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

Part 1 The process of writing

various syntactic options (different ways of constructing sentences) can allow you to compensate for the lack of intonation in writing. In this connection, one point needs to be made quite clearly. Although the written language obviously does not have intonation, your readers will tend to read your text – even though they do not read it out loud – as though it were being spoken to them. One of the best ways of editing your writing, therefore, is to read it out to yourself. In this way you can check whether your sentences are constructed in such a way that the reader is naturally drawn to place an accent on those elements which you wish to emphasize; if not, an alternative syntactic construction may be called for. This is what we have in mind when we say, from time to time in this book, that the accent falls on this or that part of a sentence or that a sentence has a particular rhythm.

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Challenges for writers more familiar with Dutch

This final section will deal with a number of differences between written English and written Dutch. These differences are not enormous but if they are not pointed out, they will inevitably show up in your writing and mark it as foreign. Very generally speaking, there are greater contrasts between writ ten sentence structure and spoken language in English than in Dutch. This applies, for example, to the use of accents, which are freely used in Dutch writing to indicate the presence of unusual stress on some item:

De motie werd tóch ingetrokken. Het publiek was zéér enthousiast in zijn reactie.

In English, such accents are totally impossible. The use of underlining or ital ics is sometimes encountered, but these techniques should be used very spar ingly in argued texts. The best ways to achieve the kind of emphasis indicated by the accents in the Dutch examples are through syntax, placing the empha sized expression ( tóch – after all ) in sentence-final position, or through vocabulary by choosing a word that is inherently powerful ( zéér – highly ):

The motion was withdrawn after all. The audience’s reaction was highly enthusiastic.

Another way in which Dutch writers can reflect spoken-language stress is by means of the colon (:); see Chapter 9 Section 4 for details. The colon is often used in Dutch before some element of a sentence which deserves particular emphasis and in speaking would be preceded by a short pause, for instance:

Dit betekent: meer aandacht voor de overlevingskans van tijgers.

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