Tài liệu Essential guide to writing part 16 pdf

You need only an occasional brief sentence to change the pace of predominately long ones, or a long sentence now and then in a passage com-posed chiefly of short ones: We t o o k a hair-

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How much recurrence, how much variety depend on sub-ject and purpose For instance, when you repeat the same point or develop a series of parallel ideas, the similarity of subject justifies—and is enhanced by—similarity of sentence structure Thus Adams repeats the same pattern in his second through seventh sentences because they have much the same content, detailing the steps President Harding took to divert the scandal threatening his administration Here the recurrent style evolves from the subject

In the other passage, however, the writer makes no such connection between style and subject, and so the recurrence seems awkward and monotonous The ideas expressed in the separate sentences are not of the same order of value For example, the fact that the theater is in Hartford is less im-portant than that it shows foreign films The sentence style,

in other words, does not reinforce the writer's ideas; it ob-scures them

Nor has the writer offered any relief from his short, straightforward statements Adams has Moreover, Adams uses variety effectively to structure his paragraph, opening with a relatively long sentence, which, though grammatically simple, is complicated by the correlative " n o t but" con-struction And he closes the paragraph by beginning a sen-tence, for the first time, with something other than the subject

Adams's brief sentences work because the subject justifies them and because they are sufficiently varied Lacking similar justification or relief, the four sentences of the first passage are ineffective They could be improved easily:

The Art Cinema, a movie theater in Hartford, specializes in foreign films It is noted for the high quality of its films; in fact, many people consider them good art.

There is still recurrence: in effect the passage consists of three similar short clauses plus an appositive But now there is more variety In the first sentence an appositive interrupts subject

2 3 6 THE SENTENCE

and verb; in the second there are two clauses instead of one, the latter opening with the phrase "in fact." Subordinating the information about Hartford also keeps the focus where it belongs, on the films

Of course, in composing a sentence that differs from others,

a writer is more concerned with emphasis than with variety But if it is usually a by-product, variety is nonetheless im-portant, an essential condition of interesting, readable prose Let us consider, then, a few ways in which variety may be attained

Changing Sentence Length and Pattern

From the beginning she had known what she wanted, and pro-ceeded single-minded, with the force of a steam engine towards her goal There was never a moment's doubt or regret She wanted the East; and from the moment she set eyes on Richard Burton, with his dark Arabic face, his "questing panther eyes," he was, for her, that lodestar East, the embodiment of all her thoughts Man and land were identified Lesley Blanch

It is not necessary, or even desirable, to maintain a strict alternation of long and short statements You need only an occasional brief sentence to change the pace of predominately long ones, or a long sentence now and then in a passage com-posed chiefly of short ones:

We t o o k a hair-raising taxi ride into the city The rush-hour traffic

of B o m b a y is a n i g h t m a r e — n o t f r o m d e m e n t i a , as in Tokyo; nor

f r o m exuberance, as in Rome; not f r o m m a l i c e , as in Paris; it is a chaos rooted in years of practiced c o n f u s i o n , absentmindedness, selfishness, inertia, a n d an i n c o m p l e t e understanding of mechanics There are no d i s c e r n i b l e rules James Cameron

D a v e Beck was hurt D a v e Beck was indignant He t o o k the fifth

a m e n d m e n t w h e n he was questioned a n d w a s forced off the

ex-e c u t i v ex-e b o a r d o f thex-e A F L - C I O , b u t h ex-e rex-etainex-ed ex-e n o u g h c o n t r o l o f

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Prosecution dragged in the courts Convictions were appealed Delay John Dos Passos Sometimes variation in length can be used to emphasize a key idea In the following passage the historian Herbert But-terfield moves through two long sentences (the second a bit shorter than the first) to a strong short statement:

The Whig historian is interested in discovering agency in history, even where in this way he must avow it only implicit It is char-acteristic of his method that he should be interested in the agency rather than in the process And this is how he achieves his simplification.

Fragments

Fragments, usually a special kind of short sentence, make for effective variation—easy to see and easy to use (italics high-light the fragments in the next examples):

Sam steals like this because he is a thief Not a big thief He tried

to be a big thief once and everybody got mad at him and made him go away to jail He is strictly a small thief, and he only steals for his restaurant Jimmy Breslin Examinations tend to make me merry, often seeming to me to be some kind of private game, some secret ritual compulsively played

by professors and the institution I invariably become facetious in

all the critical hours All that solemnity for a few facts! I couldn't

believe they were serious I never quite understood it.

Mary Caroline Richards

Used with restraint, fragments like these are a simple way to vary your sentences They are, however, more at home in a colloquial style than in a formal one

Rhetorical Questions

Like fragments or any other kind of unusual sentence, rhe-torical questions are rarely used for variety alone Their

238 THE SENTENCE

primary purpose is to emphasize a point or to set up a topic for discussion Still, whenever they are employed for such ends, they are also a source of variety:

But Toronto—Toronto is the subject One must say something— what must one say about Toronto? What can one? What has any-body ever said? It is impossible to give it anything but commen-dation It is not squalid like Birmingham, or cramped like Canton,

or scattered like Edmonton, or sham like Berlin, or hellish like New York, or tiresome like Nice It is all right The only depressing thing

is that it w i l l always be what it is, only larger, and that no Canadian city can ever be anything better or different If they are good they may become Toronto Rupert Brooke

Varied Openings

Monotony especially threatens when sentence after sentence begins the same way It is easy to open with something other than the usual subject and verb: a prepositional phrase; an

adverbial clause; a connective like therefore or an adverb like

naturally, or, immediately following the subject and splitting

it from the verb, a nonrestrictive adjectival construction Take

a look at this passage:

In the first decade of the new century, the South remained primarily rural; the beginnings of change, in those years, hardly affected the lot of the Negro The agricultural system had never recovered fully from the destruction of the old plantation economy Bound to the production of staples—tobacco, cotton, rice, sugar—the soil suf-fered from erosion and neglect Those who cultivated it depended

at best upon the uncertain returns of fluctuating world markets But the circumstances under which labor was organized, particularly Negro labor, added to those difficulties further hardships of human Creation Oscar Handlin

Handlin's five sentences show considerable variety in their openings: a prepositional phrase, a subject, a participial phrase, a subject, and a connective word

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Interrupted Movement

Interruption—positioning a modifier or even a second, in-dependent sentence between main elements of a clause so that pauses are required on either side of the intruder—nicely var-ies straightforward movement Here the writer places a sec-ond sentence between two clauses (italics added):

I had halted on the road As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought to shoot him It is a serious matter to

shoot a working elephant—it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery—and obviously one ought not to do

it if it can possibly be avoided George Orwell

P A R T V

Diction

CHAPTER 24

Meaning

To say that a word has meaning is to say that it has purpose The purpose may be to signify something—that is, to refer

to an object or person other than the writer, to an abstract conception such as "democracy," or to a thought or feeling

in the writer's mind On the other hand, the purpose may be

to induce a particular response in the readers' minds or to establish an appropriate relationship between the writer and those readers We shall consider each of these three uses of words—modes of meaning, we shall call them

Before we do that, however, we need to glance at several misconceptions about words and also at two aspects of mean-ing fundamental to all the purposes for which words may be used These aspects concern denotative and connotative meaning and the various levels of usage

First the misconceptions

Words Are Not Endowed with Fixed

and "Proper" Meanings

When people object to how someone else uses a word, they

often say, "That isn't its proper meaning." The word

disin-terested, for example, is frequently employed in the sense

244 DICTION

of "uninterested," and those who dislike this usage argue

that the proper meaning of disinterested is "objective,

unbiased."

In such arguments "proper meaning" generally signifies a meaning sanctioned by past usage or even by the original, etymological sense of the word But the dogma that words come to us out of the past with proper meanings—fixed and immutable—is a fallacy The only meanings a word has are those that the speakers of the language choose to give it If

enough speakers of English use disinterested to mean

"unin-terested," then by definition they have given that meaning to the word

Those who take a conservative attitude toward language have the right, even the duty, to resist changes which they feel lessen the efficiency of English They should, however, base their resistance upon demonstrating why the change does make for inefficiency, not upon an authoritarian claim that it violates proper meaning

As a user of words you should be guided by consensus, that is, the meanings agreed upon by your fellow speakers of English, the meanings recorded in dictionaries We shall look

at what dictionaries do in Chapter 29 For now, simply un-derstand that dictionary definitions are not "proper mean-ings" but succinct statements of consensual meanings

In most cases the consensus emerges from an activity in which individual language users participate without knowing that they are, in effect, defining words The person who says

"I was disinterested in the lecture" does not intend to alter

the meaning of disinterested He or she has simply heard the

word used this way before In a few cases people do act de-liberately to establish a consensual meaning, as when

mathe-maticians agree that the word googol will mean "10 raised to

the 100th power." In any case, meaning is what the group consents to This is the only "proper meaning" words have, and any subsequent generation may consent to alter a consensus

But while the unconscious agreement which establishes the

MEANING 245

meaning of a word is a group activity, it originates with

in-dividuals Particular speakers began using disinterested in the sense of "uninterested" or square in the sense of "extremely

conventional and unsophisticated." From the usage of indi-vidual people the change spreads through the group—for bet-ter or worse

By such a process word meanings change, sometimes rap-idly, sometimes glacially Often the change occurs as a re-sponse to historical events When the eighteenth-century

historian Edward Gibbon writes of "the constitution of a

Ro-man legion" he means how it was organized, not, as a modern reader might suppose, a written document defining that or-ganization The latter sense became common only after the late eighteenth century, with the spread of democratic revo-lutions and the formal writing down of a new government's principles

Because words must constantly be adapted to a changing world, no neat one-to-one correspondence exists between words and meanings On the contrary, the relationship is messy: a single word may have half a dozen meanings or more, while several words may designate the same concept or

entity Thus depression means one thing to a psychologist,

another to an economist, and another still to a geologist But

psychological "depression" may also be conveyed by

mel-ancholia, the blues, or the dismals, in the dumps, low, and so

on

One-to-one correspondences do in fact exist in the highly specialized languages of science and technology and

mathe-matics To a chemist sodium chloride means only the

com-pound NaCl, and that comcom-pound is always designated in

words by sodium chloride The common term salt, in contrast,

has a number of meanings, and we must depend on the con-text (that is, the words around it) to clarify which sense the writer intends:

Pass the salt

She's the salt of the earth.

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They're not worth their salt.

He's a typical old salt.

Her wit has considerable salt.

The crooks intended to salt the mine.

They are going to salt away all the cash they can.

But while one-to-one correspondences might seem desirable, having a distinct word for every conceivable object and idea and feeling would not be practical The vocabulary would swell to unmanageable proportions And probably we would like it less than we suppose The inexact correspondence of words and meanings opens up possibilities of conveying sub-tleties of thought and feeling which an exactly defined

vocab-ulary would exclude The fact that sodium chloride means one

thing and only one thing is both a virtue and a limitation The

fact that salt means many things is both a problem and an

opportunity

Words, then, are far from being tokens of fixed and per-manent value They are like living things, complex, many-sided, and responsive to pressures from their environment They must be handled with care

Denotation and Connotation

Denotation and connotation are aspects of a word's meaning,

related but distinct Denotation is a word's primary, specific sense, as the denotation of red is the color (or, from the view-point of physics, light of a certain wavelength) Connotation

is the secondary meaning (or meanings), associated with but

different from the denotation Red, for instance, has several

connotations: "socialist," "anger," and "danger," among others.1

Using a circle to represent a word, we may show the denotation as the core meaning and the connotation as

1 In logic denotation and connotation are used in somewhat different senses.