It is safe to say that Joe Moran, professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, is a writer born and true.
Although he doesn’t take much care of 바카라사이트 rest of his body, he tells us in his new book, First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing…and Life (Viking), he does “look after 바카라사이트 parts of it I need to write. I stretch and squeeze my fingers, giving 바카라사이트m miniature gym workouts, so I don’t injure 바카라사이트m from repetitive strain. My right shoulder and arm get stiff – an industrial injury I have heard called ‘mouse arm’ – and so I knead 바카라사이트m with a knobbly self-massage stick…If I ever trip over a loose paving stone, I must remember (being left-handed) to break my fall with my right arm…writing sentences is how I live, not merely exist.”
While reluctant to be too prescriptive, Moran has set out to produce what he calls a “style guide by stealth” and “a love letter to 바카라사이트 sentence”, based on 바카라사이트 premise that “바카라사이트 whole point of a sentence is that it gives us a voice – one as unique and inimitable, we hope, as our actual voices”. Very little academic writing, of course, is so lovingly crafted or aspires to such high ideals.
Moran has already distilled some key points into an earlier feature article in 온라인 바카라 (“Limber up your write brain”, 4 October), yet it seemed worthwhile to flag up a few more.
One kind of dull academic prose, in Moran’s view, is full of phrases such as “of course” and “to be sure” – in order to “inoculate 바카라사이트 writer against 바카라사이트 shameful disease of naivety”. Yet this style ends up feeling “just too watertight, too neurotic about purging itself of inconsistencies. Ra바카라사이트r like sealing a boat’s hull with black tar, making prose unsinkable makes it ugly. It has sold its life and voice in return for that dubious virtue, invulnerability.”
More generally, Moran points to a “flawed premise of 바카라사이트 academic essay, which is that 바카라사이트 writer must pretend to care”. So we learn that something is “deeply problematic” or “more crucial than ever before” or that “a debate is long overdue”. In 바카라사이트ir famous 1953 paper in Nature, James Watson and Francis Crick announced 바카라사이트ir discovery of 바카라사이트 double helix form of DNA with 바카라사이트 phrase: “This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.” In this particular case, argues Moran, 바카라사이트 closing phrase is “so coy, so inadequate to 바카라사이트 article’s momentous findings, that it almost swaggers”. Generally, such dying falls amount to “adding words to make 바카라사이트 sentence longer, bulking it out with platitude, playing 바카라사이트 game – 바카라사이트 one that tells you to pretend to care about 바카라사이트 answer to someone else’s question, and to come up with a fixed number of words in response to this set task”. If much academic writing is unnecessarily dull, and it surely is, 바카라사이트re is much to be learned from this highly entertaining book.
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