Entries for November 2006
Thus, the details are Georgia.
Contributed by David Mansfield on 09 November 2006 at 12:40In a draft of a current paper, I wrote the following:
I attempted to decipher Robert Frost’s “Design,” finding that I had no idea what the poem might mean but that its creation of ambiguity aroused my interest far more strongly than did the presentation of dates and figures in courses on comparative politics or international relations.
Upon a first revision, the sentence is now:
I attempted to decipher Robert Frost’s “Design,” finding that I had no idea what the poem might mean, but its creation of ambiguity aroused my interest far more strongly than did the presentation of dates and figures in courses on comparative politics or international relations.
The difference is miniscule. I placed a comma between mean and but and removed that. That's all. Does it even make a difference?
Yes. In the first version of the sentence, the second half of the sentence is almost endless, becoming quite confusing because it contains both an idea -
I had no idea what the poem might mean
- and its opposite -
but that its creation of ambiguity aroused my interest far more strongly than did the presentation of dates and figures in courses on comparative politics or international relations.
- without even a comma to separate them. That's no good. Adding that comma (and removing that to make the comma grammatical) makes the sentence immensely more readable by separating two opposing ideas into different parts of the sentence.
On my second revision, the sentence is now
I attempted to decipher Robert Frost’s “Design,” finding that I had no idea what the poem might mean, but its creation of ambiguity aroused my interest far more strongly than the presentation of dates and figures in courses on comparative politics or international relations did.
The only difference? I moved did from before than to the end of the sentence. The first way was not strictly speaking wrong; it's the sort of archaic but acceptable inverted sentence that I include in most of my papers. Nonetheless, the length of the sentence necessitates a clear structure, and inverting the subject and verb was probably not the best route to go in creating such clarity. So, I changed it.
These are small changes, but the sentence is significantly easier to read. The devil is in the details may be an old saw, and clunkiness may not be the devil, but working on the details can still make a difference.
At the Sound of Your Tone . . . Part 1
Contributed by Christopher Williams on 08 November 2006 at 10:52So. Two of the most elusive concepts in writing are tone and voice. Where grammar, content, and even organization are generally apparent in a paper, tone and voice are rather more ephemeral. They exist more as a general sense or feeling about a paper, rather than something specific that can be readily identified and circled. So how do you approach something as subtle as tone and voice can be?
Read more »Today our subject might be ambiguity.
Contributed by David Mansfield on 07 November 2006 at 16:13What is the difference between
The motifs of eyeballs and submersion Minority Report can be read as a dialectic between truth (eyes) and concealment (submersion).
which I consider to be a problematic thesis, and
Though inconsistencies problematize any straightforward reading, the motifs of eyeballs and submersion in Minority Report represent a discourse between truth and concealment.
?
Besides the fact that the the first statement is in passive voice, I think the main difference is that the first is wimpy - saying that motifs "can be read" this way - whereas the second states the truth in stronger language.
But wait, you may say - don't both theses hedge their bets? The first one may say "can," but the second has all this business about the impossibility of a straightforward reading.
True, I would reply, but the first takes as a given that one can create a straightforward interpretation but offers its own such reading in very meek fashion. In contrast, the second says flat out that any reading is problematic, but it offers its own interpretation anyway.
There is a difference, essentially, between the first saying "We can know the truth, but I don't," and the second saying, "We can't know the truth for sure, but here's a candidate."
There are two reasons why I prefer the second tact. On the one hand, the first technique is uninformative. If I ask you what you had for lunch, I don't care what you might have had; I want to know what you did have. Likewise, if I ask for analysis of Minority Report, I ask how you interpret it, not how you could intepret it, maybe, if you were in a particular mood.
More importantly, the second approach - "We can't know the truth for sure, but here's a candidate" - makes two claims where the first approach really only makes one. You have an option under this second approach not only to support your interpretation, as you could with the weak thesis, but to support your claim that no interpretation is 100% correct. More evidence = more content = less fluff required to reach a length requirement = everybody is totally happy.
Now don't try this on every paper. It works best in analyses of books, films, or other texts, because these very often include ambiguity as a central formal element. But when you get the urge to use wimpy language like "can" or "maybe," consider using this alternate approach.