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
