tailieunhanh - Essential guide to writing part 18

It's your job to guide them, to make their task as easy as the subject allows. Ask yourself questions about your readers: What can I expect them to know and not know? What do they believe and value? How do I want to affect them by what I say? | For more material and information please visit CLARITY AND SIMPLICITY 267 Some connectives are prone to ambiguity. Or for instance can signify 1 a logical disjunction that is A or B but not both and 2 an alternative name or word for the same thing The shag or cormorant is a common sea bird along the New England coast. Because after a negative statement may also be ambiguous We didn t go because we were tired. We did not go and the reason was that we were tired or emphatically We did go and we certainly were not tired On other occasions ambiguity lurks not in a single word but in an entire statement I liked this story as much as I liked all his others. I like all his stories including this one or I don t like any of his stories including this one So be it until Victory is ours and there is no enemy but Peace. . there is no enemy and now we have Peace or . there is no enemy except Peace Clever writers exploit ambiguity as a kind of irony seeming to say one thing while meaning another. Joan Didion in the following description of a wedding wryly comments on marriage by using illusion both in its technical dressmaking sense of a bridal veil and in its more commonplace meaning of a false hope or dream A coronet of seed pearls held her illusion veil. And the nineteenth-century statesman and novelist Benjamin Disraeli had a standard response to all would-be authors who sent him unsolicited manuscripts Many thanks I shall lose no time in reading it. For more material and information please visit 268 DICTION Connotation The connotation of a word is its fringe or associated meanings including implications of approval or disapproval. See pages 179 ff When a connotation pulls awkwardly against the context even though the basic meaning of the word fits the term must be replaced. In the following sentence for example unrealistic has the wrong connotations for the writer s purpose In such stories it is exciting to break away from the .