Geez, Keith,
You may be right, but you missed my point. This is not a custom in the US --
it is a custom of academic culture.
All those gaffalloons in the studies I mentioned are US academic enamored of
gobbledygook and passive language.
My great tutors in language were British. The first was Shakespeare. The
second was a collectivity -- William Tynsdale, who translated the first
great English Bible, and the committee that later translated the King James
Bible, much of it based on Tynsdale's work. Then, tthere was Churchill -- a
Briton who the Nobel Prize in Literature for his prose.
Churchill liked straighforward prose: "I affected a combination of the
styles of Macaulay and Gibbon," he once wrote, "the staccato antitheses of
the former and the rolling sentences and genitival endings of the latter;
and I stuck in a bit of my own from time to time. I began to see that
writing, especially narrative, was not only an affair of sentences, but of
paragraphs. Indeed I thought the paragraph no less important than the
sentence. Macaulay is a master of paragraphing. Just as the sentence
contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a
distinct episode; and as sentences should follow one another in harmonious
sequence, so the paragraphs must fit on to one another like the automatic
couplings of railway carriages."
You may not agree with me on the nature of good academic prose, but do not
blame my narrative style on US English. Passive, third-person writing is a
disease as prevalent among US academics as among academics anywhere else.
The cure is to be found in Shakespeare, Tynsdale, the Bible Committee, and
Churchill -- Britons all -- perhaps with a light dusting of Martin Luther.
There are US models, to be sure, and a thorough acquaintaince with The
Elements of Style by Strunk and White doesn't hurt. But my exemplars were
English.
Yours,
Ken
--
On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:07:11 +1100, Keith Russell
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>The US resistance to such structures might be compared to the
>resistance of certain Greek philosophers to the writing of philosophy in
>verse.
|