Nuts and bolts of college writing 2nd edition

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Copyright © 2013 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

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Cover and interior designs by Abigail Coyle Composition by William Hartman

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. 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.