Writing with Clarity and Style

A Guide to Rhetorical Devices for Contemporary Writers

Robert A. Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351361859
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

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:

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• Style Check, discussing many elements of style, including some enhanced and revised sections

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• Define Your Terms, asking students to use their own words and examples in their definitions.

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• It's in the Cloud, directing students to the Web to locate and respond to various rhetorically focused items, including biographies and speeches.

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• 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.

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• Review Questions, providing an end-of-chapter quiz to help cement the chapter ideas in long-term memory.

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• Questions for Thought and Discussion, a set of questions designed for either in-class discussion or personal response.

New to the Second Edition

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• Additional examples of each device, including from world personalities and the captains of industry

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• More and longer exercises, with a range of difficulty

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• Advice from classical rhetoricians including Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Cicero, and Quintilian.

1
Balance

The single, most important goal of writing is to be clear—without being boring.

—Aristotle

Writing well involves more than merely putting one word after another. Good writing has structure and balance that make it easy to read and understand. This chapter covers a few of the basic techniques for creating more balanced and therefore more readable prose. As with the other devices in the book, these can be learned and appreciated best if you read the examples aloud to get a feel for the effect. When you work on the exercises, read your own sentences aloud and listen to them carefully. Writing is aural (there is sound in silent reading) as well as visual.

Parallelism

Parallelism (PAR uh lel iz um) is the presentation of several ideas of equal importance by putting each of them into the same kind of grammatical structure. Each of the ideas is ordered or phrased similarly:

To think carefully and to write precisely are interrelated goals.

The sentence in this example contains two subjects, developed in the same grammatical style (two infinitives, to think and to write; each with an adverb, carefully and precisely). Thus, to think carefully is paralleled with to write precisely. Compare that sentence to the following example, which presents the same ideas but which does not contain parallelism:

To think carefully and precise writing are interrelated goals.

If you study these two sentences, you will notice that parallelism provides several benefits:

• 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 texture—even a beauty—to writing that makes it more readable and engaging.

Parallelism is one of the building blocks for many of the other devices in this book. It is so important for clarity that breaking parallelism is usually considered a writing fault. In fact, revise for parallelism is a common notation in the margins of student essays. Compare the following sentences.

Parallelism broken: Julie liked reading the new blog posts more than lunch.

Revised for parallelism: Julie liked reading the new blog posts more than eating her sack lunch.

In the example above, confusion may arise from the broken parallelism because the sentence sets up an unbalanced contrast between reading the new blog posts and lunch. What about lunch is being compared? Going to lunch, eating lunch, relaxing during lunch?

Parallelism broken: The mechanic applied extra force to the bolt so that it would seat properly and he wanted it to be sufficiently tight.

Revised for parallelism: The mechanic applied extra force to the bolt so that it would seat properly and tighten sufficiently.

In this example, the revision more clearly shows that proper seating and proper tightening are parallel reasons (both following the so that) for the mechanic’s actions.

Any sentence parts can be paralleled, any number of times, with the usual number being two, three, or four. Following are several examples of the various elements that can be paralleled.

Parallel subjects: The carefully trimmed trees in the front yard and the spectacularly clean patio in the back revealed the meticulous nature of the homeowner.

Parallel verbs and adverbs: The agency had frequently received but seldom revealed a large number of crank phone calls.

Parallel objects: The doctor carefully examined the heel, the ankle, and the toes.

Parallel verbs and objects: Mom went to little Judy’s room and gave her a drink, pulled up her blanket, and kissed her forehead.

Parallel verbs and objects: Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

—John F. Kennedy

Parallel prepositional phrases: The dropped apple floated down the river and under the bridge.

Note that effective parallelism does not require that every element match exactly, as the following example shows.

Rough parallelism: After the concept drawings for the building are completed, but before we submit them to the planning department, the design committee will take one more look at them.

Exact parallelism: After the concept drawings for the building are completed, but before the planning review in city hall is started, the design committee will take one more look.

One definition of parallelism is “recurrent structural similarity,” and as the word similarity implies, there is some latitude. Note also that paralleling rather long subordinate clauses helps the reader hold the entire sentence more easily and clearly in mind.

These early critics—who point out the beauties of style and ideas, who discover the faults of false constructions, and who discuss the application of the rules—usually provide a much richer understanding of the writer’s essay.

In the example above, the second and third use of who is optional and will still be implied if omitted. See the discussion of the zeugmatic devices in Chapter 9 for further information about implying words in various constructions.

Parallelism is often useful for expressing contrasts or alternatives (see antithesis, later in this chapter).

Baking in the summer sun and rusting from the winter rains, the tractor deteriorated a little more each year.

Flying a plane is more complicated than turning a few knobs and pulling a few levers.

In practice, various sentence elements are combined into parallel structures that form either a piece of a sentence, an entire sentence, or even more than one sentence. Following are some examples of these possibilities.

Parallelism for emphasis at the end of a sentence: I shall never envy the honors which wit and learning obtain in any other cause, if I can be numbered among the writers who have given ardor to virtue and confidence to truth.

—Samuel Johnson

Parallelism of an entire sentence: Theoretical knowledge seeks to find truth, but practical knowledge seeks to improve performance.

—Aristotle

Parallelism of two sentences: After the first test, which used the rubber seal, the cylinder showed a ten-centimeter stain on the underside. After the second test, which used the new neoprene seal, the cylinder was completely unblemished underneath.

Exercise 1

Underline the parallel structures in the following sentences.

Example: The Fenns drove through the meadow and into the forest before setting up camp.

• (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.

Exercise 2

Write a sentence imitating the model sentence below, using parallelism where the model does.

Example model: He liked to eat chocolate donuts and drink strong coffee.

Ex...