Focus on Prose Style & Williams’ Stylefor exercises (use these to structure the course)

Other Readings

Zinsser, On Writing Well

Strunk & White (online)

Use for lectures (lecture questions on test)

Walsh, Bill. Lapsing Into a Comma: A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print

Walsh, Bill.The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of tips on the Big Issues & Gray Areas of Contemporary American English

Gordon, Karen Elizabeth. The New Well Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed

Gordon, Karen Elizabeth, The Disheveled Dictionary: A Curious Caper Through Our Sumptuous Lexicon

Gordon, Karen Elizabeth. The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed

Gordon, Karen Elizabeth, Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, A beastly Guide Through the Writer’s Labyrinth

Woe is I

?Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Hale, Constance. Sin and Syntax

SAVE GRAMMAR & PUNCTUATION BOOKS FOR A THREE-UNIT ENG 395.

Readings: model essays,

Grading: midterm (25%), final (40%), preparation—voice ex., submitted electronically, comment on these randomly, although they can request a closer look; exercises, called on randomly in class (15%); 20% participation in online groups

Examples from recognized prose stylists, from Quotation books, from my own prose

Part I: Basics (simpler examples & exercises, no vocab)

  1. Exercises in Conciseness
  2. Principles of Modern Style
  3. Jargon, Cliches & specialized style
  4. Well-chosen verbs
  5. Ineffective Repetition
  6. Levels of Style
  7. Precision & Abstraction
  8. Usage
  9. Readings: Zinsser, Orwell “Politics,” Atwood
  10. Sentence Exercises: eliminating unnecessary long words & expressions, including jargon & circumlocution, rewriting of famous quotations (to good prose and from good prose)
  11. Voice Exercises: folksy, plain wisdom (topics: a job, a character, a time you were out of tune with the “script,” self-deception, feeling “more mature” or “superior”: “Rewrite the following sentence, using precision to build the scene” Adapt some of May’s exercises from Interacting with Essays, check also Rockas.
  12. Balance newer approaches (sentence combining) with ancient technique (imitation)
  13. Exam: Multiple Choice. Content questions over reading & “Choose the better sentence” (a) & (b) why. Example: Which of these two sentences better represents accepted principles of modern style? A B C D “Why” A B C D

Exercises in Expansion

Set One: (Concession/Refutation, or the virtues of qualifying)

(Enumeration, or the virtues of listing)

(Parallelism, or the virtues of patterns)

(Incongruity, or the virtues of pattern breaking)

Balance, or the virtues of weighing

Emphasis, or the virtues of stress

Part II: Advanced (more complex examples, parsing, vocab)

Indebted to “scholarship” of text books: Sentence combining books, Prose Style, Strunk & White, Joe Williams, Classical Rhetoric,

7. Coordination.

8. Subordination.

10. Transitions.

11. The Sound of the Sentence.

12. Parallelism.

13. Sentence Variety.

14. Figures of Speech.

15. Slanting.