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Style: Balance and Consistency
Tenses
Use the present tense or the past tense
consistently throughout papers, but don't shift back and forth between them.
The present tense is useful for all writing which analyzes events, ideas,
words, works of art, or scientific results. It helps show that ideas are alive
in your mind. With historical events you may choose the past tense to say what
happened when, if the action is complete in the past:
In March, 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson
declared that he would not seek the Presidency.
When analyzing such events in a present
context, however, return to the present:
Johnson's stepping-down suggests that
even powerful presidents have to recognize the limits of their power.
Use your course texts and secondary sources as
a guide to the proper use of tenses in papers.
Parallel Structure and Balance
Virginia Woolf on reading:
The only advice, indeed, that one person
can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own
instinct, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
(Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read A Book?")
Loren Eisley on evolution:
We lost our hairy covering, our jaws and
teeth were reduced in size, our sex life was postponed, our infancey became
among the most helpless of any of the animals because everything had to wait
upon the development of that fast-growing mushroom which had sprung up in
our minds.
(Loren Eisley, "The Dream Animal" from The Immense Journey)
Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh on the beauty
of mathematics:
Blindness to the aesthetic element in
mathematics is widespread and can account for a feeling that mathematics is
dry as dust, as exciting as a telephone book, as remote as the laws of
infangtheif in fifteenth century Scotland.
(Davis and Hersh, The Mathematical Experience)
Parallel structure is more than correct
grammar: it helps unify a sentence and clarify its intentions. In all three of
the above examples, the parallel elements (infinitives, subject-predicate
structures, or adjective clauses) derive from the same source. They are like
repeated stitches of the same color in an embroidered belt. This unity helps
show the relationship between cause and effect, or among items on a list. When
parallels are faulty the sentence gives a slipshod effect, as Woolf's does
when we deliberately mess it up:
The only advice, indeed, that one person
can give another about reading is to take no advice, following instincts is
best and you must use your own reason, and to come to your own conclusions.
Balance in a sentence comes from a careful
distribution of weight and purpose; in a balanced sentence (such as this one),
clauses of equal importance have equal length. No exact rule for balancing
will help you as much as reading aloud. Skillful writers can write long
sentences without losing balance, because the writers know where they are
going:
All along the street there are people who
watched me grow up, people who grew up with me, people I watched grow up
along with my brothers and sisters; and, sometimes in my arms, sometimes
underfoot, sometimes at my shoulder -- or on it -- their children, a riot, a
forest of children, who include my nieces and nephews.
(James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name)
Imbalanced sentences often end with a thud:
In face of nuclear war, widespread
starvation and political imbalance, the world must do something about these
things.
A vague predicate can dissipate the energy of
a sentence's beginning. Here the writer needs a strong ending to carry forward
her initial powerful phrase. Instead of sounding as though she got up to
answer the phone in the middle of the sentence, she should carry out her own
voice through that daunting first phrase to a decisive conclusion:
In face of nuclear war, widespread
starvation and political imbalance, the world must reawaken its
consciousness as a world, not just as an assortment of people.
Passive
Voice
Intransitive
Verbs
Too
Many Little Words
Adverbitis
Hitchhikers,
Babblers, and Jaw-Flappers
Windy
and Pretentious Language
Balance
and Consistency
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