On Well Writing—chapter 22

WORDS

1.Deflect

This fixation on the finished article causes writers a lot of trouble, deflecting them from all the earlier decisions that have to be made to determine its shape and voice and content.

To change direction.If you are deflected from something,you stop continuing with it but changing your direction to other things.

Eg. The war did not deflect him from the path he had long ago taken...

战争并没有使他放弃自己很久以前就选择的道路。

Never let a little problem deflect you.

决不要因一点小问题就半途而废。

仿写：The policies change so fast,deflecting us from the decisions to be a doctor.

Fixation

If you describe someone has a fixation on something,you mean he is obsessed with it.执迷,迷恋

Eg. The country's fixation on the war may delay a serious examination of domestic needs.

该国对这场战争的执迷可能会令其不能及时认真地审视国内需求。

2.Situate

how to situate what they write in a particular place,and how to get the people who live in that place to talk about what makes it—or once made it—special.

If you situate A in the context of B, you put A in the context of B in order to understand it better.

(尤指为了更好地理解某事)把…放在(特殊的环境中)，把…跟(具体情境)联系；[V n adv/prep] [Formal]

Eg.How do we situate Christianity in the context of modern physics and psychology?

我们怎样把基督教放在现代物理学和心理学的背景下来考虑呢？

仿写：How to situate Chinese Medicine in the context of modern times.

3.Disown

Thoughts haven’t been committed to sacred paper; they(people and places) can always be changed or rearranged or disowned. Still, I didn’t know what to expect.

If you disown someone,you no longer have connection with them.

与....断绝关系，否认

Eg.The man who murdered the girl is no son of mine. I disown him.

杀害那女孩的人不配做我的儿子。我要与他脱离关系。

Those comments were later disowned by an official army spokesman.

这些话随后遭到了军方一位官方发言人的否认。

思想还未被付之于圣神的纸张上。他们（people and places）还能被改变，重新安排，脱离关系。

仿写：The queen disowned her vague relationship with the famous star.

4.Fray

“I want to write an article about the disappearance of small towns in Iowa,” one woman told us, describing how the fabric of life in the Midwest had frayed since she was a girl on her grandparents’ farm.

The fabric of life had frayed.

生活像布匹一样被磨损

扩展：

使烦躁;使恼火;使紧张；If your nerves or your temper fray, or if something frays them, you become nervous or easily annoyed because of mental strain and anxiety. [V] [V n]

Tempers began to fray as the two teams failed to score...

随着两队都没能破门得分，大家渐渐沉不住气了。

This kind of living was beginning to fray her nerves.

这种生活开始让她神经紧张。

5.dredge up

the writer continuing to dredge up fragments of his life

（1）If you dredge up something that you learnt a long time ago or the information from your memory,you managed to remember it.

Eg. an American trying to dredge up some French or German learned in high school...

试图回想起一些中学时学的法语或德语的美国人

The fragments of memory she dredges up do not fit together.

她想起的那些支离破碎的片段连不上。

（2）someone managed to put up the upsetting information from past.

I wouldn't want to dredge up the past...

我不想重提往事。

It's the media who keep dredging it up.

是媒体一直在翻旧账。

仿写：She doesn’t want to dredge the bad memories that she experienced in her childhood.

联想：drudge 苦工。（努力回想是一件苦工）

Others

liberal-minded 思想开明的

Vibrant 替换active

Guinea pig 试验对象，小白鼠

    But since she was our first guinea pig I would give it a try.

REFLECTION

It’s a very American kind of trouble. We are a culture that worships the winning result: the league championship, the high test score. Coaches are paid to win, teachers are valued for getting students into the best colleges. Less glamorous gains made along the way—learning, wisdom, growth, confidence, dealing with failure—aren’t given the same respect because they can’t be given a grade.

我们这个时代是个以结果为王的时代，人们很少关注达到结果之前的过程是怎样的。我们常常不在意，在这过程中，我们所表现出的智慧，信心，成长。而这些，是弥足珍贵的，是构成我们一生的支点。也正是我们常说的，生命在于过程。Zinsser在第21章也谈到了这一点，enjoyment,我们应该享受书写的过程，这对我们来说是个，发现，成长的过程。所以，如果只是为了写出一篇能够卖的好的文章，这会给我们诸多限制。

If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.

当你满怀热情，将你自己的经历，融入people与places中，去发现，去研究，去书写。一篇好的文章是自然而然的事。

Two final words occur to me. One is quest, the other is intention.

The quest is one of the oldest themes in storytelling, an act of faith we never get tired of hearing about. Looking back, I notice that many students in my class, assigned to think about a place that was important to them, used the assignment to go on a quest for something deeper than the place itself: a meaning, an idea, some sliver of the past.

在我们决定写文章时，我们会有一个诉求，即在写作过程中，我们想要发现什么，想要获得什么。

Intention is what we wish to accomplish with our writing. Call it the writer’s soul. We can write to affirm and to celebrate, or we can write to debunk and to destroy; the choice is ours.

But nobody can make us write what we don’t want to write. We get to keep intention. Nonfiction writers often forget that they are not required to acquiesce in tawdry work, to carry the trash for magazine editors who have an agenda of their own—to sell a commercial product.

我们的写作意图，完全在于我们自己，任何人不能够逼迫我们去写不愿意写的东西。这是写作者的灵魂。