On this basis, I am ploughing my way
through `The Reader’s Brain’ by Yellowlees Douglas and will share the next few
tips I’ve picked up:
·
Apparently we’re hard-wired to register
cause and effect- it helped early hunter-gatherers survive. In the 1940’s researchers showed volunteers films of circles,
squares and rectangles moving randomly around a screen. When questioned, the
volunteers immediately turned these films into stories of chase, capture and
competition. This innate tendency helps explain our attraction to stories (cause and effect) and
the mini stories that each sentence tells. In particular, paragraphs full of
active rather than passive verbs are more quickly digested.
·
Orwell counselled using Anglo-Saxon rather
than Latinate words for clarity and more concrete language. Yellowlees Douglas criticizes
Orwell for using the same abstract, Latinate language he told his readers to avoid.
I smiled, when she then used the word `disambiguate’ two pages later!
·
To root out passive construction in your
sentences, she advises inserting `by zombies’ after the verb, eg :The chocolate was eaten… by zombies. If
the sentence makes sense, you are using a passive construction and should
change it into an active one: The girl
ate the chocolate.
·
English is a subject-verb-object language,
which mirrors life- in general- so sentences should reflect this, if they are
to be easily read and remembered. I
lobbed the cookies at his head, rather than The cookies were lobbed at his head by me.
·
There is constructions come to us via the Norman
Conquest and French and stand in place of the sentence’s subject. They should
therefore be avoided at all costs. She suggests using the `Find’ command to track
down all examples in your document and to then find a different way of
expressing yourself, eg instead of There
are three ways we can think of this, write: We can think of this dilemma in three ways.
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