怎样写出靠谱的英文.docx

1、怎样写出靠谱的英文怎样写出靠谱的英文？ 英文写作圣经On Writing Well 精华摘选作者：孙有病纽约时报评价On Writing Well是一本指导英文写作的圣经，任何想让要自己文章简洁的人都应该没事拿出来读一读，膜拜膜拜。Library Journal说，在这本书里，你可以看到“A love and respect for the language is evident on every page.”读这本书的时候，我随时都把William Zinsser这个小老头恪守的标准和我写好的personal statement交叉对比，每每不禁面红耳赤，内牛满面。咱申请的是新闻专业，未来这

2、两年好歹也得写出几箩筐的英文。但是按照现在的水准，我每一行每一段都可以被轰至渣。不过庆幸我手头有这本书，还一口气把它看完了。作者对Clich和Clutter由衷且无时无刻地表达鄙视之情，以至于我现在看到这俩词就虎躯一震。这本书适合谁看？如果你想提高自己英文写作的水准，特别是挖掘自己的风格； 如果你即将去米国读研究生，未来两年经常要面对一茬一茬的各种paper; 如果你以后是一个英文写作从业者，经常要写news release & report. 这本书就是你的圣经。作者对写作标准的严苛和尊敬，作者的智慧和幽默感让我随时流着哈喇子拿出各种颜色的笔圈点勾画。这种经典看一遍是绝对不够的，我认为有些句

3、子是完全可以打印出来，贴在自己的写作台上，时时鞭策警示自己。这样才能多写出一些人类看得懂的句子，少留下一些Clich和Clutter，让自己看到脸红。以下的笔记摘选自本书第一章Principles和第二章Methods. 这两章的篇幅只占全书的三分之一,但信息量非常之大，看完你就知道了。摘选的内容包括：1. Simplicity & Clutter怎样把文章写的简洁2. Style风格只有把“人”写出来，才会有自己的风格3. The audience你的文章为谁而写4. Words措辞怎样的用词会把你的文章搞坏，什么又是好的措辞5. Unity整体性如何写出牛逼的开头和结尾，怎么寻找素材6.

4、Bits & Pieces动词，副词，形容词，缩写，that/which等等用法1.Simplicity & Clutter怎么样把文章写简洁？Zinsser痛恨兜圈子，任何模棱两可的措辞，表意不明的句子在他看来都是灾难。他对简洁如此执着，以至于Zinsser这个名字成了文风简洁的代名词。美国有些老师会让学生Zinsser一下他们的文章，Zinsser成了一个清除文中clutter的动词。什么是所谓的clutter呢？ 放到中文语境里，遍地都是，比如说“有关部门”,比如说“某某领导高度重视.” 比如说胡版2011年新年贺词的全部。美版：Clutter is the disease of Ame

5、rican writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.Fighting clutter is like fighting weedsthe writer is always slightly behind. New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech. Consider what Pres

6、identNixons aide John Dean accomplished in just one day of testimony on television during the Watergate hearings. The next day everyone in America was saying “at this point in time” instead of “now.”Take the adjective “personal,” as in “a personal friend of mine,” “his personal feeling.” Its typical

7、 of hundreds of words that can be eliminated. The personal friend has come into the language to distinguish him or her from the business friend, thereby debasing both language and friendship. Someones feeling is that persons personal feelingthats what “his” means. Friends are friends, the rest is cl

8、utter.Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, garbage collectors into waste disposal personnel and the town dump into the volume reduction unit.Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes. When General Motors had a pl

9、ant shutdown, that was a “volume-related production-schedule adjustment.” When an Air Force missile crashed, it “impacted with the ground prematurely.” Companies that go belly-up have “a negative cash-flow position.”“Experiencing” is one of the worst clutters. Instead of “it is raining”, there is no

10、 way to say “At the present time we are experiencing precipitation.” Even your dentist will ask if you are experiencing any pain. If he had his own kid in the chair he would say,” Does it hurt?”The point of raising these examples is to serve notice that clutter is the enemy. Beware, then, of the lon

11、g word thats no better than the short word: “assistance”(help), “numerous” (many), “facilitate” (ease), “individual”(man or woman), “remainder” (rest), “initial” (first), “implement”(do), “sufficient” (enough), “attempt” (try), “referred to as”(called) and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery n

12、ew fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write.How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one cant exist without the othe

13、r. Itsimpossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. He may get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will be lost, and theres no sin so grave, for the reader will not easily be lured back.作者的一个tip,“括号剔除法”.经我的PS测试,发现非常好用。Is there any way to recognize clutter at a glance? He

14、res a device my students at Yale found helpful. I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasnt doinguseful work. Often just one word got bracketed: the unnecessary preposition appended to a verb (“order up”), or the adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb (“smi

15、le happily”), or the adjective that states a known fact (“tall skyscraper”). Often my brackets surrounded the little qualifiers that weaken any sentence they inhabit (“a bit,” “sort of), or phrases like “in a sense,” which dont mean anything. Sometimes my brackets surrounded an entire sentencethe on

16、e that essentially repeats what the previous sentence said, or that says something readers dont need to know or can figure out for themselves. Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the authors voice.My reason for bracketing the students superfluous words

17、, instead of crossing them out, was to avoid violating their sacred prose. I wanted to leave the sentence intact for them to analyze. I was saying, “I may be wrong, but I think this can be deleted and the meaning wont be affected. But you decide. Read the sentence without the bracketed material and

18、see if it works.” In the early weeks of the term I handed back papers that were festooned with brackets. Entire paragraphs were bracketed. But soon the students learned to put mental brackets around their own clutter, and by the end of the term their papers were almost clean. Today many of those stu

19、dents are professional writers, and they tell me, “I still see your bracketstheyre following me through life.”You can develop the same eye. Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every

20、word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think its beautiful?Simplify, simplify.2.Style以下对写PS挠头的同学颇为有用Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how

21、 much excess or murkiness has crept into their style and how it obstructs what they are trying to say. If you give me an eight-page article and I tell you to cut it to four pages, youll howl and say it cant be done. Then youll go home and do it, and it will be much better. After that comes the hard

22、part: cutting it to three.The point is that you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up. You must know what the essential tools are and what job they were designed to do. Extending themetaphor of carpentry, its first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly and to drive nails.

23、 Later you can bevel the edges or add elegant finials, if thats your taste. But you can never forget that you are practicing a craft thats based on certain principles. If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.为

24、什么必须要有自己的风格Ill admit that certain nonfiction writers, like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, have built some remarkable houses. But these are writers who spent years learning their craft, and when at lastthey raised their fanciful turrets and hanging gardens, to the surprise of all of us who never dreame

25、d of such ornamentation, they knew what they were doing. Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.First, then, learn to hammer the nails, and if what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength. But you will be impatient to find a “style”to embellish th

26、eplain words so that readers will recognize you as someone special. You will reach for gaudy similes and tinseled adjectives, as if “style” were something you could buy at the style store and drape onto your words in bright decorator colors. (Decorator colors are the colors that decorators come in.)

27、 There is no style store; style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it. Trying to add style is like adding a toupee. At first glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second glanceand with a toupee th

28、eres always a second glancehe doesnt look quite right. The problem is not that he doesnt look well groomed; he does, and we can only admire the wigmakers skill. The point is that he doesnt look like himself. This is the problem of writers who set out deliberately to garnish their prose. You lose wha

29、tever it is that makes you unique. The reader will notice if you are putting on airs. Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.怎样写文章才会有自己的style？-把自己放进去，找到那个“人”Assume that you are the writer sitting down to write. You think your art

30、icle must be of a certain length or it wont seem important. You think how august it will look in print. You think of all the people who will read it. You think that it must have the solid weight of authority. You think that its style must dazzle. No wonder you tighten; you are so busy thinking of yo

31、ur awesome responsibility to the finished article that you cant even start. Yet you vow to be worthy of the task, and, casting about for grand phrases that wouldnt occur to you if you werent trying so hard to make an impression, you plunge in. Paragraph 1 is a disastera tissue of generalities that s

32、eem to have come out of a machine. No person could have written them. Paragraph 2 isnt much better. But Paragraph 3 begins to have a somewhat human quality, and by Paragraph 4 you begin to sound like yourself. Youve started to relax. It s amazing how often an editor can throw away the first three or four paragraphs of an article, or even the first few pages, and start with the paragraph where the writer begins to sound like himself or herself. Not only are those first paragraphs impersonal and ornate; they dont s