WRITING BETTER ENGLISH WEEK 12

 WYZANT WRITING WEEK 12 ERIC LI 022623

 

WRITING BETTER ENGLISH

Persuasion:

ETHOS – AUTHORITY, REPUTATION, ACHIEVEMENT, INSIGHT

LOGOS - REASON

PATHOS – EMOTION

 

- STRUNK AND WHITE, from THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

      SEE ALSO GRAMMARLY.COM FOR FREE EDITOR

- EMERSON, from “SELF-RELIANCE”

-FROST, POETRY, “Mending Wall”

 

LAST WEEK’S ASSIGNMENT, 150-250 WORDS ON CURRENT CYPRUS CONFLICT

 

NEXT WEEK’S ASSIGNMENT, 150-250 W0RDS

Discuss “Mending Wall”

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

 

 

 

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE, CONTINUED

IV. WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS COMMONLY MISUSED

“any body” means “any corpse. ”Use “anybody.”

“as good or better than.” Use “as good as, if not better.”

“As yet.” Use “yet.”.”

“no doubt but that” use “no doubt that”

“Certainly” is often over-used.

“Comprise” means embrace or include.

“Currently” is often redundant.

“Data” is a plural noun. “Datum” is singular.

“disinterested” is impartial. “Uninterested” bored.

 

 

 

ESSAY, "SELF-RELIANCE," RALPH WALDO EMERSON

 

SIXTEENTH PARAGRAPH Ending

Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue.

We worship it today because it is not of today. We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

 

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH PARAGRAPHS

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency.

Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.

Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more.

A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me.

I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true.

Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things.

Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events.

Ordinarily, everybody in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation.

The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent.

Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.

A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire.

Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome"; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet.

Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him.

But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these.

To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, 'Who are you, Sir?'

Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise.

That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.

 

REMINDER  / REVIEW

Chapter Titles from THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE

Habit 1: Be Proactive
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Habit 3: Put First Things First
Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
Habit 6: Synergize

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

 

WRITING ASSIGNMENT:  150-250 WORDS ON FROST’S “Mending Wall.”

Perhaps: do “good fences make good neighbors”? Why and why not.

 

LESSONS FROM THE VOCABULARY BUILDER