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1、1 Simplicity & Clutter怎样把文章写的简洁2 Style 风格 只有把“人”写出来，才会有自己的风格3 The audience 你的文章为谁而写4 Words措辞 怎样的用词会把你的文章搞坏，什么又是好的措辞5 Unity 整体性 如何写出牛逼的开头和结尾，怎么寻找素材 6 Bits & Pieces 动词，副词，形容词，缩写，that/which等等用法 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
2、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
3、 is like fighting weedsthe writer is always slightly behind. New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech. Consider what President Nixons aide John Dean accomplished in just one day of testimony on television during the Watergate hearings. The next day everyone in Ame
4、rica was saying at this point in time instead of now. Take the adjective “personal,” as in “a personal friend of mine,” “his personal feeling.” Its 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,
5、thereby debasing both language and friendship. Someones feeling is that persons personal feelingthats 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
6、 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 prema
7、turely.” 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 hi
8、s 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 thats no better than the short word: assistance(help), numerous (many), facilitate (ease), individual(man or woman), remainder (rest),
9、 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 envia
10、ble freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one cant exist without the other. Itsimpossible 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 theres no sin
11、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? Heres a device my students at Yale found helpful. I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasnt doing useful work. Often just one
12、 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 inhab
13、it (a bit, sort of), or phrases like in a sense, which dont mean anything. Sometimes my brackets surrounded an entire sentencethe one that essentially repeats what the previous sentence said, or that says something readers dont need to know or can figure out for themselves. Most first drafts can be
14、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
15、 I think this can be deleted and the meaning wont 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
16、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 bracketstheyre following me through life. You can develop the same eye. Look for the clutter in your w
17、riting 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 y
18、ou think its 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
19、to four pages, youll howl and say it cant be done. Then youll 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
20、 job they were designed to do. Extending the metaphor of carpentry, its first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly and to drive nails. Later you can bevel the edges or add elegant finials, if thats your taste. But you can never forget that you are practicing a craft thats based on certain princip
21、les. 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 Ill admit that certain nonfiction writers, like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, have built some remarkable houses. But these are writers who spent years
22、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
23、what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength. But you will be impatient to find a styleto 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 cou
24、ld 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 st
25、yle is like adding a toupee. At first glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second glanceand with a toupee theres always a second glancehe doesnt look quite right. The problem is not that he doesnt look well groomed; he does, and we can only admire the wigmakers skill. T
26、he point is that he doesnt 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
27、 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 wont seem important. You think how august it will look in print. You think of all the people who will read it. You think
28、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 cant even start. Yet you vow to be worthy of the task, and, casting about for grand phrases that woul
29、dnt occur to you if you werent trying so hard to make an impression, you plunge in. Paragraph 1 is a disastera tissue of generalities that seem to have come out of a machine. No person could have written them. Paragraph 2 isnt much better. But Paragraph 3 begins to have a somewhat human quality, and
30、 by Paragraph 4 you begin to sound like yourself. Youve 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
31、 those first paragraphs impersonal and ornate; they dont say anythingthey are a self-conscious attempt at a fancy introduction. What Im always looking for as an editor is a sentence that says something like Ill never forget the day when I . . . I think, Aha! A person! 3. The audience 写作悦己 Who am I w
32、riting for? It s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Dont try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audienceevery reader is a different person. Dont try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the count
33、ry is in a mood to read. Editors and readers dont know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, theyre always looking for something new. Dont 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 al
34、ways 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 dont 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。 Wha
35、tever 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 studen
36、ts write as if they were desiccated alumni 30 years out. Never say anything in writing that you wouldnt comfortably say in conversation. If youre not a person who says indeed or moreover, or who calls someone an individual (hes a fine individual), please dont write it. 4. Words措辞 日常写作避免新闻笔调(journale
37、se) What is journalese? Its 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).
38、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 t
39、he 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 Ive never found out. 案例：作者眼里失败界的翘楚 Heres an article from a famed newsmagazine that is hard to match for fatigue: La
40、st 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
41、 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
42、is rife in the New York City police department. His efforts are now sending shock waves through the ranks of New Yorks 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
43、its still upcoming, and as for the permanent deafness, its a little early to tell. And what makes those buzzing fragments buzz? By now only Serpicos 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
44、the nearest clich. Shouldered his way, only to be met, crashing into his face, waging a lonely war, corruption that is rife, sending shock waves, New Yorks finestthese dreary phrases constitute writing at its most banal. We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual wo
45、rd, 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
46、 to write, Id 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. Dont assume that because an article is in a newspaper or a magazine it must be good. Sloppy editing is common in newspap
47、ers, often for lack of time, and writers who use clichs often work for editors who have seen so many clichs 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 Websters New World Dictionary, Second College Edi
48、tion, although, like all word freaks, I own bigger dictionaries that will reward me when Im 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 didnt know it had. Master the small gradations between words that seem to be synonyms. Whats the difference between cajole, wheedle, blandish and coax? Get yourself a dicti