Style%20Lesson%20Four

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Style Lesson Four

• Characters

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Review

• Define nominalization.
• What is Principle of clarity1?
• What is the Principle of clarity 2?

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Characters

• Make the subjects of most of your verbs short,
  specific, and concrete.
• Making sure characters are subjects is more
  important than making sure verbs are actions.

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1) Diagnose

• 1) Skim the first eight words
• Do you have a character as the simple subject?
• Government intervention in fast-changing
  technologies has led to the distortion of market
  evolution and interference in new market
  technology

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2) Identify characters.

• 2) Skim sentence for possessive pronouns attached
  to nominalization, adjectives, and objects of
  prepositions.
• Government intervention in fast-changing
  technologies has led to the distortion of market
  evolution and interference in new market
  technology

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3) Revise

• Skim passage for actions involving those
  characters. Ask who is doing what.
• Government intervention in fast-changing
  technologies has led to the distortion of market
  evolution and interference in new product
  development.
• Government intervenes, distorts, interferes
• Market evolves, develops

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Reassemble characters and actions into sentence
using conjunctions if, although, because, when,
how, why.

• Government intervenes, distorts, interferes
• Market evolves, develops

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• Medieval theological debates often address issues
  considered trivial by modern philosophical
  thought.

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Absent subjects

• What do you do when you have no character in the
  sentence?
• 3 choices

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1) Abstractions as characters

• Flesh and blood characters are best but . . .
• Abstractions (freedom of speech, amendment) can
  be characters if your readers are very familiar
  with them and you make them the subject of action
  verbs.

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2) Adding a character

• Research strategies that look for more than one
  variable are useful in understanding factors in
  psychiatric disorders.
• Add a character (researcher)
• Use a vague pronoun (one, we, you), all of which
  are unsatisfactory

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3) Passive Voice

• When we dont have a character, we slide into
  passive voice.
• We do want to avoid passive, but there are good
  reasons for choosing passive? (48)

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Academic writing

• Myth academic writing doesnt use I or we
  and thus passive voice.
• However, first person is most often found in
  meta-discourse (52).

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Beware noun noun noun

• Avoid strings of nouns because they make
  confusing characters for readers.
• Early childhood thought disorder misdiagnosis
  often results from unfamiliarity with recent
  research literature.
• Physicians misdiagnose thought disorders in young
  children when they are unfamiliar with recent
  research on the subject.