15.2 linking verbs practice 2 answer key

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harvey, Michael, 1960- The nuts & bolts of college writing / Michael Harvey.—2nd ed.

p. cm. ISBN 978-1-60384-898-5 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-1-60384-899-2 (cloth) 1. English language—Rhetoric—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Report

writing—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title. II. Title: Nuts and bolts of college writing.

PE1408.H3927 2012 808'.042—dc23

2012027921

PRC ISBN: 978-1-62466-023-8

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http://www.hackettpublishing.com
For the teachers who taught me to love words, especially Nick, Will, and George

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There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read—something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on [the conference] list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.”

So I stopped—at random—and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.

Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”:

Adventures of a Curious Character

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly.

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

For the present, however, you as students should devote yourselves to the power of simple expressions, to do all that can be done and learn how much can be said with the simpler and more fundamental terms.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

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Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing

Gordon Harvey, Writing with Sources, second edition. Stanley Chodorow, Writing a Successful Research Paper.

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http://www.hackettpublishing.com/Writing-with-Sources
http://www.hackettpublishing.com/writing-a-successful-research-paper-a-guide-for-college-students-3
Contents

Introduction

1 Concision The Pompous Style at School

2 Clarity 1. Choose Verbs over Nominalizations 2. Choose Active Verbs over Linking Verbs 3. Choose the Active Voice over the Passive Voice Clarity and Honesty

3 Flow 1. Use Consistent Characters 2. Use Pronouns and Other Pointers 3. Use Punch Lines 4. Use Conjunctions and Other Linking Words

4 Punctuation Commas and Comma Splices Semicolons Colons Dashes Parentheses Questions

5 Gracefulness 1. The Historical Present 2. Appositives 3. Parallelism 4. Tricolon 5. Concession 6. Qualification

6 Using Sources Winning Your Audience’s Trust Weaving Sources into Your Prose Quoting Effectively

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7 Paragraphs The Function of Paragraphs Opening Sentences Designing Paragraphs Sections

8 Beginnings and Endings Beginnings Endings Last Thought

Appendix: Document and Citation Formats Generic Formats CMS, MLA, and APA Style Guide Basic Document Formats Quotations First-Page Formats Abstract List of References Basic Citation and Reference Formats Specific Citation and Reference Formats

Works Cited Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing

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Introduction

THIS BOOK can help you write better college essays. It combines the most important rules and conventions of academic writing with the rudiments of good style. Naturally it has its limitations: it is general (with little to say about writing in different disciplines), basic (and may be most useful to beginning college students), and short (thus covering a lot of ground quickly). It is not about critical thinking in any formal sense, and indeed tries to lay down its do’s and don’ts, as well as my own unauthorized views on writing, as informally as possible. These views, personal and perhaps even idiosyncratic, may be its biggest limitation. Yet writing is an intensely personal activity. It seems only right, even necessary, that writing advice have a personal touch as well.

The college essay plays a special role in American higher education. The American system, more so than higher education in most countries, encourages a student’s self-directed development. Writing essays in which you say what you think and why is crucial to that development. Writing an essay means working within a rigid framework of formats and conventions, but it requires much more than technique; in a college essay, the personal qualities of its author, passionate as well as rational, take center stage.

An essay, like a personality, hangs together through a delicate balance of forces; it should be clear but not empty, thoughtful but down-to-earth, strong-minded but fair-minded. The writer must be adept at making arguments and synthesizing and analyzing others’ ideas, but original and honest. A good essay is a small piece of one’s better self—more rational, more critical, and more cogent than one is in everyday speech or idle thought, yet also more spirited. 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.

For all that, an essay is written on paper, not carved in stone. Essays are, in the root sense of the word, tries. To essay originally meant to attempt or put to the test (and still does, in assay and the French essayer). The essay as a literary form became popular at the beginning of the modern scientific age, part of a seismic cultural shift away from received wisdom and toward inquiry and exploration. (Montaigne’s celebrated essays, genial and ruminative, helped establish the genre’s tone in the latter half of the 16th century.) The essay has flourished ever since, as men and women have claimed increasing space to think for themselves. Essays, imbued with the spirit of inquiry, put ideas and assumptions to the test, and if they sometimes stumble or equivocate, that is part of their nature (Samuel Johnson’s 18th-century dictionary defined an essay as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular

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

But college essays are written in an environment in many ways ill suited to risk taking.