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Nearly all of the chapters in parts 2 and 3 of this book aim 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 this chapter, 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 read-
ers to sleep. In most college 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.
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Invigorating Your Style vary 27.1
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-
daughter 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.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Among the many things that invigorate the style of this passage is the variety
of sentence types that Hurston uses—simple, compound, complex, and
compound with a subordinate clause:
SIMPLE : It fails to register depression with me.
Slavery is sixty years in the past.
COMPOUND : The operation was successful and the patient is doing well,
thank you.
I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to
look behind and weep.
COMPOUND WITH SUBORDINATE CLAUSE : Slavery is the price that I paid for
civilization, and the choice was not with me.
Dillard varies both the structure and the length of her sentences. She
moves from five to thirty-five words, then down to just two at the end.
When a very short sentence follows one or more long ones, it can strike
like a dart.
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27.3 use Invigorating Your Style
Verbs of action show the subject not just being something but doing some-
thing. 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, as in Beauty is truth. But verbs of action can often replace verbs
of being:
won
£ Sheila was the winner of the nomination.
^
shocked
£ Frederick’s desire to learn reading would have been a shock to other
^
slaveholders.
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:
PASSIVE : After a big hole was dug and sprinkled with fertilizer, the tree
was planted.
ACTIVE : After digging a big hole and sprinkling it with fertilizer, I planted
the tree.
While some sentences work better in the passive voice, overuse of the pas-
sive 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. (For a full discussion of the active and passive
voice, see chapter 24.)
412
Invigorating Your Style cut 27.5
Questions like these can draw the reader into the very heart of your sub-
ject. 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 in speech. It will chal-
lenge 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?
Cut out all needless repetition and strive to be concise (see 8.13):
£ During their tour of Ottawa, they saw the Parliament buildings, and
413
27.5 cut Invigorating Your Style
He went
The reason for his decision to make a visit to Spain was his desire to
^
see a bullfight.
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