I was recently lent a copy of The King Must Die by Mary Renault, which is brilliant. It's a Euhemerist retelling of the Theseus myth (the guy with the Minotaur and the Labyrinth) which incorporates real archaeological evidence from Crete and some educated guesses about ancient customs. Also a couple of glancing references to Adonis and the Boar, and Orpheus, if you know where to look for them. I'm guessing that both ReptonInfinity and Adrexia would like it quite a lot. Are either of you interested in borrowing it before I give it back? Or anyone else?
I got some assignments back today, including an essay with the note at the front saying that helpful comments were given with the essay. What my tutor had actually done was make some ticks, write one 'good point', have one minor quibble about something I'd said, and then lovingly circle every single colloquialism in the essay with a suggestion for improvement. 'significant' is better than 'big' because??? (I'm assuming it's because it has more syllables and so looks more impressive or something, certainly it didn't supply any finer shade to the meaning.) There was actually a reason why my language was a bit less formal than usual, and this isn't a complaint, because she gave me a better grade than I'd expected, but sheesh. I'd far rather she'd spent her time thinking up helpful advice rather than nitpicks when a simple "Your language should be more formal" would have done.
In other news, I had a surprise in my first lecture of the day when Anna from Auckland said Hi. She's been visiting another friend who is in the same class as me, and tagged along to the lecture. So then we smuggled her into the tutorial later that morning. (She seemed to be enjoying herself.)
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4 comments:
I think I would have written "big".
I sometimes wonder what would happen if I found myself in an arts degree and had to write essays. These days, a demon has appeared on my shoulder when I write. The demon is quite picky — it says things like "Waffle! Delete it!" or "Pretentious word! Use a simpler one!". I think this has caused my writing to become fairly terse..
(also, I am still a fan of E-prime, although not to the point of absurdity..)
I absolutely hate people who think that you should use a big word when a shorter word conveys precisely the meaning the author intends it to. This is especially a problem in academic English departments where the bigger the words and the more obfuscated the meaning then clearly the author must be smarter than the reader.
In a rat's eye!
As you'll quickly learn when you start actually writing for a living (journalism, software documentation) clarity of meaning is by far the most important quality of a piece of writing.
If a big word is needed then by all means use it - but if a small word works then use that!
And, depending on context, I would suggest that using significant instead of big does not make a piece of writing more or less formal. The exception being when it scans badly in the context of the sentence.
From Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman!, quoted at http://yunus.hacettepe.edu.tr/~saritan/electric.htm :
There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read-something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means. "
So I stopped-at random-and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read."
I did enjoy myself :) I'm quite jealous of that course, we don't have an equivalent down here, and I'm really interested in the history of the English language.
It was nice to run into you, thanks for letting me tag around with you for a bit ^_^
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