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Style:
Balance and Consistency
Tenses
Use the present tense or the past tense
consistently throughout papers, but don't shift back and forth between
them. The present tense is useful for all writing which analyzes events,
ideas, words, works of art, or scientific results. It helps show that
ideas are alive in your mind. With historical events you may choose the
past tense to say what happened when, if the action is complete in the
past:
In March, 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson
declared that he would not seek the Presidency.
When analyzing such events in a present
context, however, return to the present:
Johnson's stepping-down suggests that
even powerful presidents have to recognize the limits of their power.
Use your course texts and secondary
sources as a guide to the proper use of tenses in papers.
Parallel Structure and
Balance
Virginia Woolf on reading:
The only advice, indeed, that one
person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow
your own instinct, to use your own reason, to come to your own
conclusions.
(Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read A Book?")
Loren Eisley on evolution:
We lost our hairy covering, our jaws
and teeth were reduced in size, our sex life was postponed, our infancey
became among the most helpless of any of the animals because everything
had to wait upon the development of that fast-growing mushroom which had
sprung up in our minds.
(Loren Eisley, "The Dream Animal" from The Immense Journey)
Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh on the
beauty of mathematics:
Blindness to the aesthetic element in
mathematics is widespread and can account for a feeling that mathematics
is dry as dust, as exciting as a telephone book, as remote as the laws
of infangtheif in fifteenth century Scotland.
(Davis and Hersh, The Mathematical Experience)
Parallel structure is more than correct
grammar: it helps unify a sentence and clarify its intentions. In all
three of the above examples, the parallel elements (infinitives,
subject-predicate structures, or adjective clauses) derive from the same
source. They are like repeated stitches of the same color in an
embroidered belt. This unity helps show the relationship between cause
and effect, or among items on a list. When parallels are faulty the
sentence gives a slipshod effect, as Woolf's does when we deliberately
mess it up:
The only advice, indeed, that one
person can give another about reading is to take no advice, following
instincts is best and you must use your own reason, and to come to your
own conclusions.
Balance in a sentence comes from a
careful distribution of weight and purpose; in a balanced sentence (such
as this one), clauses of equal importance have equal length. No exact
rule for balancing will help you as much as reading aloud. Skillful
writers can write long sentences without losing balance, because the
writers know where they are going:
All along the street there are people
who watched me grow up, people who grew up with me, people I watched
grow up along with my brothers and sisters; and, sometimes in my arms,
sometimes underfoot, sometimes at my shoulder -- or on it -- their
children, a riot, a forest of children, who include my nieces and
nephews.
(James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name)
Imbalanced sentences often end with a
thud:
In face of nuclear war, widespread
starvation and political imbalance, the world must do something about
these things.
A vague predicate can dissipate the
energy of a sentence's beginning. Here the writer needs a strong ending
to carry forward her initial powerful phrase. Instead of sounding as
though she got up to answer the phone in the middle of the sentence, she
should carry out her own voice through that daunting first phrase to a
decisive conclusion:
In face of nuclear war, widespread
starvation and political imbalance, the world must reawaken its
consciousness as a world, not just as an assortment of people.
Passive Voice
Intransitive Verbs
Too Many Little Words
Adverbitis
Hitchhikers, Babblers, and Jaw-Flappers
Windy and Pretentious Language
Balance and Consistency
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