William Zinsser是美國著名的作家、編輯、文學(xué)評論家，由他主編的《怎樣寫出靠譜英文》因它給讀者寫作方面絕妙的建議，以及行云流水般的寫書風(fēng)格而聞名。每個人，只要想寫好英文作文，想在這個社會中生存下來，都需要這樣的一本書。它不僅能指導(dǎo)我們寫作的用語、詞匯的運用，還能開闊我們的寫作思路，提供更多更全面的論據(jù)，充實我們的文章。無論你是想寫人物景色、科學(xué)技術(shù)、體育運動，還是自己的情感經(jīng)歷，這本書都成為你寫作道路上的指明燈。

1. Simplicity & Clutter 怎樣把文章寫簡潔？

Zinsser痛恨兜圈子，任何模棱兩可的措辭，表意不明的句子在他看來都是災(zāi)難。他對簡潔如此執(zhí)著，以至于Zinsser這個名字成了文風(fēng)簡潔的代名詞。美國有些老師會讓學(xué)生Zinsser一下他們的文章，Zinsser成了一個清除文中clutter的動詞。

什么是所謂的clutter呢？ 放到中文語境里，遍地都是，我們來看看書里是怎么介紹的吧！

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions,?pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind. New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech. Consider what President Nixon’s aide John Dean accomplished in just one day of testimony on television during the Watergate hearings. The next day everyone in America was saying “at this point in time” instead of “now.”

Take the adjective “personal,” as in “a personal friend of mine,” “his personal feeling.” It’s typical of hundreds of words that can be eliminated. The personal friend has come into the language to distinguish him or her from the business friend, thereby debasing both language and friendship. Someone’s feeling is that person’s personal feeling-—that’s what “his” means. Friends are friends, the rest is clutter.

Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, garbage collectors into waste disposal personnel and the town dump into the volume reduction unit.

Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes. When General Motors had a plant shutdown, that was a “volume-related production-schedule adjustment.” When an Air Force missile crashed, it “impacted with the ground prematurely.” Companies that go belly-up have “a negative cash-flow position.”

“Experiencing” is one of the worst clutters. Instead of “it is raining”, there is no way to say “At the present time we are experiencing precipitation.” Even your dentist will ask if you are experiencing any pain. If he had his own kid in the chair he would say,” Does it hurt?”

The point of raising these examples is to serve notice that clutter is the enemy. Beware, then, of the long word that’s no better than the short word: “assistance”(help), “numerous” (many), “facilitate” (ease), “individual”(man or woman), “remainder” (rest), “initial” (first), “implement”(do), “sufficient” (enough), “attempt” (try), “referred to as”(called) and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write.

How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. It’s impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. He may get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will be lost, and there’s no sin so grave, for the reader will not easily be lured back.

Is there any way to recognize clutter at a glance? Here’s a device my students at Yale found helpful. I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work. Often just one word got bracketed: the unnecessary preposition appended to a verb (“order up”), or the adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb (“smile happily”), or the adjective that states a known fact (“tall skyscraper”). Often my brackets surrounded the little qualifiers that weaken any sentence they inhabit (“a bit,” “sort of), or phrases like “in a sense,” which don’t mean anything. Sometimes my brackets surrounded an entire sentence—the one that essentially repeats what the previous sentence said, or that says something readers don’t need to know or can figure out for themselves. Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the authors voice.

My reason for bracketing the students’ superfluous words, instead of crossing them out, was to avoid violating their sacred prose. I wanted to leave the sentence intact for them to analyze. I was saying, “I may be wrong, but I think this can be deleted and the meaning won’t be affected. But you decide. Read the sentence without the bracketed material and see if it works.” In the early weeks of the term I handed back papers that were festooned with brackets. Entire paragraphs were bracketed. But soon the students learned to put mental brackets around their own clutter, and by the end of the term their papers were almost clean.

Today many of those students are professional writers, and they tell me, “I still see your brackets—they’re following me through life.”

You can develop the same eye. Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful?

Simplify, simplify.

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