Writing with Style

Write with style. Most of your essays will be on the formal side, but that doesn t mean they have to be dull and dry. Choose interesting words that state exactly what you mean, including vivid verbs and specific adjectives and adverbs. 

You re at a dinner party and an elegantly dressed guest arrives. All the heads in the room turn to watch this person calmly enter the room. This person has style. They may not be the most attractive or intelligent person you ve ever met, but people pay attention to this person. When you write with style, your reader also pays attention. In this lesson, you will learn some tips for finding your own style. 

Writing with Style LESSON 12 M BETTER WRITING RIGHT NOW ... 

BETTER WRITING RIGHT NOW LESSON 12 Writing with Style... 

Flesch R. The art of plain talk, 1962. In JR Trimble, ed. Writing with Style Conversation on the Art of Writing. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975, p. 101. 

AS YOU BEGIN writing, feel free to try different approaches and angles. This is a good time to experiment with your writing tone, style, and form. At the same time, you should focus on... 

Transferring risk may sound easy. All you need is to find the right policy, for the right need, at the right cost. Write a check once a year and hope nothing happens. Of course, it is more complicated than this. When you retire, you must find policies that cover new risks or close gaps in existing ones. Policies can be deceptive. You may think you are fully covered when you re not. There are sometimes exclusions that limit your policy. Also, you must consider cost. It s impossible to live with style if you spend all your discretionary income on insurance premiums. 

J. S. Dodd (ed.). The ACS Style Guide, 2ded., American Chemical Society, Washington, DC (1997). [A general reference book on scientific writing with emphasis on manuscripts intended for one of the jomnals published by the American Chemical Society ] J. T. Scott, AIP Style Manual, 4th ed., American Institute of Physics. New York (1990). [Provides guidance in the preparation of papers for AIP journals ]... 

One can speak of it only in terms of the liigliest praise The book is eminently readable and the author writes with the knowledge and lucidity of style with which his previous works have made us familiar.. . , All students and workers in the field of physical chemistry, and all teachers of physical chemistry, will be grateful to Professor Partington for his Advanced Treatise, and one can only express the hope that the author will be able to bring this truly monumental work to a conclusion at not too distant a date. ... 

Guetig, M. 2011. Harness the Power of PowerPoint. PM NETWORK, September, pp. 50-54. lacone, S. J. 2004. Write to the Point How to Communicate in Business With Style and Purpose. Barnes Noble New York, NY. 

A weaker but more widely applicable criterion is that the rate constant estimate should be consistent with the body of experimental work on closely related reactions. A third factor is that of style, which is essentially equivalent to the contemporary state of mechanistic chemistry it may seem more reasonable to write a mechanism for one of the forms than for the alternative. Styles change, however. 

Pesticide use was not Carson s chosen topic. She preferred to author works that simply fostered a deeper appreciation of nature. A shy and soft-spoken woman, Carson wrote with an Albert Schweitzer-like reverence for life. All was sacred to her. Her style was lyrical, vivid, and romantic, falling mostly within the nature-writing tradition. She gave her creatures anthropomorphic characteristics, set them in dramatic situations, hoping, she said, to make animals in the woods or waters, where they live, as alive to others as they are to me. ... 

Writing here in a popular and well illustrated style, leading young scientists describe their research and give their visions offuture developments. The book conveys the excitement and enthusiasm ofthe young authors. It offers definitive reviews for people with a general interest in the future directions of science, ranging from researchers to scientifically minded school children. 

It s a good late-sixteenth-century hand, not the court hand of clerks, my paleographic colleagues would say, but the italic style of an educated man or woman, accustomed to writing a good deal. The black strokes jog across the page with no more force or flourish than necessary, as if the writer was old and could spare little time for more than was needed to tell the tale. 

Describe, for the tenth time, an instrument not covered in the laboratory book, and you write a procedure. Explain, again and again, operations that are in the book, and you get a set of notes. When these produce questions you revise until the students, not you, finally have it right. It you believe that writing is solidified speech—with the same pauses, the same cadences—then a style is set. And if you can still laugh, you write this book. 

With the aid of William Strunk and E.B. White in The Elements of Style and that of William Zinsser in On Writing Well, Rudolph Flesch in The ABC of Style, and D.L. Carson, whose comments appear in this book, I have tried to follow some principles of technical communication lately ignored in scientific texts use the first person, put yourself in the reader s place, and, the best for last, use the active voice and a personal subject. 

Write the effect postcondition in a (pre post) style when you wish each to describe one of many possible outcomes. Then combine them into actions using or. This style is generally better when you re building a specification model from different parts within the same document. You must combine these effects with your eyes open none of them makes any guarantees that the outcome it describes will be met, because they may restrict each other. 

Sometimes, however, you want to write a specification that makes guarantees for certain cases when these cases may overlap with others. In this case you can use an alternative style for writing the spec do not use an explicit precondition but instead describe the case within the postcondition itself. Here we use the same composition mles ... 

Hence, these two different styles of writing specs can be used to accomplish these two different goals of composing separate specifications. More details on dealing with exception conditions in specifications appear in Section 8.4, Action Exceptions and Composing Specs. 

The two fundamentally different ways of writing multiple specs (pre/post and pre=>post) were inspired by the work of D. Jackson [Jackson95], He points out the importance of having specs from different views that, when composed, do not do so monotoni-cally we realized we could support both styles with a simple convention on how the specs should be written, while using a uniform rule about composition. 

---