1981 📖 Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
Backlinks
- > Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out
- ~ begin sentences with familiar info
- ~ delete all adverbs and adjectives in a paragraph, then restore only the needed ones
- ~ end sentences with infos your readers cannot anticipate.
- ~ in long, complex sentences, put the point at the beginning
- ~ keep subjects close to their actions
- ~ let the sentence length mirror the situation
- ~ make important actions verbs
- ~ move from simplicity to complexity
- ~ prevent connection sentences with comma if they have internal punctuation
- ~ put complex stuff and new terms at the end of a sentence.
- ~ putting words in parentheses means reading them in sotto voce
- ~ read long sentences out lout and see whether you run out of breath or break flow
- ~ sentences are cohesive when the last few words of one set up info that appears in the first few words of the next
- ~ simplify complex negative-affirmative combinations as you would a math term
- ~ use references to elements from previous sentences at sentence start
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