学术写作是一项技能。与其他任何技能一样，学术写作技能的提高是需要持续练习的。

A modal of effecttive of effective prose communication ¶

1. Reverse-engineer what you read. If it feels like good writing, what makes it good? If it’s awful, why? Witing is an unnatural act. Good style requires a mental model of the communication scenario: How the writer imagines the reader; What the writer is trying to accomplish.

2. Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language. Prose as a window onto the world: The writer has seen something in the world that the reader has not yet noticed; He positions the reader so she can see it with her own eyes. The reader and writer are equals. The goal is to help the reader see objective reality. The style is conversation.

The focus is on the thing being shown, not on the activity of stuying it. (1) Minimize apologizing: Classic prose gives the reader credit for knowing that many concepts are hard to define, many controversies hard to resolve. The reader is there to see what the writer will do about it. (2) Minimize hedging: Better to be clear and possibly wrong than muddy and not even wrong; Count on the cooperative nature of ordinary conversation.

Keep up the illusion that the reader is seeing a world rather than listing to verbiage.7. Avoid cliché like the plague: The problem with writing a cliché is that it either forces the reader to turnoff her visual brain and just the prose as blah blah blah.

Classic prose is about the world, not about the conceptual tools with which we understand the world. 3. Don’t go meta. Minimize concepts about concepts, like approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency, and variable. Aviod metaconcepts (concepts about concepts).

Classic prose narrates ongoing events: We see agents performing actions to that affect objects Non-classic prose thingifies events and then refers to them: Nominalization and Zombie-nouns. 4. Let verbs be verbs. Appear, not make an appearance.

How understanding the design of language can lead to better writing advice? ¶

Language is an app for converting a web of thoughts into a linear string of words.

A inhereent problem in the design of language: The order of words in a sentence has to do two things at once: Serve as a code for meaning (Who did what to whom); Present some bits of information to the reader before others (affects how the information is absorbed)

In particular, the early material in the sentence naturally connect back to the context, to the topic, what the passage is about. In the metaphor of classic prose, what the reading is looking at. Later material is the sentence’s focal point. It referes to what the reader should now notice. Prose that violates these principles feels choppy, disjoined, incoherent.

English syntax provides writers with constructions that vary order in the string while preserving meaning. Writers must choose the construction that introduces ideas to the reader in the order in which she can best absorb them.

Why is the passive so common in bad writing? Good writers narrate a story, advanced by protagonists who make things happen. Bad writers work backwards from their own knowledge, writing down ideas in the order in which they occur to them. They begin with the outcome of an event, and then throw in the cause as an afterthought.

8. Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end. 9. Save the heaviest for last: A complex phrase should go at the end of the sentence. 10. Prose must cohere: Readers must know how each sentence is related to the preceding one. If it’s not obvious, use that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, as a result, because, nonetheless, or despite.

Why it is so hard for writers to use language to convey ideas effectively? ¶

5. Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms technical terms. Use for example liberally. Show a draft around, prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else. The curse of knowledge: When you know something, its hard to imagine what it is like for someone else not to know it. The curse of knowledge is the chief contributor to opaque writing: It doesn’t occur to the writer that readers haven’t learned their jargon, don’t know the itermediate steps that seem to them to be too obvious to mention, can’t visualize a scene currently in the writer’s mind’s eye. So the writer doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, to spell the logic, or to supply the concrete details. Because of the curse of knowledge we are prone to overestimating how familar are our audience is with our own material. Better solutions: Show a draft to a representative reader; Show a draft to yourself after some time has passed and it’s no longer familiar; Rewrite (several times) with a single goal: Making the prose understandable to the reader.

11. Revise several times with the single goal of improving the prose. 12. Read it aloud.

How should we think about correct usage? ¶

6.Omit needless words. 13. Find the best word, which is not always the fanciest word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes, and a thesaurus.

参考书 ¶

更多信息，请参考下面的书：

• Pinker, S. (2014). The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Penguin.