Style Lesson Four

Characters

Review

• Define nominalization.• What is Principle of clarity1?• What is the Principle of clarity 2?

Characters

• Make the subjects of most of your verbs short, specific, and concrete.

• Making sure characters are subjects is more important than making sure verbs are actions.

1) Diagnose

1) Skim the first eight words:Do you have a character as the simple subject?

Government intervention in fast-changing technologies has led to the distortion of market evolution and interference in new market technology

2) Identify characters.

2) Skim sentence for possessive pronouns attached to nominalization, adjectives, and objects of prepositions.

Government intervention in fast-changing technologies has led to the distortion of market evolution and interference in new market technology

3) Revise

Skim passage for actions involving those characters. Ask who is doing what.

Government intervention in fast-changing technologies has led to the distortion of market evolution and interference in new product development.

Government intervenes, distorts, interferesMarket evolves, develops

Reassemble characters and actions into sentence using conjunctions: if, although, because, when, how, why.

Government intervenes, distorts, interferesMarket evolves, develops

Medieval theological debates often address issues considered trivial by modern philosophical thought.

Absent subjects

What do you do when you have no character in the sentence?

3 choices

1) Abstractions as characters

Flesh and blood characters are best but . . .

Abstractions (freedom of speech, amendment) can be characters if your readers are very familiar with them and you make them the subject of action verbs.

2) Adding a character

Research strategies that look for more than one variable are useful in understanding factors in psychiatric disorders.

Add a character (researcher)

Use a vague pronoun (one, we, you), all of which are unsatisfactory

3) Passive Voice

When we don’t have a character, we slide into passive voice.

We do want to avoid passive, but there are good reasons for choosing passive? (48)

Academic writing

Myth: academic writing doesn’t use “I” or “we” and thus passive voice.

However, first person is most often found in meta-discourse (52).

Beware noun + noun = noun

Avoid strings of nouns because they make confusing characters for readers.

Early childhood thought disorder misdiagnosis often results from unfamiliarity with recent research literature.

Physicians misdiagnose thought disorders in young children when they are unfamiliar with recent research on the subject.