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 （上） 2011-01-06 22:41| (分类:默认分类) 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Cliché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Cliché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 财务内部控制制度的内容财务内部控制制度的内容人员招聘与配置的内容项目成本控制的内容消防安全演练内容 包括： Simplicity & Clutter怎样把文章写的简洁 Style 风格 只有把“人”写出来，才会有自己的风格 The audience 你的文章为谁而写 Words措辞 怎样的用词会把你的文章搞坏，什么又是好的措辞 Unity 整体性 如何写出牛逼的开头和结尾，怎么寻找素材 Bits & Pieces 动词，副词，形容词，缩写，that/which等等用法 Φ 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 American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind. New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech. Consider what President Nixon's 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.” It’s typical 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. Someone’s feeling is that person’s personal feeling­—that’s what “his” means. Friends are friends, the rest is clutter. 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 plant 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 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 long word that's 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 new 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 can't exist without the other. It'simpossible 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 there's 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? Here's a device my students at Yale found helpful. I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn't doing useful 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 ("smile 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 don't mean anything. Sometimes my brackets surrounded an entire sentence—the one that essentially repeats what the previous sentence said, or that says something readers don't 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, 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 won't be affected. But you decide. Read the sentence without the bracketed material and 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 students are professional writers, and they tell me, "I still see your brackets—they're 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 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 it's 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 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, you'll howl and say it can't be done. Then you'll go home and do it, and it will be much better. After that comes the hard 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 the metaphor of carpentry, it's first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly and to drive nails. Later you can bevel the edges or add elegant finials, if that's your taste. But you can never forget that you are practicing a craft that's 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. 为什么必须要有自己的风格 I'll 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 last they raised their fanciful turrets and hanging gardens, to the surprise of all of us who never dreamed 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 the plain 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.) 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 glance—and with a toupee there's always a second glance—he doesn't look quite right. The problem is not that he doesn't look well groomed; he does, and we can only admire the wigmaker's skill. The point is that he doesn't look like himself. This is the problem of writers who set out deliberately to garnish their prose. You lose whatever 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 article must be of a certain length or it won't 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 your awesome responsibility to the finished article that you can't even start. Yet you vow to be worthy of the task, and, casting about for grand phrases that wouldn't occur to you if you weren't trying so hard to make an impression, you plunge in. Paragraph 1 is a disaster—a tissue of generalities that seem to have come out of a machine. No person could have written them. Paragraph 2 isn't much better. But Paragraph 3 begins to have a somewhat human quality, and by Paragraph 4 you begin to sound like yourself. You've 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 don't say anything—they are a self-conscious attempt at a fancy introduction. What I'm always looking for as an editor is a sentence that says something like "I'll never forget the day when I . . . " I think, "Aha! A person!" 3. The audience 写作悦己 "Who am I writing for? It s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Don't try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person. Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new. Don't worry about whether the reader will "get it" if you indulge a sudden impulse for humor. If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in. (It can always be taken out, but only you can put it in.) You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, you don't want them anyway. 如果你平时说话不是文邹邹的，那写东西的时候也不要尽是之乎者也。 Whatever your age, be yourself when you write. Many old men still write with the zest they had in their twenties or thirties; obviously their ideas are still young. Other old writers ramble and repeat themselves; their style is the tip-off that they have turned into garrulous bores. Many college students write as if they were desiccated alumni 30 years out. Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. If you're not a person who says "indeed" or "moreover," or who calls someone an individual ("he's a fine individual"), please don't write it. 4. Words措辞 日常写作避免新闻笔调(journalese) What is "journalese"? It's a quilt of instant words patched together out of other parts of speech. Adjectives are used as nouns ("greats," "notables"). Nouns are used as verbs ("to host"), or they are chopped off to form verbs ("enthuse," "emote"), or they are padded to form verbs ("beef up," "put teeth into"). This is a world where eminent people are "famed" and their associates are "staffers," where the future is always "upcoming" and someone is forever "firing off" a note. Nobody in America has sent a note or a memo or a telegram in years. Famed diplomat Henry Kissinger, who hosted foreign notables to beef up the morale of top State Department staffers, sat down and fired off a lot of notes. Notes that are fired off are always fired in anger and from a sitting position.（囧） What the weapon is I've never found out. 案例：作者眼里失败界的翘楚 Here's an article from a famed newsmagazine that is hard to match for fatigue: Last February, Plainclothes Patrolman Frank Serpico knocked at the door of a suspected Brooklyn heroin pusher. When the door opened a crack, Serpico shouldered his way in only to be met by a .22-cal. pistol slug crashing into his face. Somehow he survived, although there are still buzzing fragments in his head, causing dizziness and permanent deafness in his left ear. Almost as painful is the suspicion that he may well have been set up for the shooting by other policemen. For Serpico, 35, has been waging a lonely, four-year war against the routine and endemic corruption that he and others claim is rife in the New York City police department. His efforts are now sending shock waves through the ranks of New York's finest.. . . Though the impact of the commissions upcoming report has yet to be felt, Serpico has little hope that. . . 为什么这篇文章的用词很纱布？ The upcoming report has yet to be felt because it's still upcoming, and as for the permanent deafness, it's a little early to tell. And what makes those buzzing fragments buzz? By now only Serpico's head should be buzzing. But apart from these lazinesses of logic, what makes the story so tired is the failure of the writer to reach for anything but the nearest cliché. "Shouldered his way," "only to be met," "crashing into his face," "waging a lonely war," "corruption that is rife," "sending shock waves," "New York's finest"—these dreary phrases constitute writing at its most banal. We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual word, an oblique look. We are in the hands of a hack, and we know it right away. We stop reading. 要写好文章，首先学会模仿。但能印在报纸杂志上的不一定就牛逼到哪去了.要选好对象。 Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written by earlier masters. Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it. But cultivate the best models. Don't assume that because an article is in a newspaper or a magazine it must be good. Sloppy editing is common in newspapers, often for lack of time, and writers who use clichés often work for editors who have seen so many clichés that they no longer even recognize them. 用字典,考过GRE的同学表示对以下引用的单词毫无压力。 Also get in the habit of using dictionaries. My favorite for handy use is Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, although, like all word freaks, I own bigger dictionaries that will reward me when I'm on some more specialized search. If you have any doubt of what a word means, look it up. Learn its etymology and notice what curious branches its original root has put forth. See if it has any meanings you didn't know it had. Master the small gradations between words that seem to be synonyms. What's the difference between "cajole," "wheedle," "blandish" and "coax"? Get yourself a dictionary of synonyms. 用Thesaurus，这玩意儿是GRE Verbal的大杀器 And don't scorn that bulging grab bag Roget's Thesaurus. It's easy to regard the book as hilarious. Look up "villain," for instance, and you'll be awash in such rascality as only a lexicographer could conjure back from centuries of iniquity, obliquity, depravity, knavery, profligacy, frailty, flagrancy, infamy, immorality, corruption, wickedness, wrongdoing, backsliding and sin. You'll find ruffians and riffraff, miscreants and malefactors, reprobates and rapscallions, hooligans and hoodlums, scamps and scapegraces, scoundrels and scalawags, Jezebels and jades. You'll find adjectives to fit them all (foul and fiendish, devilish and diabolical), and adverbs and verbs to describe how the wrongdoers do their wrong, and cross-references leading to still other thickets of venality and vice. Still, there's no better friend to have around to nudge the memory than Roget. It saves you the time of rummaging in your brain—that network of overloaded grooves—to find the word that's right on the tip of your tongue, where it doesn't do you any good. The Thesaurus is to the writer what a rhyming dictionary is to the songwriter—a reminder of all the choices—and you should use it with gratitude. If, having found the scalawag and the scapegrace, you want to know how they differ, then go to the dictionary. 一定要看the Elements of Style这本神作 E. B. White makes the case cogently in The Elements of Style,a book every writer should read once a year, when he suggests trying to rearrange any phrase that has survived for a century or two, such as Thomas Paine s "These are the times that try men's souls": Times like these try men's souls. How trying it is to live in these times! These are trying times for men's souls. Soulwise, these are trying times. Paine s phrase is like poetry and the other four are like oatmeal— which is the divine mystery of the creative process. Good writers of prose must be part poet, always listening to what they write. E. B. White is one of my favorite stylists because I'm conscious of being with a man who cares about the cadences and sonorities of the language. I relish (in my ear) the pattern his words make as they fall into a sentence. I try to surmise how in rewriting the sentence he reassembled it to end with a phrase that will momentarily linger, or how he chose one word over another because he was after a certain emotional weight. It's the difference between, say, "serene" and "tranquil"—one so soft, the other strangely disturbing because of the unusual nand q. 好文章悦耳，因为有韵律感。 Such considerations of sound and rhythm should be woven through everything you write. If all your sentences move at the same plodding gait, which even you recognize as deadly but don't know how to cure, read them aloud. (I write entirely by ear and read everything aloud before letting it go out into the world.) You'll begin to hear where the trouble lies. See if you can gain variety by reversing the order of a sentence, or by substituting a word that has freshness or oddity, or by altering the length of your sentences so they don't all sound as if they came out of the same mold. An occasional short sentence can carry a tremendous punch. It stays in the reader's ear. Remember that words are the only tools you've got. Learn to use them with originality and care. And also remember: somebody out there is listening. 5. Unity 一篇文章什么都写了就等于什么都没写。好的文章一定要有自己非常清晰的point.一个牛逼哄哄的point足够亮瞎双眼. Nobody can write a book or an article "about" something. Tolstoy couldn't write a book about war and peace, or Melville a book about whaling. They made certain reductive decisions about time and place and about individual characters in that time and place— one man pursuing one whale. Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write. Therefore think small. Decide what corner of your subject you're going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop. Often you'll find that along the way you've managed to say almost everything you wanted to say about the entire subject. This is also a matter of energy and morale. An unwieldy writing task is a drain on your enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the force that keeps you going and keeps the reader in your grip. When your zest begins to ebb, the reader is the first person to know it. As for