Library Journal 说，在这本书里，你可以看到“A love and respect for the language is evident on every page.”
读 这本书的时候，我随时都把William Zinsser这个小老头恪守的标准和我写好的personal statement交叉对比，每每不禁面红耳赤，内牛满面。咱申请的是新闻专业，未来这两年好歹也得写出几箩筐的英文。但是按照现在的水准，我每一行每一 段都可以被轰至渣。不过庆幸我手头有这本书，还一口气把它看完了。作者对Cliché和Clutter由衷且无时无刻地表达鄙视之情，以至于我现在看到这 俩词就虎躯一震。
这本书适合谁看？如果你想提高自己英文写作的水准，特别是挖掘自己的风格； 如果你即将去米国读研究生，未来两年经常要面对一茬一茬的各种paper; 如果你以后是一个英文写作从业者，经常要写news release & report. 这本书就是你的圣经。作者对写作标准的严苛和尊敬，作者的智慧和幽默感让我随时流着哈喇子拿出各种颜色的笔圈点勾画。这种经典看一遍是绝对不够的，我认为 有些句子是完全可以打印出来，贴在自己的写作台上，时时鞭策警示自己。这样才能多写出一些人类看得懂的句子，少留下一些Cliché和Clutter，让 自己看到脸红。
以下的笔记摘选自本书第一章Principles和第二章Methods. 这两章的篇幅只占全书的三分之一,但信息量非常之大，看完你就知道了。
摘选的内容包括：
- Simplicity & Clutter 怎样把文章写的简洁
- Style 风格只有把“人”写出来，才会有自己的风格
- The audience 你的文章为谁而写
- Words 措辞怎样的用词会把你的文章搞坏，什么又是好的措辞
- Unity 整体性如何写出牛逼的开头和结尾，怎么寻找素材
- Bits & Pieces 动词，副词，形容词，缩写，that/which等等用法
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1. Simplicity & Clutter
怎么样把文章写简洁？
Zinsser痛恨兜圈子，任何模棱两可的措辞，表意不明的句子在他看来都是灾难。他对简洁如此执着，以至于Zinsser这个名字成了文风简洁的代名词。美国有些老师会让学生Zinsser一下他们的文章，Zinsser成了一个清除文中clutter的动词。
什么是所谓的clutter呢？ 放到中文语境里，遍地都是，比如说“有关部门”,比如说“某某领导高度重视.” 比如说胡版2011年新年贺词的全部。
美版：
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind. New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech. Consider what President Nixon's aide John Dean accomplished in just one day of testimony on television during the Watergate hearings. The next day everyone in America was saying "at this point in time" instead of "now."
Take the adjective “personal,” as in “a personal friend of mine,” “his personal feeling.” It’s typical of hundreds of words that can be eliminated. The personal friend has come into the language to distinguish him or her from the business friend, thereby debasing both language and friendship. Someone’s feeling is that person’s personal feeling—that’s what “his” means. Friends are friends, the rest is clutter.
Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, garbage collectors into waste disposal personnel and the town dump into the volume reduction unit.
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes. When General Motors had a plant shutdown, that was a “volume-related production-schedule adjustment.” When an Air Force missile crashed, it “impacted with the ground prematurely.” Companies that go belly-up have “a negative cash-flow position.”
“Experiencing” is one of the worst clutters. Instead of “it is raining”, there is no way to say “At the present time we are experiencing precipitation.” Even your dentist will ask if you are experiencing any pain. If he had his own kid in the chair he would say,” Does it hurt?”
The point of raising these examples is to serve notice that clutter is the enemy. Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance"(help), "numerous" (many), "facilitate" (ease), "individual"(man or woman), "remainder" (rest), "initial" (first), "implement"(do), "sufficient" (enough), "attempt" (try), "referred to as"(called) and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write.
How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other. It'simpossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. He may get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will be lost, and there's no sin so grave, for the reader will not easily be lured back.
作者的一个tip,“括号剔除法”.经我的PS测试,发现非常好用。
Is there any way to recognize clutter at a glance? Here's a device my students at Yale found helpful. I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn't doing useful work. Often just one word got bracketed: the unnecessary preposition appended to a verb ("order up"), or the adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb ("smile happily"), or the adjective that states a known fact ("tall skyscraper"). Often my brackets surrounded the little qualifiers that weaken any sentence they inhabit ("a bit," "sort of), or phrases like "in a sense," which don't mean anything. Sometimes my brackets surrounded an entire sentence—the one that essentially repeats what the previous sentence said, or that says something readers don't need to know or can figure out for themselves. Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the authors voice.
My reason for bracketing the students' superfluous words, instead of crossing them out, was to avoid violating their sacred prose. I wanted to leave the sentence intact for them to analyze. I was saying, "I may be wrong, but I think this can be deleted and the meaning won't be affected. But you decide. Read the sentence without the bracketed material and see if it works." In the early weeks of the term I handed back papers that were festooned with brackets. Entire paragraphs were bracketed. But soon the students learned to put mental brackets around their own clutter, and by the end of the term their papers were almost clean. Today many of those students are professional writers, and they tell me, "I still see your brackets—they're following me through life."
You can develop the same eye. Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?
Simplify, simplify.
2. Style
以下对写PS挠头的同学颇为有用
Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style and how it obstructs what they are trying to say. If you give me an eight-page article and I tell you to cut it to four pages, you'll howl and say it can't be done. Then you'll go home and do it, and it will be much better. After that comes the hard part: cutting it to three.
The point is that you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up. You must know what the essential tools are and what job they were designed to do. Extending the metaphor of carpentry, it's first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly and to drive nails. Later you can bevel the edges or add elegant finials, if that's your taste. But you can never forget that you are practicing a craft that's based on certain principles. If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
为什么必须要有自己的风格
I'll admit that certain nonfiction writers, like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, have built some remarkable houses. But these are writers who spent years learning their craft, and when at last they raised their fanciful turrets and hanging gardens, to the surprise of all of us who never dreamed of such ornamentation, they knew what they were doing. Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
First, then, learn to hammer the nails, and if what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength. But you will be impatient to find a "style"—to embellish the plain words so that readers will recognize you as someone special. You will reach for gaudy similes and tinseled adjectives, as if "style" were something you could buy at the style store and drape onto your words in bright decorator colors. (Decorator colors are the colors that decorators come in.) There is no style store; style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it. Trying to add style is like adding a toupee. At first glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second glance—and with a toupee there's always a second glance—he doesn't look quite right. The problem is not that he doesn't look well groomed; he does, and we can only admire the wigmaker's skill. The point is that he doesn't look like himself. This is the problem of writers who set out deliberately to garnish their prose. You lose whatever it is that makes you unique. The reader will notice if you are putting on airs. Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.
怎样写文章才会有自己的style？----把自己放进去，找到那个“人”
Assume that you are the writer sitting down to write. You think your article must be of a certain length or it won't seem important. You think how august it will look in print. You think of all the people who will read it. You think that it must have the solid weight of authority. You think that its style must dazzle. No wonder you tighten; you are so busy thinking of your awesome responsibility to the finished article that you can't even start. Yet you vow to be worthy of the task, and, casting about for grand phrases that wouldn't occur to you if you weren't trying so hard to make an impression, you plunge in. Paragraph 1 is a disaster—a tissue of generalities that seem to have come out of a machine. No person could have written them. Paragraph 2 isn't much better. But Paragraph 3 begins to have a somewhat human quality, and by Paragraph 4 you begin to sound like yourself. You've started to relax. It s amazing how often an editor can throw away the first three or four paragraphs of an article, or even the first few pages, and start with the paragraph where the writer begins to sound like himself or herself. Not only are those first paragraphs impersonal and ornate; they don't say anything—they are a self-conscious attempt at a fancy introduction. What I'm always looking for as an editor is a sentence that says something like "I'll never forget the day when I . . . "
I think, "Aha! A person!"
3. The audience
写作悦己
"Who am I writing for?
It s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Don't try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person. Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new.
Don't worry about whether the reader will "get it" if you indulge a sudden impulse for humor. If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in. (It can always be taken out, but only you can put it in.) You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, you don't want them anyway.
如果你平时说话不是文邹邹的，那写东西的时候也不要尽是之乎者也。
Whatever your age, be yourself when you write. Many old men still write with the zest they had in their twenties or thirties; obviously their ideas are still young. Other old writers ramble and repeat themselves; their style is the tip-off that they have turned into garrulous bores. Many college students write as if they were desiccated alumni 30 years out. Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. If you're not a person who says "indeed" or "moreover," or who calls someone an individual ("he's a fine individual"), please don't write it.
4. Words 措辞
日常写作避免新闻笔调(journalese)
What is "journalese"? It's a quilt of instant words patched together out of other parts of speech. Adjectives are used as nouns ("greats," "notables"). Nouns are used as verbs ("to host"), or they are chopped off to form verbs ("enthuse," "emote"), or they are padded to form verbs ("beef up," "put teeth into"). This is a world where eminent people are "famed" and their associates are "staffers," where the future is always "upcoming" and someone is forever "firing off" a note. Nobody in America has sent a note or a memo or a telegram in years. Famed diplomat Henry Kissinger, who hosted foreign notables to beef up the morale of top State Department staffers, sat down and fired off a lot of notes. Notes that are fired off are always fired in anger and from a sitting position.（囧） What the weapon is I've never found out.
案例：作者眼里失败界的翘楚
Here's an article from a famed newsmagazine that is hard to match for fatigue:
Last February, Plainclothes Patrolman Frank Serpico knocked at the door of a suspected Brooklyn heroin pusher. When the door opened a crack, Serpico shouldered his way in only to be met by a .22-cal. pistol slug crashing into his face. Somehow he survived, although there are still buzzing fragments in his head, causing dizziness and permanent deafness in his left ear. Almost as painful is the suspicion that he may well have been set up for the shooting by other policemen. For Serpico, 35, has been waging a lonely, four-year war against the routine and endemic corruption that he and others claim is rife in the New York City police department. His efforts are now sending shock waves through the ranks of New York's finest.. . . Though the impact of the commissions upcoming report has yet to be felt, Serpico has little hope that. . .
为什么这篇文章的用词很纱布？
The upcoming report has yet to be felt because it's still upcoming, and as for the permanent deafness, it's a little early to tell. And what makes those buzzing fragments buzz? By now only Serpico's head should be buzzing. But apart from these lazinesses of logic, what makes the story so tired is the failure of the writer to reach for anything but the nearest cliché. "Shouldered his way," "only to be met," "crashing into his face," "waging a lonely war," "corruption that is rife," "sending shock waves," "New York's finest"—these dreary phrases constitute writing at its most banal. We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual word, an oblique look. We are in the hands of a hack, and we know it right away. We stop reading.
要写好文章，首先学会模仿。但能印在报纸杂志上的不一定就牛逼到哪去了.要选好对象。
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written by earlier masters. Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it. But cultivate the best models. Don't assume that because an article is in a newspaper or a magazine it must be good. Sloppy editing is common in newspapers, often for lack of time, and writers who use clichés often work for editors who have seen so many clichés that they no longer even recognize them.
用字典, 考过GRE的同学表示对以下引用的单词毫无压力。
Also get in the habit of using dictionaries. My favorite for handy use is Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, although, like all word freaks, I own bigger dictionaries that will reward me when I'm on some more specialized search. If you have any doubt of what a word means, look it up. Learn its etymology and notice what curious branches its original root has put forth. See if it has any meanings you didn't know it had. Master the small gradations between words that seem to be synonyms. What's the difference between "cajole," "wheedle," "blandish" and "coax"? Get yourself a dictionary of synonyms.
用Thesaurus，这玩意儿是GRE Verbal的大杀器
And don't scorn that bulging grab bag Roget's Thesaurus. It's easy to regard the book as hilarious. Look up "villain," for instance, and you'll be awash in such rascality as only a lexicographer could conjure back from centuries of iniquity, obliquity, depravity, knavery, profligacy, frailty, flagrancy, infamy, immorality, corruption, wickedness, wrongdoing, backsliding and sin. You'll find ruffians and riffraff, miscreants and malefactors, reprobates and rapscallions, hooligans and hoodlums, scamps and scapegraces, scoundrels and scalawags, Jezebels and jades. You'll find adjectives to fit them all (foul and fiendish, devilish and diabolical), and adverbs and verbs to describe how the wrongdoers do their wrong, and cross-references leading to still other thickets of venality and vice. Still, there's no better friend to have around to nudge the memory than Roget. It saves you the time of rummaging in your brain—that network of overloaded grooves—to find the word that's right on the tip of your tongue, where it doesn't do you any good. The Thesaurus is to the writer what a rhyming dictionary is to the songwriter—a reminder of all the choices—and you should use it with gratitude. If, having found the scalawag and the scapegrace, you want to know how they differ, then go to the dictionary.
一定要看the Elements of Style这本神作
E. B. White makes the case cogently in The Elements of Style, a book every writer should read once a year, when he suggests trying to rearrange any phrase that has survived for a century or two, such as Thomas Paine s "These are the times that try men's souls":
Times like these try men's souls.
How trying it is to live in these times!
These are trying times for men's souls.
Soulwise, these are trying times.
Paine s phrase is like poetry and the other four are like oatmeal— which is the divine mystery of the creative process. Good writers of prose must be part poet, always listening to what they write. E. B. White is one of my favorite stylists because I'm conscious of being with a man who cares about the cadences and sonorities of the language. I relish (in my ear) the pattern his words make as they fall into a sentence. I try to surmise how in rewriting the sentence he reassembled it to end with a phrase that will momentarily linger, or how he chose one word over another because he was after a certain emotional weight. It's the difference between, say, "serene" and "tranquil"—one so soft, the other strangely disturbing because of the unusual n and q.
好文章悦耳，因为有韵律感。
Such considerations of sound and rhythm should be woven through everything you write. If all your sentences move at the same plodding gait, which even you recognize as deadly but don't know how to cure, read them aloud. (I write entirely by ear and read everything aloud before letting it go out into the world.) You'll begin to hear where the trouble lies. See if you can gain variety by reversing the order of a sentence, or by substituting a word that has freshness or oddity, or by altering the length of your sentences so they don't all sound as if they came out of the same mold. An occasional short sentence can carry a tremendous punch. It stays in the reader's ear.
Remember that words are the only tools you've got. Learn to use them with originality and care. And also remember: somebody out there is listening.
5. Unity
一篇文章什么都写了就等于什么都没写。好的文章一定要有自己非常清晰的point.一个牛逼哄哄的point足够亮瞎双眼.
Nobody can write a book or an article "about" something. Tolstoy couldn't write a book about war and peace, or Melville a book about whaling. They made certain reductive decisions about time and place and about individual characters in that time and place— one man pursuing one whale. Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write.
Therefore think small. Decide what corner of your subject you're going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop. Often you'll find that along the way you've managed to say almost everything you wanted to say about the entire subject. This is also a matter of energy and morale. An unwieldy writing task is a drain on your enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the force that keeps you going and keeps the reader in your grip. When your zest begins to ebb, the reader is the first person to know it.
As for what point you want to make, every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five—just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader s mind. It will not only give you a better idea of what route you should follow and what destination you hope to reach; it will affect your decision about tone and attitude. Some points are best made by earnestness, some by dry understatement, some by humor.
The Lead and the Ending 开头和结尾
什么是好的开头
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead. Of such a progression of sentences, each tugging the reader forward until he is hooked, a writer constructs that fateful unit, the "lead."
How long should the lead be? One or two paragraphs? Four or five? There's no pat answer. Some leads hook the reader with just a few well-baited sentences; others amble on for several pages, exerting a slow but steady pull. Every article poses a different problem, and the only valid test is: does it work? Your lead may not be the best of all possible leads, but if it does the job it's supposed to do, be thankful and proceed. Sometimes the length may depend on the audience you're writing for. Readers of a literary review expect its writers to start somewhat discursively, and they will stick with those writers for the pleasure of wondering where they will emerge as they move in leisurely circles toward the eventual point. But I urge you not to count on the reader to stick around. Readers want to know— very soon—what's in it for them.
Therefore your lead must capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading. It must cajole him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humor, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question. Anything will do, as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve.
Next the lead must do some real work. It must provide hard details that tell the reader why the piece was written and why he ought to read it. But don't dwell on the reason. Coax the reader a little more; keep him inquisitive.
Continue to build. Every paragraph should amplify the one that preceded it. Give more thought to adding solid detail and less to entertaining the reader. But take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph—it's the crucial springboard to the next paragraph. Try to give that sentence an extra twist of humor or surprise, like the periodic "snapper" in the routine of a standup comic. Make the reader smile and you've got him for at least one more paragraph.
什么是坏的开头
Speaking of everybody else's lead, there are many categories I'd be glad never to see again. One is the future archaeologist: "When some future archaeologist stumbles on the remains of our civilization, what will he make of the jukebox?" I'm tired of him already and he's not even here. I'm also tired of the visitor from Mars: "If a creature from Mars landed on our planet he would be amazed to see hordes of scantily clad earthlings lying on the sand barbecuing their skins." I'm tired of the cute event that just happened to happen "one day not long ago" or on a conveniently recent Saturday afternoon: "One day not long ago a small button-nosed boy was walking with his dog, Terry, in a field outside Paramus, N.J., when he saw something that looked strangely like a balloon rising out of the ground." And I'm very tired of the have-in-common lead: "What did Joseph Stalin, Douglas MacArthur, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sherwood Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges and Akira Kurosawa have in common? They all loved Westerns." Let's retire the future archaeologist and the man from Mars and the button-nosed boy. Try to give your lead a freshness of perception or detail.
在生活中寻找素材
One moral is that you should always collect more material than you will use. Every article is strong in proportion to the surplus of details from which you can choose the few that will serve you best—if you don't go on gathering facts forever. At some point you must stop researching and start writing.
Another moral is to look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people. Look at signs and at billboards and at all the junk written along the American roadside. Read the labels on our packages and the instructions on our toys, the claims on our medicines and the graffiti on our walls. Read the fillers, so rich in self-esteem, that come spilling out of your monthly statement from the electric company and the telephone company and the bank. Read menus and catalogues and second-class mail. Nose about in obscure crannies of the newspaper, like the Sunday real estate section—you can tell the temper of a society by what patio accessories it wants. Our daily landscape is thick with absurd messages and portents. Notice them. They not only have social significance; they are often just quirky enough to make a lead that's different from everybody else's.
结尾要有惊喜，这就像一根诱人口水的大骨头，首先它要有嚼头，然后它得告诉读者，这是最后一根了。
The positive reason for ending well is that a good last sentence—or last paragraph—is a joy in itself. It gives the reader a lift, and it lingers when the article is over. The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right. They didn't expect the article to end so soon, or so abruptly, or to say what it said. But they know it when they see it. Like a good lead, it works. It's like the curtain line in a theatrical comedy. We are in the middle of a scene (we think), when suddenly one of the actors says something funny, or outrageous, or epigrammatic, and the lights go out. We are startled to find the scene over, and then delighted by the aptness of how it ended. What delights us is the playwrights perfect control.
For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
Something I often do in my own work is to bring the story full circle—to strike at the end an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning. It gratifies my sense of symmetry, and it also pleases the reader, completing with its resonance the journey we set out on together.
But what usually works best is a quotation. Go back through your notes to find some remark that has a sense of finality, or that's funny, or that adds an unexpected closing detail. Sometimes it will jump out at you during the interview—I've often thought, "That's my ending!"—or during the process of writing.
In the mid-1960s, when Woody Allen was just becoming established as Americas resident neurotic, doing nightclub monologues, I wrote the first long magazine piece that took note of his arrival. It ended like this:
"If people come away relating to me as a person," Allen says, "rather than just enjoying my jokes; if they come away wanting to hear me again, no matter what I might talk about, then I'm succeeding." Judging by the returns, he is. Woody Allen is Mr. Related-To, and he seems a good bet to hold the franchise for many years.
Yet he does have a problem all his own, unshared by, unrelated to, the rest of America. "I'm obsessed," he says, "by the fact that my mother genuinely resembles Groucho Marx."
There's a remark from so far out in left field that nobody could see it coming. The surprise it carries is tremendous. How could it not be a perfect ending? Surprise is one of the most refreshing elements in nonfiction writing. If something surprises you it will also surprise—and delight—the people you are writing for, especially as you conclude your story and send them on their way.
6. Bits & Pieces 细节才是王道
This is a chapter of scraps and morsels—small admonitions on many points that I have collected under one, as they say, umbrella.
VERBS.
不到万不得已，不要用被动动词
Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around using a passive verb. The difference between an active verb style and a passive-verb style—in clarity and vigor—is the
difference between life and death for a writer.
"Joe saw him" is strong. "He was seen by Joe" is weak. The first is short and precise; it leaves no doubt about who did what. The second is necessarily longer and it has an insipid quality: something was done by somebody to someone else. It’s also ambiguous. How often was he seen by Joe? Once? Every day? Once a week? A style that consists of passive constructions will sap the readers energy. Nobody ever quite knows what is being perpetrated by whom and on whom.
用词要精确
Verbs are the most important of all your tools. They push the sentence forward and give it momentum. Active verbs push hard; passive verbs tug fitfully. Active verbs also enable us to visualize an activity because they require a pronoun ("he"), or a noun ("the boy"), or a person ("Mrs. Scott") to put them in motion. Many verbs also carry in their imagery or in their sound a suggestion of what they mean: glitter, dazzle, twirl, beguile, scatter, swagger, poke, pamper, vex. Probably no other language has such a vast supply of verbs so bright with color. Don't choose one that is dull or merely serviceable. Make active verbs activate your sentences, and try to avoid the kind that need an appended preposition to complete their work. Don't set up a business that you can start or launch. Don't say that the president of the company stepped down. Did he resign? Did he retire? Did he get fired? Be precise. Use precise verbs.
If you want to see how active verbs give vitality to the written word, don't just go back to Hemingway or Thurber or Thoreau. I commend the King James Bible and William Shakespeare.
ADVERBS
大多数副词是可以被省略的
Most adverbs are unnecessary. You will clutter your sentence and annoy the reader if you choose a verb that has a specific meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning. Don't tell us that the radio blared loudly; "blare" connotes loudness. Don't write that someone clenched his teeth tightly; there's no other way to clench teeth. Again and again in careless writing, strong verbs are weakened by redundant adverbs. So are adjectives and other parts of speech: "effortlessly easy," "slightly spartan," "totally flabbergasted." The beauty of "flabbergasted" is that it implies an astonishment that is total; I can't picture someone being partly flabbergasted. If an action is so easy as to be effortless, use "effortless." And what is "slightly spartan"? Perhaps a monk's cell with wall-to-wall carpeting. Don't use adverbs unless they do necessary work. Spare us the news that the winning athlete grinned widely.
ADJECTIVES
大多数形容词也是可以被省略的
Most adjectives are also unnecessary. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don't stop to think that the concept is already in the noun. This kind of prose is littered with precipitous cliffs and lacy spiderwebs, or with adjectives denoting the color of an object whose color is well known: yellow daffodils and brownish dirt. If you want to make a value judgment about daffodils, choose an adjective like "garish." If you're in a part of the country where the dirt is red, feel free to mention the red dirt. Those adjectives would do a job that the noun alone wouldn't be doing.
Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit—a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled. The adjective that exists solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.
Again, the rule is simple: make your adjectives do work that needs to be done. "He looked at the gray sky and the black clouds and decided to sail back to the harbor." The darkness of the sky and the clouds is the reason for the decision. If it's important to tell the reader that a house was drab or a girl was beautiful, by all means use "drab" and "beautiful." They will have their proper power because you have learned to use adjectives sparsely.
LITTLE QUALIFIERS.
删掉那些让你的文章看上去不靠谱的口水词
Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: "a bit," "a little," "sort of," "kind of," "rather," "quite," "very," "too," "pretty much," "in a sense" and dozens more. They dilute your style and your persuasiveness.
Don't say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be tired. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
Don't say you weren't too happy because the hotel was pretty expensive. Say you weren't happy because the hotel was expensive. Don't tell us you were quite fortunate. How fortunate is that? Don't describe an event as rather spectacular or very awesome. Words like "spectacular" and "awesome" don't submit to measurement. "Very" is a useful word to achieve emphasis, but far more often it's clutter. There's no need to call someone very methodical. Either he is methodical or he isn't.
The larger point is one of authority. Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
The Dash 破折号的用法
The dash is used in two ways. One is to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you stated in the first part. "We decided to keep going—it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner."By its very shape the dash pushes the sentence ahead and explains why they decided to keep going. The other use involves two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence. "She told me to get in the car—she had been after me all summer to have a haircut—and we drove silently into town." An explanatory detail that might otherwise have required a separate sentence is dispatched along the way.
MOOD CHANGERS
谁说but不能用来开头了？
Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with "but." If that's what you learned, unlearn it—there's no stronger word at the start. It announces total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change. If you need relief from too many sentences beginning with "but," switch to "however." It is, however, a weaker word and needs careful placement. Don't start a sentence with "however"—it hangs there like a wet dishrag. And don't end with "however"—by that time it has lost its howeverness. Put it as early as you reasonably can, as I did three sentences ago. Its abruptness then becomes a virtue.
CONTRACTIONS.
用I’ll 会比I will显得更有爱
Your style will be warmer and truer to your personality if you use contractions like "I'll" and "won't" and "can't" when they fit comfortably into what you're writing. "I'll be glad to see them if they don't get mad" is less stiff than "I will be glad to see them if they do not get mad." (Read that aloud and hear how stilted it sounds.) There's no rule against such informality—trust your ear and your instincts. I only suggest avoiding one form—"I'd," "he'd," "we'd," etc.—because "I'd" can mean both "I had" and "I would," and readers can get well into a sentence before learning which meaning it is. Often it's not the one they thought it was. Also, don't invent contractions, like "could've." They cheapen your style. Stick with the ones you can find in the dictionary.
THAT AND WHICH.
能用that 就不要用which
Anyone who tries to explain "that" and "which" in less than an hour is asking for trouble. Fowler, in his Modern English Usage, takes 25 columns of type. I'm going for two minutes, perhaps the world record. Here (I hope) is much of what you need to bear in mind:
Always use "that" unless it makes your meaning ambiguous. Notice that in carefully edited magazines, such as The NewYorker, "that" is by far the predominant usage. I mention this because it is still widely believed—a residue from school and college—that "which" is more correct, more acceptable, more literary. It's not. In most situations, "that" is what you would naturally say and therefore what you should write.
If your sentence needs a comma to achieve its precise meaning, it probably needs "which." "Which" serves a particular identifying function, different from "that." (A) "Take the shoes that are in the closet." This means: take the shoes that are in the closet, not the ones under the bed. (B) "Take the shoes, which are in the closet." Only one pair of shoes is under discussion; the "which" usage tells you where they are. Note that the comma is necessary in B, but not in A.
A high proportion of "which" usages narrowly describe, or identify, or locate, or explain, or otherwise qualify the phrase that preceded the comma:
The house, which has a red roof,
The store, which is called Bob s Hardware,
The Rhine, which is in Germany,
The monsoon, which is a seasonal wind,
The moon, which I saw from the porch,
That's all I'm going to say that I think you initially need to know to write good nonfiction, which is a form that requires exact marshaling of information.
CONCEPT NOUNS.
尽量少用抽象的概念词，因为里头没有“人”
Nouns that express a concept are commonly used in bad writing instead of verbs that tell what somebody did. Here are three typical dead sentences:
The common reaction is incredulous laughter.
Bemused cynicism isn't the only response to the old system.
The current campus hostility is a symptom of the change.
What is so eerie about these sentences is that they have no people in them. They also have no working verbs—only "is" or "isn't." The reader can't visualize anybody performing some activity; all the meaning lies in impersonal nouns that embody a vague concept: "reaction," "cynicism," "response," "hostility." Turn these cold sentences around. Get people doing things:
Most people just laugh with disbelief.
Some people respond to the old system by turning cynical; others say. . .
It’s easy to notice the change—you can see how angry all the students are.
My revised sentences aren't jumping with vigor, partly because the material I'm trying to knead into shape is shapeless dough. But at least they have real people and real verbs. Don't get caught holding a bag full of abstract nouns. You'll sink to the bottom of the lake and never be seen again.
CREEPING NOUNISM.
用人类的语言交流
This is a new American disease that strings two or three nouns together where one noun—or, better yet, one verb—will do. Nobody goes broke now; we have money problem areas. It no longer rains; we have precipitation activity or a thunderstorm probability situation. Please, let it rain.
Today as many as four or five concept nouns will attach themselves to each other, like a molecule chain. Here's a brilliant specimen I recently found: "Communication facilitation skills development intervention." Not a person in sight, or a working verb. I think it's a program to help students write better.
THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND.
写不出东西来怎么办？也许睡一觉就好了
Your subconscious mind does more writing than you think. Often you'll spend a whole day trying to fight your way out of some verbal thicket in which you seem to be tangled beyond salvation. Frequently a solution will occur to you the next morning when you plunge back in. While you slept, your writers mind didn't. A writer is always working. Stay alert to the currents around you. Much of what you see and hear will come back, having percolated for days or months or even years through your subconscious mind, just when your conscious mind, laboring to write, needs it.
REWRITING.
好文章很少一遍促成，不要吝惜使用Delete键。
Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept. We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't. Most writers don't initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could. The newly hatched sentence almost always has something wrong with it. It's not clear. It's not logical. It’s verbose. It's klunky. It's pretentious. It's boring. It's full of clutter. It's full of clichés. It lacks rhythm. It can be read in several different ways. It doesn't lead out of the previous sentence. It doesn't... The point is that clear writing is the result of a lot of tinkering.
Many people assume that professional writers don't need to rewrite; the words just fall into place. On the contrary, careful writers can't stop fiddling. I've never thought of rewriting as an unfair burden; I'm grateful for every chance to keep improving my work. Writing is like a good watch—it should run smoothly and have no extra parts. Students, I realize, don't share my love of rewriting. They think of it as punishment: extra homework or extra infield practice. Please—if you're such a student—think of it as a gift. You won't write well until you understand that writing is an evolving process, not a product. Nobody expects you to get it right the first time, or even the second time.
What do I mean by "rewriting"? I don't mean writing one draft and then writing a different second version, and then a third. Most rewriting consists of reshaping and tightening and refining the raw material you wrote on your first try. Much of it consists of making sure you've given the reader a narrative flow he can follow with no trouble from beginning to end. Keep putting yourself in the reader's place. Is there something he should have been told early in the sentence that you put near the end? Does he know when he starts sentence B that you've made a shift—of subject, tense, tone, emphasis—from sentence A?
When you read your writing aloud with these connecting links in mind you'll hear a dismaying number of places where you lost the reader, or confused the reader, or failed to tell him the one fact he needed to know, or told him the same thing twice: the inevitable loose ends of every early draft. What you must do is make an arrangement—one that holds together from start to finish and that moves with economy and warmth.
Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write (I like to have written). But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that won the game.
Go WITH YOUR INTERESTS.
爱啥写啥，只要你有兴趣，再邪门的东西你都能写好。
There's no subject you don't have permission to write about. Students often avoid subjects close to their heart—skateboarding, cheerleading, rock music, cars—because they assume that their teachers will regard those topics as "stupid." No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.
I've read elegant books on fishing and poker, billiards and rodeos, mountain climbing and giant sea turtles and many other subjects I didn't think I was interested in. Write about your hobbies: cooking, gardening, photography, knitting, antiques, jogging, sailing, scuba diving, tropical birds, tropical fish. Write about your work: teaching, nursing, running a business, running a store. Write about a field you enjoyed in college and always meant to get back to: history, biography, art, archeology. No subject is too specialized or too quirky if you make an honest connection with it when you write about it.
Φ
【太长了？ 一个简化版的DOs & DON'Ts，来自The Spinozanator,Amazon.com】
1. Do - prune out every word that does not perform a necessary function. Strip each sentence to its cleanest components. A clear sentence is no accident.
2. Do - use the thesaurus liberally. Learn the small gradations between words that seem to be synonyms.
3. Do - try to improve the rhythm by reversing the order of a sentence, substituting a word that has freshness or oddity, and by varying the lengths of sentences.
4. Do - make your first sentence the best one - your lead must capture the reader.
5. Do - make each sentence lead into the next. Readers think linearly.
6. Do - Take special care with the last sentence in your paragraph - its the springboard to the next paragraph.
7. Do - make your paragraphs short. Readers think in segments.
8. Do - pay special attention to the last sentence. The perfect ending should take your reader slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right.
9. Do - Read it aloud to see how it sounds and re-edit - then do it again. Clear writing is the result of lots of tinkering.
On the other hand:
1. Don't - use passive verbs unless there is no comfortable way to use an active verb.
2. Don't - use adverbs that convey the same meaning as your strong active verb - prune it out.
3. Don't - use adjectives when the concept is already in your carefully chosen noun - prune it out.
4. Don't - use small words that qualify how you feel: "a bit," "a little," "sort of," and dozens more. Good writing is lean and confident.
5. Don't - use concept nouns:
Instead of - "The common reaction is incredulous laughter."
Write - "Most people just laugh with disbelief."
6. Don't - use the exclamation point unless you must, do use the period more frequently, don't forget the versatile dash, and cut down on the use of semi-colons and colons. If you don't know how to punctuate, get a grammar book.
On Writing Well的第三、四章分门别类描述了怎么写Nonfiction as Literature, People, Place, yourself, Science and Technology, Business, Sports, Arts and Humor. 每一节都自成一体，无需引用。 总之，这本书基本可以应付日常英文写作的各个环节。是居家旅行模仿必备良品。为什么说模仿呢？
Zinsser写道, “Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach and Picasso didn’t spring full-blown as Bach and Picasso; they needed models. This is especially true and writing. Find the best writers in the fields that interest and read their work aloud. Get their voice and their taste into your ear—their attitude toward language. Don’t worry that imitating them you’ll lose your own voice and your own identity. Soon enough you will shed those skins and become who you are supposed to become.”
