Writing with Clarity and Style
A Guide to Rhetorical Devices for Contemporary Writers
Robert A. Harris
- 220 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Writing with Clarity and Style
A Guide to Rhetorical Devices for Contemporary Writers
Robert A. Harris
About This Book
Writing with Clarity and Style, 2nd Edition, will help you to improve your writing dramatically. The book shows you how to use dozens of classical rhetorical devices to bring power, clarity, and effectiveness to your writing. You will also learn about writing styles, authorial personas, and sentence syntax as tools to make your writing interesting and persuasive. If you want to improve the appeal and persuasion of your speeches, this is also the book for you.
From strategic techniques for keeping your readers engaged as you change focus, down to the choice of just the right words and phrases for maximum impact, this book will help you develop a flexible, adaptable style for all the audiences you need to address.
Each chapter now includes these sections:
-
- Style Check, discussing many elements of style, including some enhanced and revised sections
-
- Define Your Terms, asking students to use their own words and examples in their definitions.
-
- It's in the Cloud, directing students to the Web to locate and respond to various rhetorically focused items, including biographies and speeches.
-
- Salt and Pepper, spicing up the study of rhetoric by stretching students' thinking about how their writing can be improved, sometimes by attending to details such as punctuation, and sometimes by exploring the use of unusual techniques such as stylistic fragments.
-
- Review Questions, providing an end-of-chapter quiz to help cement the chapter ideas in long-term memory.
-
- Questions for Thought and Discussion, a set of questions designed for either in-class discussion or personal response.
New to the Second Edition
-
- Additional examples of each device, including from world personalities and the captains of industry
-
- More and longer exercises, with a range of difficulty
-
- Advice from classical rhetoricians including Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Cicero, and Quintilian.
Frequently asked questions
Information
1
Balance
Parallelism
- Clarity. Sentences with parallelism are easier to understand than those without it because a repeated grammatical structure requires less mental processing than a series of new structures.
- Balance. Parallel structures make it easier for the reader to hold each of the ideas in mind while reading the subsequent ideas.
- Rhythm. Most readers hear in their minds the words they read. The sound, the musical nature, of the words adds to (or detracts from) the overall reading experience. Parallel structures are more rhythmic than nonparallel structures.
- Elegance. Another way to describe elegant writing might be to say interesting writing. Appropriate use of parallelism provides a textureâeven a beautyâto writing that makes it more readable and engaging.
Exercise 1
- (a) To install new carpeting, workers must first remove the old carpet, prepare the surface, and then lay down the matting.
- (b) Next, the installers need a sharp knife and a sturdy straightedge to cut the new carpet along carefully measured lines.
- (c) Several workers are often needed to haul the carpet into the house, up the stairs, and across the room.
- (d) Thus, the main steps in a carpet installation are removing the old floor covering, cleaning the floor, installing the underlayment, and laying the carpet.
- (e) A proper carpeting installation starts with measuring exactly and cutting precisely.