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1、李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛内部资料 | 严禁传播The Elements of Style第一章精讲讲义by李晨老师Page 1 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛基本信息作者生平出版信息评价好评中评差评中立第一章内容提要1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's.单数名词构成所有格加s内部资料 | 严禁传播446778101720212. In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma aftereach

2、 term except the last.由一个连词连接的三个或三个以上的一组词语中,除最后一个外,其余的每个词语后都需用逗号分开3. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas.插入语应位于两个逗号之间4. Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause.引导独立分句的连词前需用逗号5. Do not join independent clauses with a comma.不要用逗号连接独立分句6. Do not break sentences i

3、n two.不要把句子拆成两半23243032347. Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, anappositive, an amplification, or an illustrative quotation.在独立分句之后用冒号来引导一列具体的事物、一个同位语、一个进一步阐述的词语或一条说明性的引语368. Use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption and to announce a longappositi

4、ve or summary.破折号表示突然停顿或中断,引导一个较长的同位语或简短的总结9. The number of the subject determines the number of the verb.主语的单复数决定谓语动词的单复数10. Use the proper case of pronoun.代词的格要用得得当38434511. A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammaticalsubject.位于句首的分词短语必须与句子的主语相关成果检测测验1 测验2第一章有声

5、书Page 2 of 545053535354李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛李晨老师朗读外教朗读内部资料 | 严禁传播5454Page 3 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛基本信息内部资料 | 严禁传播作者生平Page 4 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛内部资料 | 严禁传播Page 5 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛出版信息内部资料 | 严禁传播Page 6 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛内部资料 | 严禁传播评价好评主要来自50周年纪念版,复制下面的链接到浏览器中查看 biz=MzA5MDQzMTYwN

6、g=&mid=208938201&idx=1&sn=2cb955413e576 d24add6a6a6afc199c2&scene=19#wechat_redirectPage 7 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛中评内部资料 | 严禁传播The War on Strunk and WhiteJoseph Bottum, anti-anti-Strunk & WhiteBe clear, they said, and, by God, clarity is what they got. Sentences thatzinged by l

7、ike bulletsbang, a shot rings out, and bang, the man at the bar with a whiskey sour slumps over dead, and bang, the lights go out, leaving nothing much to notice, except the screaming.They hated conjunctions and sentence adverbs, did Strunk and White, ourlucid boys, our apostles of a briefer gospel.

8、 “Omit needless words,” demanded The Elements of Style. You remember the book, of course. A 1919 writing manual from an English professor named William Strunk Jr., mostly forgotten until his famous student E.B. White revised the text in 1959, added his name to the front cover, and sold over 10 milli

9、on of the thingsmostly to people needing going-away-to-college presents for their nieces and nephews. Who eventually grew up, got jobs, worked for 20 years, and discovered they remembered little from school except that they ought to buy the book for their own college-bound nieces and nephews.As it h

10、appens, I love all those complicated conjunctive phrases that Strunkand White despised: in the event, however, whereupon, and yet. I love the way they feel at the beginning of a sentencethe way they grease the slide from one phrase to another, with an unctuous nod toward the structures of logic as t

11、hey slip by. For that matter, passive constructions are used with glee by most of the writers I admire. Which would be a telling point against Strunk and Whites commandment “Use the active voice,” except that the pair dont actually seem to know what active and passive voices are.Neither, as far as t

12、hat goes, does George Orwell, whose 1946 essay “Politicsand the English Language” invariably gets itself mentioned somewhere in discussions of writing. Strunk and White were after a lean and sharpened prose; a sort of literary purpose is what they had in view. But with his own attack on the passive,

13、 Orwell was hounding a different fox: the way language can be used to erase the agent who caused the events a sentence is ostensibly describing. Mistakes were made being a classic example.For such obscuring purposes, the passive voice is only one of many devices,and not a particularly good one at th

14、at: What, exactly, is unclear about The crash was caused by the pilots error? Cloudy agency and the passive voice are like circles in a Venn Diagram with only a small arc of intersection, butPage 8 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛内部资料 | 严禁传播writing manuals have taught several generations of students to equ

15、atepassives with obscurityand, surprisingly often, to believe that a passive is any sentence with the verb to be in it.“Avoid the use of qualifiers,” “Put statements in positive form”all suchOrwellish, Strunk-and-Whiteian rules can seem a little silly. A little small- hearted, and a lot susceptible

16、to misuse. Besides, they partake of a kind of sympathetic magic: Eliminating the occasional accoutrements of bad writing wont rid the world of bad writingunless you expect a ban on red leatherette barstools to halt the consumption of bad whiskey sours.All that said, something in the recent war on St

17、runk and White has begun toput my back up. The Elements of Style is an “obnoxiously ignorant little book,” the linguistics professor Geoffrey K. Pullum announced on January 24a text matched only by Orwells “overblown and dishonest essay.” On January 21, the Financial Times dismissed Strunk and White

18、 as a product of the Cold War, “that disciplined, buttoned-down, and most self-assured stretch of the American century.” In his new book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, Stanley Fish airily waves off Strunk and White as the faded avatars of the old middlebrow consensus: the middle-class

19、 elitists of a world gone by.And in that contextin the midst of an assault on the old definitions of goodwritingcant we stop and admit that, all in all, these were reasonable guides? Last night I pulled down from the shelves, for the first time in years, that little blue book my uncle had given me a

20、s I was packing for college.Brittle pages, foxed edges, and a clean confident belief that writing, after all, is meant to express something.“Prefer the standard to the offbeat,” Strunk and White insisted at the end ofThe Elements of Style. I could never quite obey that kind of dictum myself; prose h

21、as always seemed to me a vast and inarticulate ocean, tossing wave after wave of words against the shore in the hope of washing down to sea a flotsam bit of meaning. But, hell, the fact that we cant live up to an ideal doesnt mean it isnt an ideal. A praiseworthy goal. A truth that keeps us honest w

22、ith ourselves.Page 9 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛差评内部资料 | 严禁传播50 Years of Stupid Grammar AdviceBy Geoffrey K. Pullum16 April 2009 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that isloved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a co

23、mmemorative edition has been released.I won't be celebrating.The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it isheld by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students'

24、; grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead.William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte's Web, took English

25、with him in 1919, purchasing as a required text the first edition, which Strunk had published privately. After Strunk's death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket

26、 (in 1959) and has sold millions.This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because bothauthors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian. Des

27、pite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.Notice what I am objecting to is no

28、t the style advice in Elements, which mightbest be described the way The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes Earth: mostly harmless. Some of the recommendations are vapid, like "Be clear" (how could one disagree?). Some are tautologous, like "Do not explain too much."

29、(Explaining too much means explaining more than you should, so of course you shouldn't.) Many are useless, like "Omit needless words." (The students who know which words are needless don't need the instruction.) Even so, it doesn't hurt to lay such well-meant maxims before novi

30、ce writers.Page 10 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛内部资料 | 严禁传播Even the truly silly advice, like "Do not inject opinion," doesn't really do harm.(No force on earth can prevent undergraduates from injecting opinion. And anyway, sometimes that is just what we want from them.) But despite the &qu

31、ot;Style" in the title, much in the book relates to grammar, and the advice on that topic does real damage. It is atrocious. Since today it provides just about all of the grammar instruction most Americans ever get, that is something of a tragedy. Following the platitudinous style recommendatio

32、ns of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them, but that is not true of the grammar stipulations."Use the active voice" is a typical section head. And the section in questionopens with an attempt to discredit passive clauses that is either grammatically misgui

33、ded or disingenuous.We are told that the active clause "I will always remember my first trip toBoston" sounds much better than the corresponding passive "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." It sure does. But that's because a passive is always a stylisti

34、c train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows "by").For me to report that I paid my bill by saying "The bill was paid by me," withno stress on "me," would sound inane. (I'm

35、 the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. "The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor" sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invente

36、d example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.After this unpromising start, there is some fairly sensible style advice: Theauthors explicitly say they do not mean "that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice," which is "frequently convenient and sometimes necessar

37、y." They give good examples to show that the choice between active and passive may depend on the topic under discussion.Sadly, writing tutors tend to ignore this moderation, and simply red-circleeverything that looks like a passive, just as Microsoft Word's grammar checker underlines every

38、passive in wavy green to signal that you should try to get rid of it. That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done. But it is not what I am most concerned about here.Page 11 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛内部资料 | 严禁传播What concerns me is that the bias against

39、 the passive is being retailed by apair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnose

40、s. "At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard" is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no signof the passive in it anywhere."It was not long before she was very s

41、orry that she had said what she had"also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction."The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired" ispresumably fingered as passive because of "impaired," but that's a mistake. It's an

42、adjective here. "Become" doesn't allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that "A new edition became issued by the publishers" is not grammatical.)These examples can be found all over the Web in study guides for freshmancomposition classes. (Try a Google search

43、 on "great number of dead leaves lying.") I have been told several times, by both students and linguistics-faculty members, about writing instructors who think every occurrence of "be" is to be condemned for being "passive." No wonder, if Elements is their grammar bible

44、. It is typical for college graduates today to be unable to distinguish active from passive clauses. They often equate the grammatical notion of being passive with the semantic one of not specifying the agent of an action. (They think "a bus exploded" is passive because it doesn't say

45、whether terrorists did it.)The treatment of the passive is not an isolated slip. It is typical of Elements.The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notic

46、e their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how to identify what they condemn."Put statements in positive form," they stipulate, in a section that seeks toprevent "not" from being used as "a means of evasion."Page

47、 12 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛内部资料 | 严禁传播"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," they insist.(The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clausecontaining three adjectives: "The adj

48、ective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."That's actually not just three strikes, it's four, because in addition tocontravening "positive form" and "active voice" and "nouns and verbs," it has a relative clau

49、se ("that can pull") removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: "Keep related words together.""Keep related words together" is further explained in these terms: "Thesubject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a

50、rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning." That is a negative passive, containing an adjective, with the subject separated from the principal verb by a phrase ("as a rule") that could easily have been transferred to the beginning. Another quadr

51、uple violation.The book's contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, asif the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don't apply to them. But I don't think they are. Given the evidence that they can't even tell actives from passives, my guess would be tha

52、t it is sheer ignorance. They know a few terms, like "subject" and "verb" and "phrase," but they do not control them well enough to monitor and analyze the structure of what they write.There is of course nothing wrong with writing passives and negatives andadjectives an

53、d adverbs. I'm not nitpicking the authors' writing style. White, in particular, often wrote beautifully, and his old professor would have been proud of him. What's wrong is that the grammatical advice proffered in Elements is so misplaced and inaccurate that counterexamples often show up

54、 in the authors' own prose on the very same page.Some of the claims about syntax are plainly false despite being respected bythe authors. For example, Chapter IV, in an unnecessary piece of bossiness, says that the split infinitive "should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusua

55、l stress on the adverb." The bossiness is unnecessary because the split infinitive has always been grammatical and does not need to be avoided. (The authors actually knew that. Strunk's original version never even mentioned split infinitives. White added both the above remark and the furthe

56、r reference, in Chapter V, admitting that "some infinitives seem to improve onPage 13 of 54李晨老师手稿李解写作微信群 | 笃学讲坛内部资料 | 严禁传播being split.") But what interests me here is the descriptive claim about stresson the adverb. It is completely wrong.Tucking the adverb in before the verb actually de-e

57、mphasizes the adverb, soa sentence like "The dean's statements tend to completely polarize the faculty" places the stress on polarizing the faculty. The way to stress the completeness of the polarization would be to write, "The dean's statements tend to polarize the faculty co

58、mpletely."This is actually implied by an earlier section of the book headed "Place theemphatic words of a sentence at the end," yet White still gets it wrong. He feels there are circumstances where the split infinitive is not quite right, but he is simply not competent to spell out hi

59、s intuition correctly in grammatical terms.An entirely separate kind of grammatical inaccuracy in Elements is themismatch with readily available evidence. Simple experiments (which students could perform for themselves using downloaded classic texts from sources like ) show that S

60、trunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage.Consider the explicit instruction: "With none, use the singular verb when theword means 'no one' or 'not one.'" Is this a rule to be trusted? Let's investigate.Try searching the script of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest(1895) for "none of us." There is one example of it as a subject: "None of us are perfect" (spoken

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