Good Writing - What’s the Point?
Good term paper writing is a vital part of scholarly technique. While it is possible to be a good student without being able to write a term paper well, it is generally the case that a student who can logically organize his/her material and then write clearly and precisely about the content he/she has so organized, will have an enormous advantage over the student who cannot, or will not, do these things. The smart student is part of an intellectual community and must communicate well with the other members of that community. Moreover, there is no absolute line between content and the way in which that content is expressed; good writing illuminates the material covered rather than obscures it. Language and logic are intimately related and sound language is often a reflection of sound logic. Finally, in terms of sheer career pragmatism, the quality of a student’s writing style will almost always be taken by that students’s peers as one of the prime indices of the quality of his/her scholarship generally.
Strunk and White give a number of suggestions with respect to what constitutes good style for term paper writing. They advocate, for example, the avoidance of over-writing in your term paper. They denigrate the “sickly sweet word” and favor “vigor (V:6).” This is something with which it is easy to agree. “Purple prose” may have its place in poetry and other forms of literary writing, but in scholarly term paper writing it often gives an impression of intellectual adolescence. Good scholarly term paper writing has its own form of eloquence, a kind of cold precision that is lean, austere, and forceful in a logical rather than emotional way. Ornate prose is essentially outmoded and sounds that way to the modern ear.
Strunk and White suggest that in good term papers the specific is preferable to the general (II:16). This is, once again, something with which this writer agrees. Between, “A period of unfavorable weather set in,” and “It rained every day for a week,” the latter is preferable because it gives information of a more precise and specific kind. “Rained” gives more information than the vague “unfavorable weather” and “every day for a week” is far more informative than “a period.” Good scholarly prose should be both clear and compact. Specificity enhances both of these qualities. Both the examples discussed here contain seven words, but the second contains far more information and thus gives the reader a better sense of what actually happened.
The authors also suggest the avoidance of fancy words in your term papers. There is much merit in this suggestion for inflated diction often gives the impression that the writer is asserting his/her ego by showing off his/her vocabulary. This is one of the obvious marks of pedantry. But this prohibition can be taken too far. One of the tools of the good writer is an accurate and precise knowledge of the meaning of words. Another tool is a knowledge of many words. There are times when, between a plain word that is vague, and a fancy word that is more precise, the fancy word should be used because it is more accurate and descriptive. Also, much scholarly writing makes use of technical jargon and this has the advantage that it makes communication very compact, a single “fancy” word expressing something that would require many “plain” words. Because of its relative compactness the word “lithotrope” is much to be preferred to “a tiny organism that feeds on minerals.”
In conclusion, this essay has discussed three suggestions contained in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. All three are valuable, but the last discussed, the avoidance of fancy words, can be taken too far. The general thrust of Strunk’s and White’s treatment, a thrust in the direction of simplicity, logical and linguistic clarity, and the writing of prose in which the writer’s ego is not overly apparent, is something that every student should incorporate in his/her term paper. Such writing enhances and validates your term paper writing.
References:
Strunk, William & E.B. White. The Elements of Style. London: Macmillan, 1972.
