A] intends [XYZ].” In this situation, try to restore the root word and change the grammar of the sentence accordingly.

  • Another solution, particularly for adjective-based nominalizations, is to find a different word whose root form is already a noun: e.g. “joy” instead of “happiness.” This doesn’t solve the problem of abstraction, but it will still look and sound better.

  • Gerunds are perhaps the worst offenders, as nominalization subjects. Try not to start sentences with a verb + ing.

• Make sure your subjects are agents.

  • Most of the time, the subject of a sentence should be a person/thing capable of performing an action. (This is why nominalizations make for bad subjects.)

  • For example, here’s an awkward sentence by Joseph Frank: “The conception of esthetic form inherited by the eighteenth century from the Renaissance was a purely external one.” A clearer version would be: “Writers in the eighteenth century inherited their conception of esthetic form from the Renaissance.”

  • This can be a hard rule to follow in English essays without leaning hard on authorial intention, but… it’s okay to ascribe some authorial intention. Sometimes you can tie yourself in grammatical knots just trying to avoid it, and that’s worse. For my money, it’s better to just use the author as your subject than to try to hide him/her behind an abstract subject or passive voice.

• Relatedly: use active verbs.

  • See notes “Conjugations of ‘to be’” and passive voice below.

• Keep your parallel structures parallel.

  • When you have a sentence with multiple branching parts—“both [X] and [Y];” “not only [X] but also [Y] and [Z]”; a list of clauses; etc.

  • make sure you start each branch with the same part of speech.

• Don’t use a longer word just to use a longer word.

  • Use the word that most precisely connotes what you’re trying to say, even if that’s a simple, short word. Often, it is the shorter word.

  • I’ll mention a personal pet peeve as an example: use “social” rather than “societal.”

At the paragraph level

• Start strong and end strong.

  • Even the most considerate reader will sometimes skim over parts of a long paragraph, but any reader will pay attention to the first sentence and the last sentence. Make these sentences count: express clearly what the paragraph is about at the beginning (even if you don’t have an explicitly argumentative “topic sentence”) and arrive somewhere new at the end.

  • This advice is good to keep in mind for smaller and bigger essay-units too, like sentences and sub-sections. The last word in a sentence, or the opening statement in a whole sub-section, will resound with your reader, so craft these carefully.

• String together sentences in chains.

  • Think about starting each new sentence by linking it to the idea or word that ends the previous sentence. This will help you build upon your previous claims to reach new arguments, and it will help the reader follow along.

  • Naturally, this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule: often, the most interesting move in a paragraph may be to change directions. But even then, linking the sentences together semantically by using the same terms will keep your reader in tow.

• Notice sentence-structures that you repeat often, and think of other ways to express your ideas.

• For example, one of mine is: “[A] is not only [X], but [Y].” Do I really need to present each [Y] in opposition to an [X]? It’s not a bad sentence-structure, but it’ll be more effective if I use it sparingly.

• Precision and Concision: run your writing through the “Writer’s Diet”

  • http://writersdiet.com/test.php

  • This website will let you plug in some of your prose to analyze how your writing can be more precise and concise, by checking for nominalizations, “to be” verbs, possible superfluous adjectives, and filler words. It’s just a machine, so it’s not perfect, but it’s a helpful diagnostic tool.

• Don’t mix metaphors.

  • As in creative writing, if you are illustrating an idea by way of a metaphor, keep that metaphor consistent until you’re done with the idea.

• Keep in mind that certain common expressions and idioms are themselves metaphorical (e.g. “down the road,” “boiled down,” “harping on”). Try not to mix these metaphors either.

• Avoid the whiplash that comes from using “but,” “yet,” and “however” multiple times in quick succession.

  • Each of these terms suggests a turn of 180 degrees, so having a few in the same paragraph is like having a double-negative in a sentence. The reader will be confused about which direction you’re going.
  • If you’re entertaining two opposite positions, keep clear which one is the ultimate resolution. “To be sure… [A], but in fact… [B].” or “While… [A], actually [B].”

At the essay level

• Don’t waste time with vague statements or general background in introductions and conclusions. Get right into the topic and stay specific.

• Treat conclusions as an opportunity, rather than a chore.
  • Some writers treat conclusions as an obligation to re-state the thesis and sum up the claims of the paper. By the end of the paper, though, these arguments and claims should (ideally) be pretty clear. So use the conclusion, instead, to suggest a new area of inquiry or to speculate about a more tenuous argument that follows from the paper. Think of it, perhaps, as a pitch for what the next chapter of a bigger project would be.
• Use reverse outlines when revising
  • Try copy-pasting the first sentence of each of your paragraphs into a new document. You should be able to roughly follow the arc of your argument in this skeletal structure. Make sure your claims build on each other and don’t repeat themselves. Look for places where you digress or go in the wrong direction.
• Consider using tables, lists, diagrams, drawings, or images to illustrate points inside the essay
  • Don’t go too crazy with this! Still, it’s often constructive (and fun) to try representing your ideas in different formats, especially when you’re dealing with complex categories, dynamic relationships, long lists, or other media. Creative visualizations representing evidence have been a part of literary studies for a long time, and they are becoming even more popular now.

Old lessons that still hold up

• Conjugations of “to be” (is, was, are, were…), when used as the main verb in a sentence, tend to be boring. Try not to overuse them. They can be rhetorically effective when used sparingly, particularly when you actually want to draw a surprising equivalence between two things.

• Continue to be wary of passive voice.

  • You don’t need to avoid it with the zeal of a high-school English teacher, but you do need to consider why you’re using it. Just make sure you aren’t putting a sentence in passive voice to obscure the active subject of your claim: that means you’re not sure who’s doing the action.

• Anticipate objections to your argument.

  • The best essays are those that either pre-empt counter-arguments by out-arguing them or find a way to turn possible objections into additional evidence for the thesis. You don’t need to address possible objections in each body paragraph, but your essay should have an answer for at least a few big counter-arguments that might be raised against your thesis as a whole.