(a
reminder, you need not write anything here--just read.)
READING
1
THE
FOLLOWING IS FROM Orwell's essay,
“Politics and the English Language”
A scrupulous
writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four
questions, thus:
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask
himself two more:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
One can often be in doubt
about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely
on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of
speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it
out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a
jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything
outright barbarous.
READING 2
Twain's Rules of
Writing
(FROM MARK TWAIN'S
SCATHING ESSAY ON THE LITERARY OFFENSES OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER)
1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes of a
tale shall be necessary parts of
the tale, and shall help develop it.
3. The personages in
a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the
reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
4. The personages in
a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
5. When the
personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human
talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given
circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose,
and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand,
and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the
people cannot think of anything more to say.
6. When the author
describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and
conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
7. When a personage
talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar
Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a
Negro minstrel at the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities
shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the
tale.
9. The personages of
a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if
they venture a miracle, the author must so plausably set it forth as to make it
look possible and reasonable.
10. The author shall
make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their
fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and
hate the bad ones.
11. The characters in
tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will
do in a given emergency.
An author should
12. _Say_ what he is
proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its
second cousin.
14. Eschew
surplusage.
15. Not omit
necessary details.
16. Avoid
slovenliness of form.
1
7. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple,
straightforward style.
Reading 3:
ELMORE LEONARD'S RULES FOR WRITING:
Never open a book with weather.
Avoid prologues.
Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished
gravely.
Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no
more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke
loose."
Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
I never really was a great grammatical writer, but I love to write. Writing rules always took the fun out of writing for me and maybe it was because the rules of writing always seemed to confuse me. I think these rules are all amazing in their own way. If one was to follow all these rules when writing I can see where they would be beneficial while writing a page turner. Reading 1 seemed to stand out to me the most, being that I am a systematical learner, thinker, and everything I do must have some type of structure to seem complete. I like the idea of a writer asking questions to himself before writing every sentence. The most important question of the four in my opinion would be, “What am I trying to say”. This is the most important question for writing because every sentence must say something meaningful or representative of idea; otherwise, it can be skimmed over rendering it a wasted space for thought. Reading 2 Twain’s Rules of Writing was confusing and very in-depth of what a writer should and shouldn’t do. Towards the end of Twain’s rules it seems to become clear and simply to the point of keeping writing effortless, precise, and to the point. Reading 3 Elmore Leonard’s Rules For Writing were straightforward and helpful for the over analyzers of our time. Also Leonard’s rules will be helpful to a society that speaks, writes, and lives in short phrases and abbreviations such as “LOL!!!!!!, AMOF!!!, JK!!!”. People now days can be excessive with exclamation marks leading me to believe that everyone should be running around doing jazz hands for even the most calm situations. Sorry I just had to go there. My personal rules for writing have never been too extensive I just type, proof read, and correct or add as needed. I know, probably not the best way of doing it, but it helps me. I do report writing every day and I find it is best to stick to a template of using basic facts, evidence, and no extras at all.
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