英语单词大师：Wise Writing

 AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER, our guest is the author of a new book called "On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work -- and Don't."RS: Paula LaRocque has worked for many years as a writing instructor¹ and newspaper writing coach. Her advice to English language learners is to try to avoid bad habits that can be found even in the work of professional writers.

PAULA LaROCQUE: "If they're thinking about beauty and clarity, they won't be seduced² by the things that cheapen the language. And, to my mind, that's the proliferation of unnecessary euphemisms³ or fad⁴ and cliché, the things that are embedded⁵ in the language like the proliferation of the -ize and the -wise suffixes⁶. I remember reading in an obituary⁷ this sentence: 'The officer will be funeralized Tuesday.'"AA: "Someone actually wrote that?"PAULA LaROCQUE: "Yes, somebody actually wrote it. And you and I have no difficulty in seeing how even silly but ugly that is and how it cheapens the language and makes it less elegant than it could be. But a person speaking the language as second language might say, 'Oh, this is what a professional writer does and so this is what I should do.'

"Let's say that a member of your audience turns on the television here and gets the weather and the person says 'Let's see what the picture is weather-wise.' It's more elegant to say 'Let's see what the weather is.'"RS: "You do talk about words in the media and you come down a little bit hard on the media. Tell us why and what are the things that perhaps an English language learner might want to avoid when listening to the media."PAULA LaROCQUE: "When they listen to the media, the first thing they're going to hear is what I think of as media-speak. It's a small vocabulary, flat because it's overused; verbs such as spawned⁸, spurred, fueled, triggered, decimated, sparked. They have these little bunches of words that fall into the sentence kind of fully⁹ born: 'He is the architect of a plan hammered out in wide-ranging discussions.'"RS: "Isn't written language different from spoken language? Not to defend these words, but -- "PAULA LaROCQUE: "I know you're not defending it, but here's what I think: no. The only thing that should be different between speech and writing is that writing can be more elegant, because you can edit it. You go back and look at the sentence. We don't have that luxury when we're speaking. But everything else should be the same.

"For example, Avi, if you were going to tell me a story and you walked into my office, you would probably do a subject-verb-object sentence."AA: "That's right, that's the natural way people tend to speak."PAULA LaROCQUE: "And if we were working on the newspaper, I'd say 'That's really interesting, maybe you should do a story on that.' So you go out and sit at the computer and write something entirely¹⁰ different. You write something like 'Amid a firestorm of criticism, spawned on Thursday when ... '

"I mean, we know how to engage each other's interests, how to be dramatic without being melodramatic. We know how to deliver a message so that we're not boring, bewildering, annoying people -- in person. And yet we sit down and we write and we do bore, bewilder and annoy."AA: "And one last question. We're about to start a new academic year here in the United States and thousands of students from around the world will be attending classes and getting an introduction to academic American English. What suggestions would you offer them to prepare for the experience?"PAULA LaROCQUE: "When they sit down to write, if they wouldn't think about how I'm going to impress the reader, but only, or rather, how I'm going to get my message across in a pleasing and clear way. I'm not going to try to use a vocabulary that's not mine, because I know what will happen is, some of the words will be just a little bit off.

"And in terms of writing itself, if they would just sit down and write something as a roadmap before sitting down at the computer and just putting a sentence into the thing and start writing that way. If you have a beginning, a middle and an end planned -- sometimes now we just simply sit down at the computer, we change things out, we treat paragraphs like interchangeable modules¹¹. It stops being organic with really firmly knit transitions between one paragraph that grows out of another. We put the last period on and we say we're done, without ever realizing that what we just wrote was a rough draft."RS: Writing coach Paula LaRocque. Her new book is called "On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work -- and Don't."AA: You can learn much more about how American English works at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

1 instructor   

n.指导者，教员，教练

参考例句：

• The college jumped him from instructor to full professor.大学突然把他从讲师提升为正教授。
• The skiing instructor was a tall,sunburnt man.滑雪教练是一个高高个子晒得黑黑的男子。

2 seduced   

诱奸( seduce的过去式和过去分词 )； 勾引； 诱使堕落； 使入迷

参考例句：

• The promise of huge profits seduced him into parting with his money. 高额利润的许诺诱使他把钱出了手。
• His doctrines have seduced many into error. 他的学说把许多人诱入歧途。

3 euphemisms   

n.委婉语，委婉说法( euphemism的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• No point is in mincing words or hiding behind euphemisms. 没有必要闪烁其词或者羞羞答答。 来自辞典例句
• No point in mincing words or hiding behind euphemisms. 没必要闪烁其词或者羞羞答答。 来自辞典例句

4 fad   

n.时尚；一时流行的狂热；一时的爱好

参考例句：

• His interest in photography is only a passing fad.他对摄影的兴趣只是一时的爱好罢了。
• A hot business opportunity is based on a long-term trend not a short-lived fad.一个热门的商机指的是长期的趋势而非一时的流行。

5 embedded   

a.扎牢的

参考例句：

• an operation to remove glass that was embedded in his leg 取出扎入他腿部玻璃的手术
• He has embedded his name in the minds of millions of people. 他的名字铭刻在数百万人民心中。

6 suffixes   

n.后缀，词尾( suffix的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Many domain name suffixes have failed to gain general popularity. 很多域名后缀没有获得一般的通用性。 来自互联网
• For example, consider the use of prefixes and suffixes. 例如，那前缀和后缀的使用来说。 来自互联网

7 obituary   

n.讣告，死亡公告；adj.死亡的

参考例句：

• The obituary records the whole life of the deceased.讣文记述了这位死者的生平。
• Five days after the letter came,he found Andersen s obituary in the morning paper.收到那封信五天后，他在早报上发现了安德森的讣告。

8 spawned   

（鱼、蛙等）大量产（卵）( spawn的过去式和过去分词 )； 大量生产

参考例句：

• The band's album spawned a string of hit singles. 这支乐队的专辑繁衍出一连串走红的单曲唱片。
• The computer industry has spawned a lot of new companies. 由于电脑工业的发展，许多新公司纷纷成立。

9 fully   

adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地

参考例句：

• The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气，然后全部呼出。
• They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。

10 entirely   

ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The fire was entirely caused by their neglect of duty. 那场火灾完全是由于他们失职而引起的。
• His life was entirely given up to the educational work. 他的一生统统献给了教育工作。

11 modules   

n.模块( module的名词复数 )；单元；（宇宙飞船上各个独立的）舱；组件

参考例句：

• The course consists of ten core modules and five optional modules. 这门课程包括十个必修单元和五个选修单元。
• Our English course is divided into modules on poetry, drama, and novels. 我们的英语课分为诗歌、戏剧和小说等单元。 来自《简明英汉词典》