... some manner, to live, and look tolerably well,
notwithstanding their despair and the continued absence of their
lover; and some have even been known to recover so far as to be
inclined to take another ... www.tailieuduhoc.org
STOPS
following sentence is an example (the Duke of Wellington is
commenting with pleasant cynicism upon the capacity of
young ladies to endure the absence of lovers gone to war):
They ... using
commas with adverbials must be understood as loose gener-
alizations, which skillful writers frequently ignore or adapt to
their particular need to be emphatic or clear or rhythmic.
Single-Word...
... behooves
you, then, to create an appropriate tone and to avoid
pomposity, say, or will put readers off.
Here are a few examples of how skillful writers make tone
work for them.
Tone Toward Subject
Toward ... goes a long way toward
avoiding a tone of cocksureness and restoring at least a sem-
blance of two-way on that unavoidably one-way street
from writer to reader. Thus a scholar writing about Chaucer's
love ... conversation are to
inform, or to be informed, to please or to persuade, wish well
meaning sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good
by a positive assuming manner that seldom fails to disgust,...
... Girls don't like to be told that you have to stay
home and study when they want to go to a show or go dancing.
[6] So they find some other boy who doesn't have to study all the
time. ... more reluctant to admit it.
John
Charles R. Forbes went to jail. Albert B. Fall went to jail. Alien
Property Custodian Thomas W. Miller went to jail.
Samuel Hopkins Adams
Such plants to operate successfully ... sentence
to another. Coherence belongs to the substructure of the par-
agraph, to relationships of thought, feeling, and perception.
Both necessary if a paragraph is to be truly unified.
Coherence
To...
... accustomed to the law and order of the present
day to understand the dangers which threatened the Jacobean trav-
eller. The seas swarmed with pirates; so that few merchantmen
dared to put to sea ... relics, and gave his life into
the guidance of his spiritual director. The Protestant tore open the
machinery of the miracles, flung the bones and ragged garments
into the fire, and treated priests ... subject in its totality. Organ-
izing around 1, 2, and 3 emphasizes particular likenesses or
differences. It all depends on what you want to do. In the
following case the writer elected to organize...
... clear to the reader. If you are defining a word, un-
derline it (equivalent to italic type). In the following para-
graph, for instance, the writer wishes to make clear how the
word history is ... compact not to meddle with his
children under any circumstances, it would become me to let
particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone. But if there
was a bed newly made up, to which the ... ought to decide. That is just the case. The new territories are
the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies
with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up
with...
... the process, from the seed to the crop, stops
at the intermediate mechanical stage of the money. He does not
grow things to feed men; not even to feed one man; not even to
feed himself. The miser ... expository paragraphs are analytical. To
write about any subject you must it into particulars
(whether reasons or comparisons, illustrations or conse-
quences) and then organize these into a coherent ... which, although not essential to
the is interesting and enlightening.
In working out a genus-species definition, then, the essen-
tial questions to ask yourself are these:
To what class does it...
... that is still one hell
a pile of pulp. Pauline
To revert for a moment to the story told in the first person, it is plain
that in that case the narrator has no such liberty. . . .
Percy
Comma with ... visit www.tailieuduhoc.org
STOPS
But when more or less is used in a strict disjunctive
that is, to mean either more or less, but not must be
set off by commas:
It is hard to say whether the payment ... is less formal:
short, says the historian Friedrich the crusades were pro-
moted with all the devices of the stories,
over-simplification, lies, inflammatory speeches. Morris Bishop
The Dash...
... be able to
handle the short sentence to stress particular ideas and, when
the occasion warrants, to compose brief passages in a segre-
gating style. On the whole, however, the style is too limited
for ... exactly what you want to say.
Segregating sentences are especially useful in descriptive
and narrative writing. They analyze a complicated perception
or action into its parts and arrange these ... concern in this part. First, however, we must
derstand, in a brief and rudimentary way, what a sentence is.
It is not easy to say. In fact, it is probably impossible to
a sentence to everyone's...
... word
"campaign":
The Department of Justice began a vigorous campaign to break up
the corporate empires, to restore the free and open market, and to
plant the feet of the industry firmly on the road to competition.
Thurman ... purely poetical.
) G. K. Chesterton
But called by whatever name, it is a most fruitful region; kind to
the native, interesting to the visitor.
) Thomas Carlyle
stood like one thunderstruck, or ... in, to murmur at the present pos-
sessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes
of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of
mankind.
According to...
... length hearkened to the terms of peace, which was concluded
with great advantage to the empire and to Holland, but none at all
to us, and clogged soon after with the famous treaty of partition.
Allowed ... are
turned upon the stoop, the writer wisely begins a new sen-
tence. Of course, this question of when to stop, of knowing
when one statement should end and another begin, applies to
all kinds of ... those places which interested me, from a defect of eye
or of hand was totally ineffectual. Sir Walter Scott
The life story to be told of any creative worker is therefore by its
very nature, by its...
... upon none of these signals. Yet they too
need to be emphatic. What they must do, in effect, is to trans-
late loudness, intonation, gesture, and so on, into writing.
Equivalents are available. ... suddenly began to rain.
2. Suddenly, it began to rain.
If we suppose that the writer wished to draw our attention
to "suddenly," sentence (2) is better. By moving it to the
opening ... from
the noun to the participle (or predicative word).
Sometimes an entire adverbial clause can be cut back to the
operative participle.
WORDY Because they were tired, the men returned to camp.
CONCISE...
... spirit.)
The average autochthonous Irishman is close to patriotism because
he is close to the earth; he is close to domesticity because he is
close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology ... election, each party promises to make the city bigger
and better. . . .
Each party, before the election, promises to make the city bigger
and better. . . .
Now the clause is organized into potential ... married man.
Polysyndeton and Asyndeton
Despite their formidable names, polysyndeton and asyndeton
are nothing more than different ways of handling a list or
series. Polysyndeton places a conjunction...
... Victorian
monstrosities, "this area [it was one of his favorite words] is very
rich in antiquity." Aldous Huxley
Sometimes, too, it is necessary to alter a quotation slightly
to it into ... interpretation."
Often written quotations are worked into the text in a
smoother manner by an introductory that. The that requires
no stop since it turns the quotation into a noun clause acting
as the direct ... exclamation points,
placement depends on whether the stop applies only to the
quotation, only to the sentence containing the quotation, or
to both. When the quotation is a question (or exclamation)
and...
... about Toronto? What can one? What has any-
body ever said? It is impossible to give it anything but commen-
dation. is not squalid like Birmingham, or cramped Canton,
or scattered like Edmonton, ... has purpose.
The purpose may be to signify is, to refer
to an object or person other than the writer, to an abstract
conception such as "democracy," or to a thought or feeling
in the ... used to emphasize a
key idea. In the following passage the historian Herbert But-
moves through two long sentences (the second a bit
shorter than the to a strong short statement:
The Whig historian...
... to overcome masculine resistance to toilet-
ries as "sissy" (or perhaps to appeal to women, who buy most
of these products for their men).3
Emotionally loaded diction is also the stock-in-trade ... observations,
ideas, feelings, and affecting their responses both to the topic
and to you in ways that you wish. To the degree that it fails
to achieve your purpose, your diction fails entirely.4
4. ... error to pick words that mean too much, to name
an entire class when what you wish to signify is something
less:
Thrift is not one of their attributes. (For virtues)
The novel has far too many...