in fine

Continuity or amplification (also, and, besides, furthermore, in addition, in the same way, likewise, moreover, not only … but also, similarly, too)

as noted above, as we’ve seen, or as we’ve suggested.

the best way to learn is to read and read and read: see how good writers create flowing prose

Inexperienced writers tend to overuse vague links

plodding

metadiscourse—messages to the reader about what direction the argument is taking

In writing, as in joke telling, timing matters.

Our bodies are composed of cells. The cells

Start with material that is familiar, scene-setting, or unsurprising, and end with material that is new or detailed or surprising

The same technique a comedian uses to make people laugh—careful setup and good punch line—can help you write sentences people like {29} to read

The writer assumed that referring to Paganism established the idea of Pagans, the implied antecedent for they

Humble pronouns and other pointers permit powerful effects

These little words point (or relate), in their respective ways, to something already named or known (an antecedent).

Inexperienced writers tend to prefer big words to little ones

but the passage lacks flow because it treats characters sloppily.

called continental drift. Over hundreds of millions of years it has reshaped the surface of the earth. Continental drift is caused by the motion

the earth’s surface → parts of the surface (oceans and continents) → continental drift → forces driving continental drift → the earth’s mantle → the earth’s crust → plates

Exploring a single topic often means treating several different characters.

making employees a more active character. This prompts further thinking, and the writer decides to provide more detail about what employees feel

passage ends by handing off, as it were, to a new character

unobtrusive

achieving flow in your writing: (1) deploying consistent and logical characters, (2) using pronouns and other pointers, (3) designing sentences with punch lines, and (4) signaling logical steps in your argument with conjunctions and other linking words

The original’s ungainly first sentence lists terms before offering any explanation or background

traveler may even feel magically transported by the grace of what she’s reading.

involves motion—movement from point A to point B. A reader is thus a kind of traveler.

denote

The “impartial” jury took less than twenty minutes to find the defendant guilty. Adjectives like supposed, so-called, would-be, ostensible, and putative (or their adverbial forms) make such quotation marks unnecessary

Rousseau’s concept of freedom is difficult for Americans to comprehend

If the main quotation has marks around it, mark the inner quotation with single quotation marks. But if the main quotation is a set-off quotation, mark the inner quotation with double quotation marks.

If, however, these other punctuation marks are part of the original quotation, then you put them inside the quotation marks:

the deleted portion of the quotation includes a sentence’s terminal punctuation (the punctuation at the end of the sentence), or if you are using the quotation to end a sentence in your essay, add a fourth dot, representing the period.

deletions within a quoted passage must be indicated by an ellipsis. (Naturally one is not allowed to change the meaning of the original in any material sense

explain a missing antecedent or add anything else (such as a definition of an unfamiliar term), use brackets

quotation appears in italics, you need to make clear whether the emphasis is yours or the author’s

Set off a long quotation from your text, indenting on the left. Do not put quotation marks around a set-off or block quotation.

This device forces the reader to pause, so you can shine a spotlight precisely where you want: “Opinion,” the old king emphasizes, “did help me to the crown”

If a quotation consists of one or more complete sentences, introduce it with a colon or a comma.

Students often quote too much. It’s better to break a source text into pieces and only use what you really need, as long as you’re fair to the original meaning and fit the fragment grammatically into your sentence

Any loose threads, like a pronoun whose antecedent lies outside the quoted excerpt, will confuse a reader

the humanities and social sciences, sources rarely “prove” anything. Yet student writers often use this word, as if to establish by force of will that “proof” has been achieved. Academic readers in these areas don’t, by and large, expect proof. They expect a well-reasoned and well-supported argument, and usually prefer arguments that include shades of gray as well as black and white

When you want to signal your reader to evaluate a source in a particular way, one nice technique is to use an evaluative adverb

start a citation with a signal phrase that helps connect the new source to what has come before

Some have argued that prosperity depends on the degree of trust within a society (Fukuyama 1996). Fukuyama (1996) argues that the level of prosperity in a society depends on the level of trust. In his 1996 book, Fukuyama argues that trust is essential to the development of prosperous societies.

Start your sentence with set-up information that identifies the text and/or author, and then state the argument of the text itself.

If appeals to virtue, education, and your mom—“Just because everyone does it doesn’t make it right”—aren’t enough to keep you honest, let me invoke the strongest motive of all, self-interest

CMOS, MLA, and APA

The point of citations is to make it possible for your reader to check your work

Drawing on other people’s ideas is natural and inevitable in academic writing—but you must acknowledge the borrowing

textbooks, which cite the most important literature on a given topic in bibliographies; and scholarly journals, which include lots of reviews of current literature

what your teacher expects for an assignment—what kinds of sources, how many, and how scholarly or popular

take a short course at your college library on how to conduct research. {60} Among other things, you’ll learn how to use discipline-specific, subscription-only references—a filter that will help you limit your search to creditable sources

not only is getting information from the internet like drinking from a fire hose, but there’s no assurance that what comes out is safe to drink

no source should be regarded uncritically simply because it is new.

winning your audience’s trust, weaving sources into your argument, and quoting effectively

New scholarship builds on old—sometimes to support, sometimes to modify, sometimes to question or even refute

Ever since Marshall Sahlins published his influential book Stone Age Economics in 1960, social anthropologists have been inclined to view traditional societies as living in an ecological Garden of Eden

much more likely to gain the reader’s sympathetic interest

crafts her argument while patiently exploring sources

inexperienced or careless scholar decides what and how he will argue early on, not anticipating either to be changed much by his research

Secondary sources provide a context—“the literature,” or what other scholars have already said about a topic

Primary sources are the raw material—things like literary texts, government documents, survey data, or experimental results

college essays are examples of persuasive writing

“The great enemy of clear language,” Orwell said, “is insincerity”

Education takes place. (Rosenthal A10) This bland, chilling statement could be Exhibit A in how to use words to conceal and evade.

to take another example not on our doorstep

By the end of the statement the Serbs in Kosovo emerge not as victimizers but victims

the sentence calls into question the legitimacy of holding that blurry we responsible

And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf

I’ve always wondered what look Moses gave Aaron after hearing this. (The Bible doesn’t say.)

nominalizations—even the name is ugly—usually are

Mistakes

Mistakes were made. Here are some prizewinners

juxtaposed

In sum, when Roosevelt wanted to emphasize innocence he used the passive voice. When he wanted to emphasize action he used the active voice.

Why the passive voice here?

the passage would lose much of its interest (though none of its meaning)

Before looking at abuses of the passive voice, consider some examples that make good use of it

tandem

It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”

Concision isn’t an end in itself, but a means to clarity

nominalizations let you write sentences that don’t make clear who does what. “Analysis,” for instance, doesn’t specify who’s doing the analyzing. Sometimes that’s okay

A nominalization is an action expressed as a noun rather than a verb, like analysis or assessment rather than analyze or assess

The revision is about 40 percent shorter

The question of who did what is known as agency. We tend to express ourselves clearly when agency is reflected in grammar: that is, when we express agents as subjects of sentences

Unless you know your audience, it’s impossible to be assured that what you’re writing will be well-received

Have I thought about possible objections? Is there a logical arrangement to my argument that will help the reader follow it?

MOST OF US think our writing is clearer than it really is

Avoid breaking short essays into sections

“What is color?”—no longer seems simple at all

terms and ideas are often not amenable to conclusive definition. A definition that seems satisfactory so long as you don’t think about it often turns out to be problematic when you start asking questions

Description begins with analysis, or the breaking of a whole into constituent pieces

important to describe it in a way that helps the reader put the pieces together: right to left, bottom to top, first to last, big to small, foreground to background, or whatever pattern fits the material

Such units of thought might include explanation, example, description, narration, definition, comparison, contrast, or analysis

conjunctive adverbs

conjunctions

antecedent noun

relative adjectives

constancy

in particular, characters, pointers, and conjunctions—merit a second look at this point. They can help produce opening sentences

but now it may take you twenty pages and fifty or so paragraphs

Your argument will grow to include more elements, such as a consideration of contrary viewpoints (with a rebuttal or concession or both)

sturdy “unit of thought” paragraph structure: an introductory paragraph with a thesis statement, three body paragraphs that each provide one piece of supporting material, and a concluding paragraph

elegy

The paragraph is essentially a unit of thought, not of length”

break up the argument into a series of topics or steps

But if we keep in mind that texts are divided into paragraphs for the convenience of the reader, and that readers find great undifferentiated blocks of text highly inconvenient and inaccessible, we begin to get a sense of the ordinary “right” length.

(1) understand your own argument (What do I wish to say to the reader?); (2) decide on a sensible way to lay out this argument (From the reader’s perspective, what piece-by-piece arrangement of supporting and explanatory material will best illuminate the argument?); and (3) have the discipline to stick to this structure (Does each paragraph—and each sentence—fit with my plan?). (In practice there’s a fourth requirement—willingness to modify your design as the need arises

simple structure to reinforce his speech’s intention

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, for instance, consists of just three short paragraphs: the first about the past, the second the present, and the third the future

meant to make written material easier to read

This letter is long because I didn’t have time to make it shorter

while cripples sounds almost rude to students schooled in the pompous style

tension is emotional by definition, so emotionally tense is redundant

writer has good ideas but hasn’t yet succeeded in articulating them

“Substitute damn every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

adverbs add nothing to the already strong verbs

Political-institutional is the kind of claptrap that makes the pompous style so tempting for inexperienced writers.

more concise, vigorous, verb-centered style

difficult quotation has been paraphrased

Now conduct the same thought experiment with the revision, and ask yourself which version you’d rather read.

It is not incidental that the most enduring laws in Western culture, the Ten Commandments, are expressed in a succinct, lapidary style

Yet many of us are afraid of writing concisely because doing so can make us feel exposed

The real work is often figuring out what exactly we wanted to say in the first place.

CONCISION, THE LEANNESS or lack of fat in a piece of writing

Let’s commence begin

writing more graceful

educational institutions—ahem, schools

it’s hard to write (or indeed think) about ideas without using abstractions

“The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness”

“the collateral damage which has been done by NATO is at an absolute minimum, and we take great care in both targeting and in terms of the application of fire power to ensure that collateral damage does not occur”

Death, especially the killing of human beings, tends to bring forth the most strenuous applications of the pompous style

not generally a style that suits undergraduate college students

It was a strategy of deliberate opacity that let the company hide its fraud in plain sight, as it were (confused stock analysts mainly stayed mum for fear they’d be laughed out of their jobs if they admitted they didn’t understand Enron’s statements)

“All animals are equal—but some are more equal than others

Politicians, Orwell said, feared to speak the blunt truth to citizens, while even in democracies citizens failed to demand truth from their leaders.

As you learn more you’ll find yourself with more to say, and you’ll make increasingly sophisticated and nuanced arguments—but always building on a foundation of clear expression.

Plainness {xiv} makes it easier to spot your argument and harder to hide behind words.

the student’s passage uses big words merely to dress up a simple—though sensible and indeed powerful—point. Why? The student is afraid he will seem simpleminded

No wonder, then, that when a temptation to appear learned squares off against a habit of using plain English, temptation usually wins

By these means, the living no longer need to feel paralyzed with anxiety and uncertainty in the face of spectral visitations.

The doctrine of Purgatory, as we have seen, occupied a place at the center of Christendom’s ritualized strategies of familiarity, containment, and control

polyphony

At once “a certain quality” that marks an individual as standing in a privileged relationship to the sources of being and a hypnotic power “certain personalities” have to engage passions and dominate minds, it is not clear whether charisma is the status, the excitement, or some ambiguous fusion of the two.

The most successful writing in this academic environment is dense with learning

It’s natural for many students to think that their goal is to learn what their professors know, or think what their professors think

The solemn trappings of college culture—degrees, grades, academic titles—can make it seem that formality is the most important thing to aim at

The writer of an essay is a kind of intellectual entrepreneur, taking a risk to say something new.

The essay has flourished ever since, as men and women have claimed increasing space to think for themselve

Essays are, in the root sense of the word, tries. To essay originally meant to attempt or put to the test

When you write an essay you enter into the most challenging yet rewarding of the liberal arts: shaping your ideas, questions, and convictions to share with others.

It seems only right, even necessary, that writing advice have a personal touch as well.

idiosyncratic