Nov.14 On Writing Well（Ch16）

这篇文章总结起来就是说人话，不要装腔作势。

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PART ONE VOCABULARY

1.addressing

Many of those people are managers whose writing goes out to the public: the president addressing the stockholders,

address：a  formal speech  that someone makes to a group of peopleVERB 动词]向…作正式讲话;对…发表演说；

2.impart

Information can be imparted clearly and without pomposity.

impart:[VERB 动词]传授;告知；If you impart information to people, you tell it to them.SYNconvey

e.g.The ability to impart knowledge and command respect is the essential qualification for teachers...

3.vulnerable

What appealed to me was the willingness of Dr. Fleishman and his colleagues to make themselves vulnerable;

vulnerable：.they are easily hurt physically or emotionally.   ADJ-GRADED 能被表示程度的副词或介词词组修饰的形容词]脆弱的;易受伤害的；

vulnerability今晚看经济学人讲央行行长zhouxiaochun的文章中就提到financial vulnerability

4.pedantic

the other is pedantic and vague.

[ADJ-GRADED 能被表示程度的副词或介词词组修饰的形容词]过分拘泥于细节或传统的；学究气的；迂腐的；If you think someone ispedantic, you mean that they are too concerned with unimportant details or traditional rules, especially in connection with academic subjects.[disapproval]

e.g.His lecture was sopedanticand uninteresting.

5.knotty

I distributed my copies and asked the principals to rewrite the more knotty sentences.

knotty：复杂的；难以解决的；棘手的；A knotty problem is complicated and difficult to solve

6.intelligible

I said that the writers had to keep going back to the engineer until he finally made himself intelligible.

可理解的;明白易懂的；Something that is intelligible can be understood.

7.diffident

When I mentioned this, the writers said that Thomas Bell was actually a diffident man and a good executive.

 羞怯的;胆怯的;缺乏自信的；Someone who is diffident is rather shy and does not enjoy talking about themselves or being noticed by other people. 

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PART TWO THOUGHTS

I recited my four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

这章讲在商业写作上如何写，很简单：说人话、清晰、简洁。还有使用active verbs和aviod "concept nouns"。Zinsser举例乔治奥威尔翻译传道书、两个校长致辞、一个工程师讲晦涩难懂的语言，让工程师说的容易理解一些却说这样让他看起来与同龄人相比是傻瓜。后面还举例Thomas Bell缺乏自信，他从不自己写信息。我突然想起美国前总统奥巴马极爱演讲，每次演讲前都有块提词器，加上他本身就是律师出身，演讲起来富有感染力。

be yourself是Zinsser提过无数次的，而在这章最后点明无论你做什么工作，出于什么水平，为自己而写。在14章中最后一句也是给你自己权利写自己。