15.2 linking verbs practice 2 answer key

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Copyright © 2013 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

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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.

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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. The solemn trappings of college culture—degrees, grades, academic titles —can make it seem that formality is the most important thing to aim at. It’s natural for many students to think that their goal is to learn what their professors know, or think what their professors think. Every area of study from anthropology to zoology has its own jargon and its own rules about what to study, how to study it, and how to write up one’s ideas and explorations. And when students start reading academic writing, what they typically see doesn’t seem to include much room for risk taking: formality, a more serious tone than students have encountered before, and hard-won familiarity with “the literature,” that daunting mountain of published scholarship in every academic discipline.

The most successful writing in this academic environment is dense with learning. Here are two examples of good writing by respected scholars. Both examples display full-throated academic voices, each of them a striking blend of expert scholarship and sure-footed expression:

Like so many of the key ideas in Weber’s sociology—verstehen, legitimacy, inner-worldly asceticism, rationalization—the concept of charisma suffers from an uncertainty of referent: does it denote a cultural phenomenon or a psychological one? 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 attempt to write a sociology of culture and a social psychology in a single set of sentences is what gives Weber’s work its orchestral complexity and harmonic depth. But it is also what gives it, especially to ears less attuned to polyphony, its chronic elusiveness. (Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology) The doctrine of Purgatory, as we have seen, occupied a place at the center of Christendom’s ritualized strategies of familiarity, containment, and control. These strategies extended to the precise calculation of the number of masses or quantity of alms that might be required in relation to the probable number of years of purgatorial suffering, an “accounting of the hereafter” that Jacques Chiffoleau has related to the rise in the later Middle Ages of double-entry bookkeeping.3 By these means, the living no longer need to feel paralyzed with anxiety and uncertainty in the face of spectral visitations. (Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory)

Confronted every day with such nearly majestic writing, a student is anxiously aware of how little, by comparison, she knows, and how less impressive is her own writing. No wonder, then, that when a temptation to appear learned squares off against a habit of using plain English, temptation usually wins. Here, for instance, is a sentence from a student’s scholarship-application essay:

Reflecting back and providing insight on what I gained from my four years in the system, I hopefully have allowed a plethora of new concepts and perhaps even new educational-administrative philosophies to surface.

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This student is trying furiously to write like a scholar. The passages from Geertz and Greenblatt use big words sensibly, as the best way to convey the authors’ complex and sharply observed arguments; 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 if he says something as plain as this:

In my four years of high school, I’ve learned a lot about how schools work and how students learn.

But this is not simpleminded at all—rather, it is simple, and far more powerful than the first version (once we get past the dazzle of all those big words).

The aim of this book is to convince you that plain, direct writing is the most effective way to express your ideas, even in college. Plainness makes it easier to spot your argument and harder to hide behind words. But simplicity is not necessarily easy. Indeed, this book will complicate writing for you by suggesting a number of things to think about as you write. But the effort will be worthwhile. Mastering a plain, clear style is an indispensable step in one’s education. You’re not in college to imitate the erudition of your professors or even to learn their opinions, but to develop your capacity for independent critical thinking and judgment. 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.

Learning to distinguish between clear and unclear writing will also help you understand what you read, both in college and elsewhere. Professional writing— memos, contracts, public documents, and the like—often seems intended to impede rather than promote understanding. (“A memorandum,” former Secretary of State Dean Acheson once observed, “is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.”) Nowadays a company is likely to call a loss “negative earnings”; bolder companies issue “pro forma” financial statements, a little Latin phrase that in effect lets them make up their own rules about what and how to count financial results. But deceptive language is not limited to the commercial sphere. Public broadcasting stations, of course, can’t have ads; instead, “enhanced underwriting” lets “underwriters” (not advertisers) buy air time on PBS shows. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, an experienced political figure whose slightest word could move markets, was famous for his opaque and Delphic style (after the Greek oracle whose predictions were often conveniently ambiguous). Chairman Greenspan would never bluntly call a recession a recession; the closest he would come would be a blurry phrase like “significant cyclical adjustment.”

George Orwell, the English novelist and essayist, said more than sixty years ago that insincere language was the curse of the modern age. Politicians, Orwell said, feared to speak the blunt truth to citizens, while even in democracies citizens failed

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to demand truth from their leaders. Orwell’s word for duplicitous language has entered the English language: “doublespeak.” In Orwell’s great novel 1984 the propaganda ministry—in charge of all the government’s lying—is called the Ministry of Truth. In his allegory Animal Farm an animal paradise turns into a dictatorship as the cleverest animals, the pigs, take over, justifying their power grab with an immortal formulation: “All animals are equal—but some are more equal than others.” Both stories pose in sharpest form the basic question of how we use language—to tell the truth as we see it, or to hide behind words. In a classic essay, “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell said that the renewal of politics and language would begin with the choices of ordinary people like you and me about how to speak and write: “If you simplify your English,” he challenges his reader, “… when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself” (1968, 139).

But unfortunately the trends Orwell saw in the 1940s have, if anything, strengthened. In politics, at work, at school we swim in a sea of doublespeak. Any half-decent politician or lawyer today can spew forth obfuscatory words “like a cuttlefish squirting out ink,” as Orwell put it (1968, 137). Enron, the poster child of 1990s corporate fraud, for years filed numbingly long financial statements full of obscure terms like “special purpose entities.” It was a strategy of deliberate opacity that let the company hide its fraud in plain sight, legally speaking (confused stock analysts mainly stayed mum for fear they’d be laughed out of their jobs). Today attorneys learn to speak in a camouflaged manner almost by reflex, as part of defending their clients. An attorney for Enron, for instance, fends off an accusation of misconduct on his client’s part: “I am unaware of any evidence that supports the allegation there was improper selling by members of the board or senior management” (CNN Newsroom, 2002). Such verbiage—windy, vague, almost automatically evasive—has been called a variety of things. Orwell called it the “inflated style” (1968, 136). Richard Lanham (1999) labels it the “official style.” I call it the pompous style.

Of course, not all grand and ornate writing is deceptive or unclear. Many great scholars, like the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, write prose that is complex and dense, yet famously clear. And passages like those of Geertz and Greenblatt quoted above possess clarity as well as power and dignity. Done properly, grand writing can be wondrously effective. But it is not generally a style that suits undergraduate college students. For most, adopting a sturdy, direct, plain style is a better choice. Learn to write plainly, and you will more likely write clearly as you take on deeper subjects and become a better stylist.

The pompous style muffles and depersonalizes action. It cloaks itself in the language of science, hoping to take on a sense of scientific objectivity and credibility. No police officer, for instance, would ever report, “I put him in a headlock.” Instead he would say, “The suspect was restrained.” A government

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agency like the Fish and Wildlife Service prefers the cool term “taking” to plainly saying that some animals die as a result of its policies; and it prefers the technical sound of “lethal control” to the bluntness of “sometimes we have to go out and shoot wolves that are killing livestock.”

Death, especially the killing of human beings, tends to bring forth the most strenuous applications of the pompous style. A politician answers accusations of long-ago war crimes when he was a soldier with the bland statement that the platoon he led “used lethal methods” (not only is the phrasing antiseptic; it evades the question of who was killed). An American military official, responding to concern about civilian deaths from NATO bombing in Kosovo in 1999, responds as inertly as possible: “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” (“Pentagon briefing,” 1999). The statement was not a lie but a practiced use of generalities and abstractions intended to lead the listener’s mind away from the specific and concrete—men, women, and children killed by errant NATO bombs. As Orwell pointed out more than a half-century ago, this is the chief educated idiom of our time: “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness” (1968, 133).

The tendency toward abstraction reaches every corner of society, but is especially common in public and academic settings. All of us shift discursive styles when we move from private to public settings—the next time you see ordinary people interviewed on TV after something newsworthy has happened in their neighborhood, listen to the formal and stilted way most of them speak in front of the camera. Sudden shifts between the pompous and plain styles can make us smile, as when a TV announcer explained why a football player had been thrown out of a game: “Jay Leeuwenberg was the recipient of his anger. That means that’s the guy he kicked.”

To be sure, various degrees of formality are appropriate in various kinds of academic writing, and it’s hard to write (or indeed think) about ideas without using abstractions. But none of this requires pomposity. So accustomed are we to the pompous style as the voice of authority that students can’t be blamed for thinking it the way they should write in school. Indeed our educational institutions—ahem, schools—do much to encourage this belief. Children learn to read and write short, plain sentences—”See Spot run”—then grow older and begin to write as if “Observe Spot in the process of running” were somehow an improvement. By the time they arrive at college, almost all revere formality in and of itself as the mark of good writing. And by and large they learn to write like George Eliot’s self- important man of business, Borthrop Trumbull, talked: “Things never began with Mr. Trumbull: they always commenced.”

The Borthrop Trumbulls of this world, successful and stuck in their ways, may be

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a lost cause. But in the following pages I’m going to try to change your mind, at least, about the use and abuse of written English. This book will help you develop a sound college writing style, a style that combines the essential elements of academic convention with clear expression. It will show you how to make your writing clearer and more precise by developing a style whose hallmarks are plain words, active verbs, and uncluttered syntax. We’ll begin with concision and clarity, emphasizing the importance of verbs. Then we’ll consider how to give writing a sense of flow, how to punctuate effectively, and how to make your writing more graceful. Next comes a chapter on sources. In the final two chapters we’ll move to larger structural elements, with thoughts on paragraphs and the beginnings and endings of essays. At the end there’s an appendix on common document and citation formats (CMS, MLA, and APA), but our main aim is showing you how clarity and plainness can make you a better writer and a clearer thinker. Let’s commence begin.

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1 Concision

CONCISION, the leanness or lack of fat in a piece of writing, is a natural place to begin because wordiness is so common in student writing and because (unlike losing weight), writing concisely isn’t really so hard. It usually works by process of elimination: we watch what we say, ask ourselves whether what we’ve said is essential to what we mean, and eliminate what isn’t. The real work is often figuring out what exactly we wanted to say in the first place. But trying to be concise helps with that too—by helping us see what we don’t mean.

Concision can add remarkable grace to our prose. It also makes our prose easier to read and understand. Yet many of us are afraid of writing concisely because doing so can make us feel exposed. Concision leaves us fewer words to hide behind. Our insights and ideas might appear puny stripped of those inessential words, phrases, and sentences in which we rough them out. We might even wonder, were we to cut out the fat, would anything be left? It’s no wonder, then, that many students make little attempt to be concise—many, in fact, go out of their way not to be—and so often couple this strategy with a style just as mistaken. Though you can certainly be wordy without writing pompously—and the other way around—the two go hand in hand so often that it’s useful to consider them together. Here’s how lots of students think they have to write in college:

Prospero is faced with the necessity of deciding whether to accept forgiveness for the actions of his brother or remain in a state of hostility. It is evident that interpersonal conflict is responsible for many organizational problems experienced by businesses. The role of women in households in medieval Europe was arrayed across a number of possibilities of increasing or decreasing activity and independence, depending on variables such as status, wealth, religion, or region.

That’s the collegiate pompous style in action: big words, self-important phrasing, a flat tone, long gobs of prepositional phrases, nouns galore, and abuse of the passive voice—all of it run up the flag pole to see if the powers that be will salute.

The pompous style spreads like crabgrass, and can be as hard to root out. Here’s a legal sentence crafted in classic pompous style, from Maryland’s Annotated Code of Laws:

Any investigation, inquiry, hearing, or examination which the Board is empowered by law to hold or undertake may be held or undertaken by or before the majority of the members of the Board or its secretary, and the finding or order of members of the Board or the representative, when concurred in by the majority of the members of the Board, shall have the same force and effect as the finding or order of the whole Board. (Article 56, Section 497). (77 words)

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This sentence is a parade of legalese. And even if we don’t understand it, its gassiness is almost reassuring—this is what we’ve come to expect “the law” to sound and feel like. But here’s the same code, revised when the state, in a temporary fit of sanity, decided to make its laws intelligible to ordinary people (Hackett 1989, B1):

A majority of the members then serving on the Board is a quorum. (13 words)

The result is an 83 percent reduction in length. It took courage to get rid of those twenty-dollar words like empowered, finding, and concurred. But now we have a sentence that is much easier to read. It sounds strange to us, perhaps—aren’t laws supposed to sound like, well, laws? But if one imagines the thousands of laws, the book upon book of legal code, that could be simplified and compressed, one is likely to agree that from a citizen’s perspective this is a vast improvement. (It is not incidental that the most enduring laws in Western culture, the Ten Commandments, are expressed in a succinct, lapidary style.)

Here’s another example, from a different professional setting but with no less pomposity. This is a technical manual for programmers revising a corporate computer system:

To ensure that the new system being developed, or the existing system being modified, will provide users with the timely, accurate, and complete information they require to properly perform their functions and responsibilities, it is necessary to assure that the new or modified system will cover all necessary aspects of the present automated or manual systems being replaced. To gain this assurance, it is essential that documentation be made of the entities of the present systems which will be modified or eliminated. (82 words)

This passage displays the same faults as the legal sentence. Its writer tries to convey its importance by stamping pretentious words all over it and piling on the verbiage. But the passage lulls the reader to sleep and thus defeats the point of writing in the first place. Bold pruning yields this core meaning:

Make sure to document all planned changes so any mistakes you make can be corrected. (15 words)

Another 80 percent reduction in length. As with the legal sentence, the revision may sound less important (though that mistakes you make might catch the attention of those programmers who hold the future of the company in their hands). But it has lost not a shred of meaning. (That might be easier to see if we keep in mind that this instruction would occur in the context of a wider discussion of the computer system and planned changes.) If you’re not sure the revision is really an improvement, consider what it would be like to read through page after page of the original. You’d go to sleep. Now conduct the same thought-experiment with the revision, and ask yourself which version you’d rather read.

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The Pompous Style at School

College students begin their training in the pompous style innocently enough, with sentences like this:

To satisfy her hunger for nutrition, she ate the bread.

Once you’ve decided to write in a formal tone, stilted phrases like hunger for nutrition arise almost automatically. But the sentence’s tone is just too weighty for its message. Simplifying makes the sentence shorter and stronger:

She was hungry, so she ate the bread.

In the following instances, see if you can figure out what gets changed or cut to go from pompous or wordy prose to plain prose:

Pompous or Wordy Original Plain Revision

It was discussed in this reading that … Tannen argues that …

The scene is very important because it helps us understand Cleopatra early on in the play.

This early scene helps us understand Cleopatra.

In the play, Menas, who is a pirate, says this about the marriage: “I think the policy of that purpose made more in the marriage than the love of the parties” (2.6.115–6).

The pirate Menas dismisses the marriage as a political arrangement.

The film and video industry category can specifically be broken down into subsequent industries of motion picture and videotape production, motion picture and videotape distribution, movie houses, and cable and other pay-television services.

The film and video industry category consists of production, distribution, movie houses, and cable and other pay-television services.

Some of AOL Time Warner’s major media competitors include News Corporation Ltd, which is a global media and entertainment media power located in Australia, and Viacom Inc., which is based in the United States and is one of the world’s leading media companies.

AOL Time Warner’s major global media competitors include Australia-based News Corporation Ltd and U.S.-based Viacom Inc.

Do you see any patterns in the revisions? There’s a hefty reduction in the total number of words. About 70 percent of the words in the original passages have been eliminated. But how does one decide what to cut? Here are some of the structural changes that make these revisions more concise: the verbs have gotten stronger (fewer linking verbs and less passive voice, and more active verbs in the active voice); adjective phrases and clauses have been pushed into short adjectives that precede nouns; some adverbs have been cut; repetitive words and phrases have

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been squeezed together with tricks like parallelism; and a difficult quotation has been paraphrased. These structural changes have moved the writing away from the pompous style and toward a more concise, vigorous, verb-centered style.

Later we’ll look closer at some of these techniques. For now, let’s focus on gaining the skill and confidence to pluck out empty modifiers. The pompous style prefers description over action, so it bristles with adjectives and adverbs. A useful step in unlearning the pompous style is to hunt for modifiers that add little or nothing:

Original Revision

Women held an important place in social society. Women held an important place insociety.

Capitalism is accompanied by the ideal of freedom as something to be attained.

Capitalism is accompanied by the ideal of freedom.

An ideal is, by definition, something to be attained. But sometimes a student resists cutting empty words because they seem to add

important information. What do you think about the following cut?

Original Revision

From a political-institutional point of view, the Federalist Papers were the first full formulation of federalism as a theory.

The Federalist Papers were thefirst full formulation of federalism as a theory.

Political-institutional is the kind of claptrap that makes the pompous style so tempting for inexperienced writers. It sounds weighty but adds nothing. The “point of view,” whatever that means here, is obvious from the content of the sentence— especially if we remember that this sentence will be read in its context, as part of an exploration of the topic.

Another example:

Original Revision

These are the practical contingency management implications:

These are the practical implications:

If we imagine the context, plainly this sentence occurs within a larger discussion in which the topic, contingency management, has already been introduced (otherwise the use of the phrase in this sentence would make no sense). The topic’s repetition here blunts the energy of a sturdy little sentence.

When a student is wise enough to use a good verb, intensifying adverbs often backfire:

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Original Revision

Euthyphro continues to further justify his actions. Euthyphro continues to justify hisactions.

The play carefully examines the disorder brought by civil war.

The play examines the disorder brought by civil war.

These adverbs add nothing to the already strong verbs. They are just traces of the pompous style in otherwise good sentences. Keep in mind Mark Twain’s advice: “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.”

Since adverbs often prop up weak verbs, sometimes cutting an adverb will push the writer to choose a stronger verb:

Original Revision

Antony plays on the crowd’s emotions and successfully obtains their support.

Antony plays on the crowd’s emotions and wins their support.

Here the writer, trying to fix the problem of an unhelpful modifier, realized that the solution was to put the sentence’s key action into its verb:

Original Revision

Socrates convincingly explains his position to Crito. Socrates convinces Crito that it would be unjust to flee. / Eventually, Socrates convinces Crito.

Socrates convinces Crito by itself would be a bit abrupt, so the writer’s next step was to decide how to add enough value to the sentence to make it read well. Two possibilities are shown.

Wordiness, as we’ve seen, is often tied to other problems, and the effort to make one’s writing concise often brings about other improvements. Consider this opening paragraph of a student essay about the Italian Renaissance political thinker Machiavelli:

Machiavelli best supports republics in The Discourses. His favorite republic is ancient Rome. He explains and supports his admiration in this work. The two major aspects that Machiavelli discusses are that the Romans were a great empire and that they had a powerful army. (44 words)

Right away the reader stumbles over best supports. What does it mean to say that Machiavelli supports republics? And why say best, a word that implies a comparison? As is often true of unclear writing, its writer has good ideas but hasn’t yet succeeded in articulating them. The first of these is that Machiavelli praises

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republics in a book entitled The Discourses. The revision will build on this plainer verb, praises. The writer’s second idea, only hinted at in that distracting word best, is that Machiavelli’s praise of republics in The Discourses differs from his perspective in his other famous book, The Prince, where he seems to prefer monarchies. (We’d only know this in context, so to speak—if we were along for the ride with that student—but bear with me.) Mulling over ways to bring out this second point, the writer realizes she can skip it because it’s not the point of her essay:

Original Revision 1 Revision 2

Machiavelli best supports republics in The Discourses.

Machiavelli best praisesrepublics in The Discourses.

Machiavelli praisesrepublics in The Discourses.

There’s still work to do. Look back at the original paragraph. The transitions between sentences are weak, and the third sentence adds little to the first. Here’s the revised paragraph:

Machiavelli praises republics in The Discourses. Above all he praises the Roman republic, because it had a powerful army, and conquered and held a vast empire. (26 words)

The revision is 40 percent shorter. It keeps the same ideas (except for cutting the abortive contrast with The Prince) but expresses them with strong verbs (praises, had, conquered, and held) and good links (Above all and because).

Finally, note that the revision orders and expands the argument. The original version listed as major aspects (whatever that means) that Rome was an empire and had a strong army. The revision reverses the order of these items, since a strong army is what allowed Rome to gain its empire. And while the original says merely that the Romans were a great empire, the revision turns this identity into actions, conquered and held.

Here’s a student trying to cram too many ideas into too small a space:

Alien 3 is a fast-paced, emotionally tense film composed of a vast array of symbols and meanings which reflect the political debates concerning women’s reproductive rights in 1990s America. (29 words)

The idea is a good one, but the sentence, running without a pause, is too long for easy reading (pauses help readers make it through long sentences). And some of the verbiage veers into pomposity—a windy, hackneyed phrase like vast array should be a red flag. The solution is to cut to the core of the argument:

Alien 3 is a powerful allegory of the 1990s American debate about women’s reproductive rights. (15 words)

The revision is half as long. Note how the windy composed of a vast array of

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symbols and meanings is captured and even sharpened in a single well-chosen word, allegory. Emotionally tense comes from the same pompous-style tendency: tension is emotional by definition, so emotionally tense is redundant. Powerful, the revision’s choice of adjective, is vaguer and broader than fast-paced and tense, but that’s a good choice here, where we want to focus the reader’s attention on that key word allegory.

Note the mock profundity of this example from a marketing paper:

The company uses specific determination methods to make distinctions between customer segments. (12 words)

Specific, as used above, is a favorite pompous-style word, a vague term masquerading as a concrete one. And the gassy uses specific determination methods to make distinctions can be compressed into one word:

The company distinguishes between customer segments.

This is much better, but the revision isn’t complete. It feels bare and overly general. The writer should provide more information to make the sentence feel full enough:

The company distinguishes between three customer segments. (7 words)

That’s more like it. The sentence goes from vapid to informative—a good lesson that concision is more than many words versus few, or long versus short. Here, as so often, the challenge to be concise compels the writer to say something concrete and informative.

Now let’s look at a sentence that replaces a typical pompous-style verb-swaddle with a strong verb:

Original Revision

This secrecy becomes very damaging to Hamlet. This secrecy cripples Hamlet.

Many students are uneasy with changes of this kind. They seem too bold. Becomes very damaging has a safe clinical sound, while cripples sounds almost rude to students schooled in the pompous style. But for anyone with an ear for English, the revision is better. It can stand by itself or serve as a frame on which to add nuance:

This secrecy cripples Hamlet by destroying his ability to trust.

Some may protest that this kind of revision changes the meaning. I would answer that the original sentence had already changed the meaning—it took what was a good idea on the writer’s part, and sucked the life out of it.

Concision, to sum up, may start out simple—cut the fat!—but it becomes more

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complicated as we work deeper into our prose. Concision represents a careful, patient process of revision in which we weigh every word and phrase and think hard about how we can better develop, organize, articulate, and refine our ideas. Most writers produce wordy first drafts. Good writers realize that sad fact and are willing to spend time tightening their prose. Concision, in other words, is more a sign of perspiration than inspiration. As Pascal wrote in 1656, “This letter is long because I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”

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2 Clarity

MOST OF US think our writing is clearer than it really is. We know what we mean, so we see it in what we write. But good writers see their words from the reader’s perspective, because clarity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Good writers ask, “Does my reader understand the words I’m using, in the way I’m using them? Have I explained enough so that she knows what I’m talking about? Is my evidence persuasive? Have I thought about possible objections? Is there a logical arrangement to my argument that will help the reader follow it? Have I used good links and transitions to keep her pointed in the right direction?”

One problem in answering these questions is that readers differ, so there’s no one standard of clear writing. A general audience, for instance, needs more background and explanation than a scholarly one. Unless you know your audience, it’s impossible to be assured that what you’re writing will be well-received. Most undergraduate essays should be aimed at an audience of one’s better classmates unless a teacher says otherwise. Such a standard will help you decide how much to explain, what terms to define, and what tone to strike: competent, disciplined plainness.

People tend to perceive a sentence as clear when its “narrative”—generally, the story it tells or the relationship it describes—corresponds to its grammatical structure. In other words, if you wish to write clearly, begin by making your narrative’s characters the subjects of sentences, and their actions and identities the predicates. Some examples:

This process is called continental drift. Over time it has reshaped the surface of the earth. Lavoisier gave Priestley’s “dephlogisticated air” its modern scientific name, oxygen. On December 11, 2001, China formally joined the World Trade Organization. Early in his career Shakespeare wrote two narrative poems. Historically, most patriarchies have institutionalized force through their legal systems. (Kate Millett, Sexual Politics)

The basic pattern is who (or what) does what. Logical actors like Lavoisier, China, Shakespeare, and patriarchies are made grammatical subjects. (In the first example a pronoun, it, points back to continental drift.) Actions—reshaped, gave, joined, wrote, have institutionalized—are expressed as verbs. These sentences are clear because their grammar matches their narrative.

When a writer doesn’t do this the result is likely to strike us as confusing—and sometimes even comical, as in this passage from an accident report filed with an insurance company:

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The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of its way, when it struck my front end.

Trying to find something else to blame for his one-car accident, the writer gives the telephone pole a life of its own. How? By making it the grammatical subject of two active verbs, was approaching and struck. Note that you can’t chalk this up to lack of skill, but to a clever, if unsuccessful, attempt to hide behind words.

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. Muddying up the question of agency is the root cause of most unclear student writing. Consider this passage from an essay about a court case:

A motion was requested by the defendant for the case to be dismissed on the grounds that there was a failure on the part of the prosecution to establish the facts. This was accepted by the judge, and dismissal of the case was ordered. (44 words)

True, the passage describes actions and identifies the actors. But its clunky design makes it hard to figure out who’s doing what. Here’s a clearer revision:

The defendant moved to dismiss the case on the grounds that the prosecution had not established the facts. The judge agreed and dismissed the case. (25 words)

The revision is about 40 percent shorter.

who the defendant the prosecution the judge

did filed had not established agreed and dismissed

what a motion facts the case

To answer the question Who did what? you’d have to take apart the original and rearrange its pieces. The grammar of the revision, by contrast, makes answering this question a breeze. The revision shows three techniques for achieving greater clarity: (1) choose verbs over nominalizations, (2) choose active verbs over linking verbs, and (3) choose the active voice over the passive voice (see Diagram 1 for help with these terms).

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None of these techniques should be considered an absolute rule. There are many times a good writer uses nominalizations, linking verbs, and the passive voice. But since those three elements constitute the structural core of the pompous style, and are habitually overused by college students, it’s best to view them skeptically and know how to avoid them.

1. Choose Verbs over Nominalizations

A nominalization is an action expressed as a noun rather than a verb, like analysis or assessment rather than analyze or assess (some words in English, especially short words like talk or work, look the same as verbs and nouns; it’s their function that counts). Nominalizations often end in -tion or -ion:

The common -ion endings make it easy to find nominalizations in writing, and once

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you start looking for them you’ll find a lot, especially in formal writing—as H. W. Fowler lamented years ago:

Turgid flabby English is full of abstract nouns; the commonest ending of abstract nouns is -tion, and to count the -ion words in what one has written … is one of the simplest and most effective means of making oneself less unreadable. (1983, 640)

By changing actions into nouns, 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. Consider the following:

Action in Verb Action in Nominalization

I did all I could. A full complement of actions wasundertaken.

We are carefully analyzing the data. A systematic analysis of the data isunderway.

In sentences like these, which report on the scientific method, nominalizations (and their partner the passive voice) are commonly—and sensibly—used, because there is no real doubt about who is doing the actions (scientists write up their own findings). But when agency is uncertain, then nominalizations tend to make prose seem confusing or clunky, as in the following examples:

Nominalized Original Clearer Revision

The play is an examination of the conflict the conspirators face after the assassination of Julius Caesar.

The play examines the conflict theconspirators face after they assassinate Julius Caesar.

The love Antony has for Cleopatra is much greater than any love he has for his wife.

Antony loves Cleopatra more than he loves his wife.

Assessment of his test performance showed satisfactory achievement.

He passed the test.

Another example:

Nominalized Original Clearer Revision

Today, society witnesses the steady progress of women toward equality with their increasing presence in the working world and in government and their gradual move outside the home.

Today, society witnesses women’s steady progress toward equality. Moving beyond the limits of the home, women are claiming new and increasing authority in government, business, and other traditionally male-dominated areas.

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This revision divides the long string of words into two sentences, which already makes it easier to follow. It also aligns the character with the grammatical subject, by making women the subject of the verb in the second sentence. True, the revision is longer, but its new readability more than makes up for the added length. Concision isn’t an end in itself, but a means to clarity.

2. Choose Active Verbs over Linking Verbs

Not all verbs work the same way. Active verbs convey action—he ran, she spoke, the patient suffered a relapse. Linking verbs convey states of being or description —my friend is in London, she seems smart, it will be difficult.* It’s natural to use linking verbs when you’re defining or describing things:

According to Kübler-Ross there are five stages of grief or dying. Poland’s Solidarity was the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc. Machiavelli’s cynicism seems utterly contemporary.

So far so good. But when this grammar of identity is used to convey actions, things get ugly. When Bill Clinton was being sued for sexual harassment by Paula Jones, his attorney told the judge in the case that the president knew of an affidavit (false, as it turned out) by Monica Lewinsky, which affirmed, as the attorney put it, that “there is absolutely no sex of any kind” with the president. The linking-verb construction might sound clumsy, but it cleverly treated sex impersonally. The attorney—clearly a master of the pompous style—did all he could to avoid conjuring any image of the president in flagrante delicto. The inert linking verb also finessed the issue of timing (past or present?). President Clinton later tried to rebut an accusation of perjury by hiding behind the vagueness of this particular linking verb: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” (“The President’s Testimony,” 1998, B3).

That’s a notorious example from sworn testimony, but linking-verb constructions make it all too easy to obscure actions in everyday speech. If the action isn’t in its natural place—the verb—where is it? As you probably suspect, in a nominalization. Linking verbs and nominalizations occur together as elements of the pompous style, so replacing them in tandem tends to result in more dynamic sentences:

Linking-Verb Original Active-Verb Revision

A mood of ambivalence is the main effect of the poem’s language and imagery.

The poem’s language and imagery evoke a mood of ambivalence.

Motion toward a light source is a behavior of Euglena, a single-celled organism,

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Euglena, a singlecelled organism. will move toward a light source.

There was a failure on the part of the accounting firm to engage in a thorough examination of the transactions of the company.

The accounting firm failed toexamine the company’s transactions carefully.

The third example shows a common trait of linking-verb sentences—a chain of prepositional phrases that makes for a plodding, monotonous rhythm:

There was a failure on the part of the accounting firm to engage in a thorough examination of the transactions of the company.

Since the pompous style prefers nouns to verbs, it tends to overuse the prepositional phrase, that handy device for stapling nouns into sentences. When you build sentences on active verbs rather than nominalizations and linking verbs, you’ll use fewer prepositional phrases. Now let’s turn to the third technique for writing clearly.

3. Choose the Active Voice over the Passive Voice

Sentences written in the passive voice turn the usual narrative pattern upside down. The subject doesn’t do anything—it is acted upon: A car was stolen. The doer of the action often drops out altogether. Before looking at abuses of the passive voice, consider some examples that make good use of it:

The document was found in the governor’s personal library. Hamlet was written around 1600. The particle’s rate of decay was measured.

In all three of these sentences the passive voice works well (though to decide for sure we’d want to see the context and know the writer’s intention). In general, the passive voice makes sense when you want to emphasize an action or its recipient and don’t care about the agent. If you do want to identify the agent in the passive voice, use a prepositional phrase beginning with by: Hamlet was written by Shakespeare around 1600.

You can also use the passive voice to give a sentence more pizzazz by identifying the agent at the end of the sentence. In the following two-sentence sequence, for instance, the writer uses the active voice and then the passive, according to his

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purpose in each sentence:

Horses, mammoths, reindeer, bison, mountain goats, lions, and a host of other mammals cascade in image along the cave walls over a distance of almost a hundred yards, over three hundred depictions in all. Delicately executed and meticulously observed, these varied and overlapping images were made by people of the late Ice Age, perhaps thirteen thousand years ago. (Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human)

The first sentence, with its active voice and strong verb (cascade), emphasizes the lively energy of the paintings. The second sentence uses the passive voice and a by phrase to identify the agent at the end. That lets the second sentence start where the first leaves off. If the second sentence were recast in the active voice—say, People of the late Ice Age made these varied and overlapping images, perhaps thirteen thousand years ago—the passage would lose much of its interest (though none of its meaning).

A classic use of the passive voice comes from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s address to Congress the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

Why the passive voice here? To reinforce FDR’s argument that America had done nothing to provoke the attack. Later, the president uses the active voice in a strong parallel series to emphasize Japan’s active perfidy:

Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. This morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

At the end, not wanting to leave his listeners with a message of their country’s passivity, Roosevelt again uses the active voice—this time to assert America’s unbroken resolve: “The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”

In sum, when Roosevelt wanted to emphasize innocence he used the passive voice. When he wanted to emphasize action he used the active voice. His masterly use of voice is the essence of good style: when how we say something suits what we say.

The passive voice has its uses, as Roosevelt’s famous speech shows. But most of the time when good writers tell, describe, or explore, they reach for the active voice. If the passive voice dominates someone’s style, it’s a fair assumption that he or she is more interested in obscuring or ducking questions of responsibility than in frank expression. Indeed, politicians and others eager to appear contrite without

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actually taking responsibility cherish one particular passive construction: Mistakes were made. Here are some prizewinners:

Deng: Why is there still such a big noise being made about Watergate? Kissinger: That is a series of almost incomprehensible events.… It has its roots in the fact that some mistakes were made, but also, when you change many policies, you make many, many enemies.

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger speaking with Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping (April 14, 1974)

The execution of these policies was flawed and mistakes were made. Let me just say it was not my intent to do business with Khomeini, to trade weapons for hostages, nor to undercut our policy of antiterrorism.

Ronald Reagan, radio broadcast (December 6, 1986)

Mistakes were made here by people who either did it deliberately or inadvertently. Now, others—it’s up to others to decide whether those mistakes were made deliberately or inadvertently.

Bill Clinton, press conference (January 28, 1997)

Mistakes were made that cost my son’s life and all I can say is I’m so sorry for what happened. Brian Peterson, on trial with his girlfriend for killing

their infant son, in court testimony (July 8, 1998)

If in hindsight we … discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.

Edward Cardinal Egan, Archbishop of New York, letter to parishioners on the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal (April 20–1, 2002)

At least the speakers of these grudging admissions chose their words carefully and, in a narrow sense, skillfully. But students tend to use the passive voice merely as a bad habit, part of the pompous style. The usual result? Turgid prose:

Passive Voice Active Voice

The Taft-Hartley Act was also used to support the Court’s decision.

The Court also cited the Taft- Hartley Act.

While reading Mill’s “On Liberty,” the concept of personal freedom was discussed.

In “On Liberty,” Mill discusses the concept of personal freedom.

The view of the mother is displayed when Garland writes, “She didn’t want to leave our home and move west.”

Garland says his mother “didn’twant to leave our home and move west.”

It was discussed in this reading that it is important for us to understand the people with whom we work.

Smith argues that it is important tounderstand the people we work with.

In the novel’s early chapters, a large emphasis is placed upon his pride.

The novel’s early chapters emphasize his pride.

Clarity and Honesty

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The three techniques we’ve discussed for writing clearer prose work well most of the time and will help you develop a lively style. Violating them indiscriminately will saddle your readers with lifeless, shapeless sentences littered with prepositions and ugly, boring nouns (as nominalizations—even the name is ugly— usually are). Throw in big words, and you’ve got the full-blown pompous style.

Some people instinctively turn to the pompous style when things get rough. Consider an example from the Bible, when Moses returns to the Israelites after he has spent forty days on the mountaintop. He’s bringing the Ten Commandments, but while he’s been gone all hell has broken loose. The Israelites, feeling abandoned in the wilderness, have begun worshipping a new idol that Moses’ brother, Aaron, made: a golden calf. Furious, Moses smashes the Ten Commandments and turns to Aaron, who was supposed to have been in charge during his absence. What happened?, he wants to know. Where did the golden calf come from? Aaron doesn’t flat-out lie, but he tries to weasel out of his role in the debacle:

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. (Exod. 32:23)

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

A more recent example of using language the weasel way comes from Kosovo, 1999. A young Serbian man said this to an American reporter:

We have to accept the facts. Very bad things happened in Kosovo, and we are going to pay for that. (Booth 1999, B5)

The statement starts off with a seemingly forthright acceptance of responsibility. Now comes the weaseling, starting with the no-agent agency of very bad things happened. But there’s more: by rhetorically separating those bad things that happened from we—Serbians presumably—the sentence calls into question the legitimacy of holding that blurry we responsible. By the end of the statement the Serbs in Kosovo emerge not as victimizers but victims.

Human rights organizations tell us that in China (to take another example not on our doorstep), investigators routinely torture suspects during interrogation sessions. Chinese authorities don’t like to admit this. Official transcripts of interrogation sessions in China thus require some reading between the lines:

Education takes place. (Rosenthal 2000, A10)

This bland, chilling statement could be Exhibit A in how to use words to conceal and evade.

No matter the technique for doing so, writing clearly is in the end not just a matter

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of technique or skill but of will. “The great enemy of clear language,” Orwell said, “is insincerity” (1968, 137). Clarity is an ethical imperative. It takes honesty to say what we see and think, and courage to tell the truth. The ethics of clarity hold for college students no less than for diplomats, police, soldiers, politicians, and CEOs. How you choose to speak and write in school shapes how you will act—and what you will become—later in life.

_____________ * The forms of to be in statements like she was running or my friend is studying in London are not linking

verbs, but auxiliaries that are part of compound verbs (the other part is a participle: the -ing forms here are present participles).

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3 Flow

AN ESSAY is made of passages, and a passage, as its name implies, involves motion —movement from point A to point B. A reader is thus a kind of traveler. If the writer has done his job, the travel will prove worthwhile and maybe even entertaining. On rare occasions the traveler may even feel magically transported by the grace of what she’s reading. This feeling comes from hard work on the writer’s part, yet there are tricks for getting a reader from A to B (or Z for that matter), for achieving writing that seems to flow. Consider the following:

Original Revision

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are among the five stages of the process of grief, said a psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book, On Death and Dying. Many people were influenced by the book, which was published in 1969 and was a bestseller. A refusal to accept the outcome commences the process.…

In On Death and Dying (1969), the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross popularized the notion of grief as a process. According to Kübler-Ross there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In the first stage, denial.…

The original’s ungainly first sentence lists terms before offering any explanation or background. Among implies a partial list, and the reader may skip back and count the terms (we want the reader moving forward, not backward). Instead of building a bridge from the list to the last sentence by repeating the terms denial and stage, the original passage uses different words; its refusal to accept in place of denial is a distracting echo of a different term. The original’s second sentence, on the book’s influence, takes up too much space and diverts attention from the paragraph’s main function, introducing Kübler-Ross’ ideas.

The revision divides the long first sentence in two, shaping the flow of information and allowing a pause after introductory material. Its sentences end emphatically. The revision distills the original second sentence into one word, popularized. Its third sentence builds links by repeating important terms, stage and denial. All of this helps speed the reader on.

In this chapter we’ll look at four techniques for 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. These four techniques will help you write prose that is easier to read and understand.

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1. Use Consistent Characters

Good essays unfold like stories—not in the sense of being dramatic or exciting, but in the sense of showing characters doing things or being described. Here is a passage about the American political system in the 19th century:

The American system Bryce was describing was one whose regulations were few, whose resources were many, and whose central government was unobtrusive. It was a system ideally suited for congressional government. (Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism)

American system binds this passage together, not just because it is the subject of both sentences, but because of those little words like one, whose, and it that point back to it. Note too how the passage ends by handing off, as it were, to a new character: congressional government.

The lesson is that you need to control how your reader moves from one character to the next. The next example fails to do that. It presents a jumble of characters, bringing the reader’s thinking to a halt as he struggles to figure out who is doing what:

Original Machiavelli’s view of Christianity comes from a political standpoint. Morality is taken into little consideration when religion is discussed in his works.

Even though it sticks to a single topic, the passage feels choppy. The revision addresses the profusion of characters by building upon one, Machiavelli:

Revision Machiavelli judges religion from a political standpoint. He virtually ignores the moral teachings of Christianity.

Here’s another example of how thinking about characters can make a passage easier to read. We’ll go through several revisions, to see how writing can improve step by step:

Original Revision 1

The idea from Macgregor’s book that stands out is the fact that there is self-control and selfdirection.

Macgregor emphasizes self-control and self-direction.

The revision makes Macgregor the character—a much better choice than an abstract character like idea or fact. But more revision is called for. Since it isn’t clear whose self-control and self-direction Macgregor means, the writer identifies another important character:

Revision 2

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Macgregor emphasizes self-control and self-direction on the part of employees.

Better, but self-control and self-direction on the part of employees is ungainly, so the writer seeks a better term and considers making employees a more active character. This prompts further thinking, and the writer decides to provide more detail about what employees feel and why it matters:

Revision 3 Macgregor argues that employees who feel a sense of autonomy will have higher motivation and productivity.

Exploring a single topic often means treating several different characters. An essay about continental drift, for instance, needs to explain the process by considering the structures and dynamics of the earth’s surface and interior. Its sequence of characters might look like this:

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

We might encounter these characters in a passage like this:

The earth looks unchanging, but it is not. The Atlantic Ocean, for instance, is spreading by about two centimeters a year. The continent of Africa is being slowly torn apart down its middle, at the Great Rift Valley. India is gradually crashing into Asia, a pileup that created and is still lifting the Himalayas. The whole surface of the earth is in flux, as the continents crash together and pull apart. This process, long dismissed as a fantasy but confirmed in recent decades, is called continental drift. Over hundreds of millions of years it has reshaped the surface of the earth.

Continental drift is caused by the motion of convection currents in the earth’s mantle, a layer of molten rock that lies beneath the crust. The crust itself is not solid, but consists of rigid slabs or plates.…

In the following passage from an economics paper, the student thought she was sticking to one topic, the benefits of foreign trade, but the passage lacks flow because it treats characters sloppily. It begins and ends with one character, China, but switches in the middle to another, the United States (denoted with an adjective and an unacademic we):

China stands to gain from increasing trade. Throughout the 1990s, 30 percent of American economic growth came from foreign trade (Garten 23). With the opening of China’s markets, we stand to have even more economic growth from overseas, while China will also benefit greatly.

Either character, China or the United States, may be the appropriate one to focus on, depending on the writer’s intentions—or both, perhaps, in successive paragraphs or sections. The key is to select and move among characters according to a sensible design.

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2. Use Pronouns and Other Pointers

Inexperienced writers tend to prefer big words to little ones. But experienced writers, less anxious to show off their learning with every word, make frequent use of some of the shortest and humblest words in English—definite pronouns, possessive adjectives, relative pronouns, and relative adjectives. These little words point (or relate), in their respective ways, to something already named or known (an antecedent). The pointer might function as a subject of its clause (e.g., I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they, who, that, which, this, that) or as its object (e.g., me, you, him, her, it, us, you, them, whom, this, that). The pointer can refer to the antecedent in its own right or merely in its capacity as a possessor of something (e.g., my, your, his, her, its, our, your, their, whose). The beauty of these little words is that they eliminate the need to repeat the antecedent; they allow you to focus attention on the antecedent’s qualities or actions:

As Mahayana Buddhism spread across Asia, it came into contact with peoples of many different cultures and mentalities who interpreted the Buddha’s doctrine from their own point of view, elaborating many of its subtle points in great detail and adding their own original ideas. In this way they kept Buddhism alive over the centuries and developed highly sophisticated philosophies with profound psychological insights. (Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, emphasis added)

Humble pronouns and other pointers permit powerful effects. The historian William Manchester, for instance, concludes a dense and detailed paragraph on European power politics in the 1930s with a strong sentence built on a relative pronoun: “This was the final blow to appeasement.” Inexperienced writers tend not to trust the power of such simple effects, even going out of their way to avoid them: