总结

在第一单元中，作者强调了simplicity的重要性，并在阐述clutter的过程中用了各种形式的相关词语（包括名词、形容词、动词、短语），算是clutter的近义词了，今天在回顾的过程中，我把这些词总结了出来，时间有限，只总结了相关句子，并没有参考词典分辨之间的差别，感兴趣的伙伴可以仔细研究下相关words and phrases（如果有理解错误的地方欢迎指正）。

Simplicity（章节）

Perhaps a sentence is so excessively cluttered that the reader, hacking through the verbiage, simply doesn’t know what it means.

Clutter

By using a more pompous phrase in his professional role he not only sounds more important; he blunts the painful edge of truth.

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.

Don’t inflate what needs no inflating.

My reason for bracketing the students’ superfluous words, instead of crossing them out, was to avoid violating their sacred prose.

Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful?

Style

So much for early warnings about the bloated monsters that lie in ambush for the writer trying to put together a clean English sentence.

You will reach for gaudy similes and tinseled adjectives, as if“style”were something you could buy at the style store and drape onto your words in bright decorator colors.

This is the problem of writers who set out deliberately to garnish their prose.

The reader will notice if you are putting on airs.

Not only are those first paragraphs impersonal and ornate; they don’t say anything—they are a self-conscious attempt at a fancy prologue.

The audience

Other old writers ramble and repeat themselves; their style is the tip-off that they have turned into garrulous bores.

It avoids the pretentiousness that infects so much writing by people doing worthy work.