Fluent Essays

EXERCISE 32 Cliché Paragraph Now it’s time to try writing clichés—just this once. Write a paragraph of about 100 words on any topic, using as many clichés as possible. Use at least one cliché per sentence. Your objective is to make no original meaning whatsoever. Love and business make good topics. When you concentrate the clichés in a paragraph, you become a comic writer.EXERCISE 33 Original Language Now that you know what a cliché is, and you’ve read some original writing, it’s time for you to create original language. The following exercise is designed to help you develop your observational skills and produce original writing. Translating your observations into writing develops your sense of detail. Sit in a public place (bus, library, cof ee shop, a gym etc.) and write three short paragraphs: Paragraph 1: describe the actions of a person or people in that place Paragraph 2: describe how the place looks Paragraph 3: describe the sounds you hear in that placeNotice everything. Bring the place to life. Of course, do not use any clichés. Two additional restrictions: 1) do not use any forms of the verb to be (am, is, are, was, were, been, being, including contractions such as it’s for it is or I’m for I am), and 2) write only in the active voice (no passives). These restrictions make writing dif cult, but in the process you’ll discover the level of detail required for good writing.EXERCISE 34 Figurative Language Approaches To get a feel for these techniques of f gurative language, you need to practise them. This exercise requires you to write a total of 10 sentences containing all f ve types of f gures of speech described above: • Write two sentences with metaphors not using like or as. • Write two sentences with similes. • Write two sentences with irony. • Write two sentences with overstatement. • Write two sentences with understatement. read file page 154-172 koerber_clearprecisedirect.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. 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In the case of any omissions, the publisher will be pleased to make suitable acknowledgement in future editions. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Koerber, Duncan, author Clear, precise, direct : strategies for writing / Duncan Koerber and Guy Allen. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–900640–3 (pbk.) 1. English language—Rhetoric. 2. English language—Grammar. 3. Report writing—Problems, exercises, etc. I. Allen, Guy, 1947–, author II. Title. PE1408.K62 2014 808’.042 C2014-902628-5 Cover image: Atomic Imagery/Digital Vision/Getty Chapter 5 Photos: city: ©iStockphoto.com/celin; dog: ©iStockphoto.com/Wislander; car: ©iStockphoto.com/victorhe2002; Winnipeg: ©iStockphoto.com/Arpad Benedek; Collie: ©iStockphoto.com/DebbiSmirnoff ; Ferrari: ©iStockphoto.com/Sjo Oxford University Press is committed to our environment. This book is printed on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper and comes from responsible sources. Printed and bound in Canada 1 2 3 4 — 18 17 16 15 WORKS CITED Contents From the Publisher ix Preface xi Acknowledgements xv CHAPTER 1 Write Now: Start, Develop, Revise Where to Start 3 Examples of Freewriting 4 Two Composition Approaches 7 Beginning with Storytelling 9 “The Stovepipe Hole” by Elizabeth Clark 13 “Cell Phone” by Peter Palladini 16 Academic Writing 20 Revision 26 Types of Editing 28 How and Where to Edit 29 Chapter Summary 32 Further Readings 33 CHAPTER 2 Economy 34 The Morality of Wordiness 38 Forms of Wordiness 41 Editing Wordiness in Academic Writing 48 Peer Models for Emulation 51 “My Mom and Bramalea” by Julie Michelangelo 52 “The Pet Owner’s Burden” by Emilia Di Luca 55 Chapter Summary 61 Further Readings 62 CHAPTER 3 Strong Verbs 63 Concrete Verbs 65 Less-than-Concrete Verbs 67 Abstract Verbs 72 The Greater Consequences of Dead Verbs Academic Writing and Strong Verbs 79 77 1 v vi CONTENTS Final Thoughts on Strong Verbs 84 Peer Models for Emulation 84 “Going to Chinese School” by Jennifer Lee 85 “Stealing Spirituality: The Non-Native Use of Native American Spirit Guides” by Graeme Scallion 88 Chapter Summary 93 Further Readings 94 CHAPTER 4 Active Voice 95 Word Order 96 Active Voice 96 Passive Voice 98 The Morality of Passive Voice 105 The Permanence of Passive in Various Fields 106 Is it Ever Okay to Use Passive? 110 Academic Writing and Active Voice 111 Final Thoughts on Active and Passive 113 Peer Models for Emulation 113 “Jafar Uncle’s Chocolates” by Nabila Rizvi 114 “A Flourishing of Humans” by Sara Menuck 116 Chapter Summary 121 Further Readings 123 CHAPTER 5 Strong Nouns 124 The Problem of Pronouns 131 Examples of Unclear Pronouns 132 Pronouns and Repetition 134 The Morality of Unclear Pronouns 138 Inclusive Pronouns 139 Subject–Verb Agreement 140 Adjective–Pronoun Agreement 142 Academic Writing, Strong Nouns, and Unclear Pronouns 143 Final Thoughts on Nouns and Pronouns 145 Peer Models for Emulation 145 “Two Weeks at Notre Dame Hospital” by Eric Ramadi 146 “Tobacco Cigarettes as a Cause of Urinary Bladder Cancer” by Elizabeth Dancey 147 Chapter Summary 151 Further Readings 153 CONTENTS CHAPTER 6 Original Language 154 Examples of Clichés 156 Why Would Any Writer Use Clichés? 162 Is it Ever Okay to Use a Cliché? 163 Original Phrasing 165 Fresh Figurative Language 168 Academic Writing and Original Language 173 Final Thoughts on Figurative Language and Originality 173 Peer Models for Emulation 174 “Christine” by Adam Giles 174 “Financial Hardship among Former Professional Athletes and Its Contributing Factors” by Taylor Lush 177 Chapter Summary 180 Further Readings 182 CHAPTER 7 Parallelism 183 The Grammar behind Parallelism 184 Surface and Under-the-Surface Parallelism 185 Single-Element Parallelism: Part I 186 Single-Element Parallelism: Part II 189 Multiple-Element Parallelism 194 Academic Writing and Parallelism 198 Interview-Based Articles 199 Doing the Interview 200 The Questioner and the Listener 201 Writing Interviews 203 Peer Models for Emulation 205 “Two Hard Years” by Joyce Ong 205 “Solace in Obsolescence: Vinyl in the Age of Free Music” by Nicole Brewer 208 Chapter Summary 213 Further Readings 214 CHAPTER 8 Sentence Variation and Sound Sentence Patterns 216 Short Sentences 219 Long Sentences 220 Variation of Long and Short for Effect 222 215 vii viii CONTENTS Academic Writing and Sentence Variation 223 Sound 224 Personal Essays 227 The Power of the Personal Essay 228 Writer as Cultural Observer 229 Writer as Activist 230 Personal Essays and the Truth 233 Three Rhetorical Elements 234 Peer Models for Emulation 237 “I Wear My Too-Black Skin with Pride” by Petura Burrows 237 “Saints and Monsters: The Psychology of Altruism and Malice” by Nick Zabara 240 Chapter Summary 245 Further Readings 246 Appendix: Research and Citations Glossary 260 Credits 264 Works Cited 268 Index 270 247 From the Publisher Oxford University Press is delighted to introduce Clear, Precise, Direct: Strategies for Writing by Duncan Koerber and Guy Allen. This text provides a concise set of strategies to help students improve their writing and includes the following features: • • • • • • • • • • Conversational tone and easy-to-follow chapter structure that will engage and motivate students Detailed explanations of enhancing factors and interfering factors that help and hinder writing Inspiring quotations from professional writers that acknowledge the rewards and challenges of producing writing that audiences want to read Boldfaced key terms that are defined in the glossary Boxed writing topics that analyze the application of writing strategies in published writing Peer writing models for students to analyze and emulate, including academic writing and personal narrative Exercises that ask students to find and analyze various types of writing both within and outside of the academic environment Assignments that give students the opportunity to apply each lesson to their own writing and that encourage them to revise previous assignments according to each new strategy learned Chapter summaries and further reading lists An appendix of documentation styles A companion website provides podcasts, additional helpful material for students, and an instructor’s manual. Preface Our Philosophy All people have a desire to express themselves. People want others to hear and read their ideas and experiences. However, written expression doesn’t come easy. People struggle with starting to write, with finding the right words. They fear judgements of their writing—often their own judgements. People who turn to writing books for help often feel lost. Hundreds of grammar and style points glare back at them. Mastering those hundreds of grammar and style points looks daunting as a result—and there is no guarantee that mastering every single one of them will help writers express themselves easily and engage readers. They may become more correct writers, but not more expressive or engaging ones. Our philosophy is different. We think writers need a clear path to expression. That’s why this book contains just seven major lessons about writing. Students find this short list of lessons provides clarity. The lessons teach students how to become more comfortable as writers and how to improve their work through editing and revising. We also think writers need models to emulate. Not masterpiece models, however. As you’ll see in the aphorisms sprinkled throughout this book, famous writers do everything we describe but their writing intimidates beginning writers in its depth and complexity. We believe that beginning writers should emulate the best work of people at the same stage as them. That’s why this book includes peer models from students who went through our lessons. We also believe in focusing on the positives in students’ writing. We’re taught in schools to be critical and negative. Students find it easier to find faults than to find strengths. In our classrooms and in this book, particularly with the peer model writing, we focus on the positives. We respect each student’s effort. Writing should also connect with readers. The reader can put down the book or article or the professor can award a D grade to a paper. With this in mind, writing becomes about expressing ideas and experiences comfortably to bring readers in, to engage them. Good writing is not about glorifying egos or showing off. It is not about trying to hide from, attack, trick, or confuse readers. Nor should readers have to guess at what a writer is trying to say—if they have to guess, the writer’s connection with them is lost. Good writing, as we emphasize throughout this book, should seem completely natural—for the writer and for the reader. xii P R E FA C E Our Approach We developed the lessons, exercises, assignments, and general approach of this book out of decades of experimentation in our writing classes. Looking at the classroom like a scientific experiment, we tried out various exercises and assignments year after year, testing their efficacy before settling on this set. The major finding of this long-term classroom experiment was that writing lessons worked best when combined with personal writing assignments within classroom writing communities. Students found content in their own lives and then applied the lessons willingly to their life stories. They took editing and revision seriously. Inspired by classroom editing sessions, our students spontaneously formed smaller editing groups outside of the classroom. Our courses were intense but rewarding: lessons, exercises, assignments, and regular revision led to writing that many students published in professional publications during or soon after the courses ended. Students applied all the lessons to their academic writing as well—this book provides peer models of the most successful ones. To help beginning writers express themselves in a Clear, Precise, and Direct way, we have put together a set of strategies or lessons that we call enhancing factors to increase writing’s effectiveness. The factors allow writers to cut through the confusion and difficulty of writing and make expression that’s fresh, creating writing that readers intuitively enjoy. Writers who can apply these lessons— economy, strong verbs, active voice, strong nouns, original phrasing, parallelism, and sentence variation and sound—will develop a greater facility and precision with writing. They will express themselves as they want to, in a way that readers will enjoy. The enhancing factors help writers take control of their sentences because they provide signposts—a frame for looking at writing objectively. When looking at writing, we also see seven interfering factors that cause communication to break down: wordiness, dead verbs, passive voice, vague pronouns, clichés, faulty parallelism, and monotonous sentences. These seven factors are not the only problems in writing, of course, but they are the Top Seven and, as such, they give students a tangible and manageable set of targets for revising and editing. Students who remove these interfering factors through regular revision improve their writing dramatically over a short period of intense work. This book also asks writers to create samples of the major forms of professional and academic writing: the personal narrative, the research paper, the interviewbased article, and the personal essay. Personal narrative tells the writer’s direct experience. The research paper relates indirect experience from scholars. The interview-based article retells the experience of another person. The final assignment, the personal essay, allows students to write about their observations of trends and activist causes in their communities. We consider each assignment a natural extension of, not a departure from, the previous ones. Indeed, all the P R E FA C E strategies apply to all the forms of writing we describe in this book, and in particular we show how they apply to academic writing in each chapter. We encourage you to see additional connections. Benefits Our approach to writing teaching helps students connect their inner and outer worlds. They don’t remain inside themselves. Typical academic courses do not make this connection. The subject matter is often so far outside students’ experience it could be on the moon. In our courses, students who write about issues that matter to them take ownership of their experience. They care about writing and editing because their subject matter is so personal. With our list of micro-level enhancing and interfering factors in mind, they begin to see sentences objectively. They also develop an awareness of other writing issues that we don’t even talk about in this book (the lesson on parallelism, for example, tends to prevent the dreaded run-on sentence). That’s the spill-over effect of specific, targeted lessons. Students produce writing that says what they want to say—in their own voices. Students control the language instead of feeling controlled by it. They feel the urge to write more and more. That’s fluid expression. When starting with personal narrative, students can relax—the content is inside them—and focus squarely on the issues professional writers face. After gaining confidence in personal narrative writing, student writers then turn to academic writing ready to tackle difficult, often abstract content. Academic writing becomes manageable as a result. Students realize that rather than conforming to a false academic dialect and style, they have the authority to make decisions on writing; they have authority to speak in their own voices. After taking our courses, our students tend to improve in their other academic courses, sometimes by a whole grade category. How the Book is Organized We’ve ordered this book just like we order our writing courses: one chapter lesson represents one week of the course. Each chapter focuses on one major lesson with many examples. The examples help students see the good and the bad of writing. The chapters include peer writing that reflects everything we teach. Students read the peer models—written by students who went through these lessons in our classes—and immediately understand what we expect. Each chapter includes exercises developed in the classroom. The exercises ask students to try out the lessons in novel ways. Each chapter closes with suggested writing assignments. Topics are open—we want students to take control of the topic and go where they want to go. Writers write well when they write about topics they like. xiii xiv P R E FA C E How to Use This Book For Students This book provides a proven, tested set of strategies to help improve facility with writing. The students who improve the most work their way through the book in sequence. The chapter on strong verbs, for example, leads topically into the chapter on active voice. The exercises and assignments at the end of each lesson help students to build writing skills. We remind you throughout the book to revise earlier assignments using the knowledge gained in latter chapters. It’s a repetitive and recursive process. Each chapter, however, is a self-contained unit, and so you may choose to focus instead on targeting problem areas. In this case, you can sample some of the chapters based on your own needs. No matter which approach you take, merely reading the lessons will not help you improve as a writer. We implore you do all the exercises and the chapter assignment to gain the most from this book. Reading is vital to recognizing good writing, but writers must eventually write. It’s also important to continue to apply the lessons even after you’ve finished all the book’s exercises and assignments. Learning comes from repeated application. Use this book as a reference as you’re editing your writing or a friend’s. Eventually, the lessons will become second nature. Writing is a performance medium, like athletics—the more you do, the better you get. For Instructors Instructors may use this book as the spine of a course. The lessons may also be used out of order, with instructors selecting chapters based on specific needs. Each chapter is organized in a similar way and stands strongly on its own. Every class is different—judge your students’ needs and assign readings accordingly. The most important point is that students must not only read, but also write and revise regularly. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the summer of 1998, I took a writing course with Guy Allen that changed my life. Guy’s refreshing teaching style fascinated me, and his unique lessons helped me see my writing clearly. I become a better student instantly—I went from earning Cs and Bs to earning As. Almost ten years later, Guy hired me to teach that same course, and naturally I dug out my notes from 1998. My experience on both sides of this writing pedagogy—as student and as teacher—informs this book. I want other students to experience what I experienced. Thank you for your mentorship, Guy. Others helped greatly with this project. Robert Price always provided candid advice, and his notes on Guy’s other class, Specialized Prose, added depth to the chapters. I’m glad my colleague Dominique O’Neill gave us permission to publish her handout on strong verbs in academic writing. This book also wouldn’t have been the same without the peer models from my University of Toronto Mississauga and York University students. They applied the lessons and produced excellent writing for other students to emulate. I’m grateful to Dave Ward at Oxford University Press for expressing interest in the project quickly and enthusiastically. Lisa Peterson and Leah-Ann Lymer at Oxford made this book a better one with their detailed comments during the revision stages. I also want to thank the peer reviewers of the manuscript who provided positive feedback that made this book better: Laura Davis, Red Deer College; Deirdre Flynn, University of Toronto; Christopher Lee, Western University; Rebecca Menhart, Lakehead University; and Sheila M. Ross, Capilano University. Two important people in my life deserve mention as well. I must thank my wife Ellie for her love and support during the many months of proposing, writing, and revising. She allowed me the time to get this project done. Finally, Kylie Aida was born after the peer review and, on many long nights, she slept next to me while I revised the manuscript. I hope she likes it. Duncan Koerber York University Many people contributed to the development of the writing pedagogy outlin ... Purchase answer to see full attachment