Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Philip Gerard, Chapter 6, "What Form Will It Take?"

I think Gerard brings up some important stuff in this chapter. I especially like the lines:

"It is not the great writers but the amateurs who hide behind a gauze of complexity, whose writing is deliberately difficult and unnecessarily obscure... The art of the craft of writing is to make it seem effortless, transparent as window glass, to make the difficult look easy." (97)

And to that I say: ain't that the truth. How many times have I restated the same thing over and over again in slightly different and overly flowery language when I have absolutely no purpose in writing a paper? Way too many times. I don't do that anymore--at least, I don't think I do that anymore. Maybe only when I'm tired. Anyway--It's something that a lot of people do--they try to cover up the fact that they don't actually have anything substantial to stand on with pretty words and convoluted, tri-part thesis statements. It's not good--but it happens. A lot. So, Gerard is basically calling us out--he's saying: Listen, that's not good writing. There's really no excuse for it because it comes from either laziness or directionlessness--both of which cloud the writing process. Thanks for the tip, Gerard. Concise writing is the way to go! I'll try to keep that in mind. I should probably try to keep that in mind when it comes to these blog postings...

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