STRATEGIES OF INVIGORATING YOUR STYLE - Наукові конференції
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STRATEGIES OF INVIGORATING YOUR STYLE

29.01.2024 09:50

[8. Філологічні науки]

Автор: Maryna Kyryllova, Candidate of Science in Philology (PhD), Associate Professor, Department of Theory and Practice of Translation, Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University; Kateryna Vorobiova, Senior Lecturer, Foreign Languages Department, Odesa Polytechnic National University


ORCID: 0000-0002-7603-4958 Maryna Kyryllova

ORCID: 0000-0003-3474-502X Kateryna Vorobiova                         

This article aims to help you improve your style: to write not just correctly but cogently, to shape your sentences with coordination and subordination, to enhance them with parallel structure, to enrich them with modifiers, and to perfect them with well-chosen words. In our investigation we focus specifically on what you can do to invigorate your style.

Good writing exudes vitality. It not only sidesteps awkwardness, obscurity, and grammatical error; it also expresses a mind continually at work, a mind seeking, discovering, wondering, prodding, provoking, asserting. Whatever else it does, good writing keeps the reader awake.

Unfortunately, much of what gets written seems designed to put readers asleep. Too many people write the way they jog, never changing the pace or skipping a beat, never leaping, zigzagging, or stopping to scratch the reader`s mind. Does this mean that in order to be lively, you have to write like an acrobat? No, it doesn`t. Different subjects call for different styles, and you shouldn`t write about a problem in economics or history the same way you would write about a beach party or a New Year`s Day parade. In most writing you are expected to sound thoughtful and judicious. But no reader wants you to sound dull. To enliven your writing on any subject, here are five specific things you can do.

Nothing animates prose like variety, and the sentence is infinitely variable. It can stop short after a couple of words. Or it can stretch luxuriously, reaching over hills of thought and down into valleys of speculation, glancing to this side and that, moving along for as long as the writer cares to keep it going. You can vary its structure as well as its length. You can make it passive or active; you can arrange   and rearrange its parts. Opening with a modifier, you can hold your subject back. Or you can lead with your subject, adding modifiers at the end. In structure and length as well as in meaning, English sentences admit of infinite variety.

How can you get some of that variety into your writing? Take a hard look at one of your paragraphs – or at a whole essay. Do all of your sentences sound about the same? If most are short and simple, combine some of them to make longer ones. If most are lengthened out with modifiers and dependent clauses, break some of them up. Be bold. Be surprising. Use a short sentence to set off a long one, a simple structure to set off a complicated one. Though you need some consistency in order to keep the reader with you, you can and should eschew the monotony of assembly-line sentences.

To see what you can do with a variety of sentences, consider this example:

Someone is always at my elbow reminding that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get set!”; and the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.

Among the many things that invigorate the style of this passage is the variety of sentence types: simple, compound, complex, and the compound with a subordinate clause. Good writers know how to produce each sentence type and how to make different types work together in one paragraph. If you want to test the variety in a paragraph of your own, see how many different sentence types you have used.

This looking business is risky. Once I stood on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great autumn hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own. I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them. I reeled.

Use verbs of action as much as possible. Verbs of action show the subject not just being something but doing something. At times, of course, you need to say what your subject is or was or has been, and these words can speak strongly when used to express equality or identity. But verbs of action can often replace verbs of being.

Sheila was the winner of the nomination.

Sheila won the nomination.

Mr. Ault believed that learning would be the ruin of Frederick as a slave.

Mr. Ault believed that learning would ruin Frederick as a slave. 

Use the active voice as much as possible. Verbs that tell of a subject acting usually express more vitality than verbs that tell of a subject acted upon. While some sentences actually won better in the passive voice, overuse of the passive can paralyze your writing. This is a problem to be seriously considered by anyone who has ever been asked to write an essay in which a subject of some sort is to be analyzed, to be explained, or to be commented upon by him or her. That sentence shows what overuse of the passive will do to your sentences: it will make them wordy, stagnant, boring, dead. Whenever you start to use the passive, ask yourself whether the sentence might sound better in the active. Often it will.

I unwrap the bandages from the stumps, and begin to cut away the black scabs and the dead, glazed fat with scissors and forceps. A shard of white bone comes loose. I pick it away. I wash the wounds with disinfectant and redress the stumps. All this while, he does not speak. What is he thinking behind those lids that do not blink? Is he remembering a time when he was whole? Does he dream of feet?

Questions like these can draw the reader into the very heart of your subject. And  questions can do more than advertise your curiosity. They can also voice your conviction. In conversation you sometimes ask a question that assumes a particular answer – don`t you? Such a question is called rhetorical, and you can use it in writing as well as speech. It will challenge your readers, prompting them either to agree with you or to explain to themselves why they do not. And why shouldn`t you challenge your readers now and then?

To make your writing lively, make it lean. Wordiness is verbal fat: words and phrases that add nothing but extra weight to sentences that could and should be leaner.

Wordy: During their tour of Ottawa, they saw the Parliament buildings, and they saw the National Art Center. 

Edited: During their tour of Ottawa, they saw the Parliament buildings and the National Art Center.

Wordy: The reason for his decision to make a visit to Spain was his desire to see a bullfight.

Edited: He decided to visit Spain because he wanted to see a bullfight. [or] He went to Spain to see a bullfight. 

Cut away the verbal fat that slows it down to a ponderous crawl. 



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