Mike Hannay en J. Lachlan Mackenzie - Effective Writing in English

Part 1 The process of writing

When you are writing an argued text, the major difference is that, at least in the short term, you appear to be the only communicator. You seem to have no rivals, since your readers are at such a (potentially enormous) physical and temporal distance from you that they cannot participate in any interaction. In itself, this is one of the pleasures of writing. But it also puts you at a consid erable disadvantage. When you are conversing, you will be profoundly aware of your hearer’s reactions – a sceptical glance, a look of incomprehension, a nod of approval. When you are writing, however, you have no way of telling what effect your text is likely to have on your readers. There is an important conclusion that we must draw from these obser vations: when you are writing, you should do whatever you can to overcome the disadvantages of the physical and temporal distance between yourself and your readers. The most effective way of doing this is to become your own ‘first reader’. As you consider how you are going to formulate your ideas, ask yourself whether the reader you imagine for your text will be likely to inter pret it the way you wish. Remember that the reader only has your text to go by, so every clue to understanding will have to be in that text. This is very much connected with what we called reader-friendliness in Section 1. Some of the questions you should ask yourself during the writing process are: 1 Is my overall intention clear to anyone reading this? 2 Have I omitted any essential steps in the argumentation? 3 Have I provided evidence for all the claims I make? 4 Is the level (vocabulary, syntactic complexity, paragraph length) appropri ate for the expected readership? Many if not all of the recommendations in this book are ultimately geared to helping you write in a more reader-friendly manner. By becoming your own first reader, you can to some extent recreate the face-to-face situation in which speech occurs. The fact that writing does not take place in a face-to-face situation also has consequences for certain linguistic aspects of the texts you create. Con sider, for example, the use of the first- and second-person personal pronouns I and you . These are among the most common words in spoken interaction. In the kind of argued text dealt with in this book, however, the use of these personal pronouns is generally frowned upon. Ways of avoiding the use of these pronouns will be discussed in the following subsections. 1.3.1 Depersonalization: first-person pronouns The major justification for banning the use of first-person pronouns, i.e. I and we and related forms such as me, my, mine, us, our , and ours , is that it is the argument itself that is central to the reader’s appreciation of your text, not its

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