节选学习牛津写作指南第二章（Oxford Essential G

来源： "The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing"/牛津写作指南

书号： ISBN 978-0-425-17640-5

译者与年份：吴和平，2019年

版权声明：英文版原著版权归原书作者及企鹅出版社所有，以下中文版由吴和平试译，仅限于用于个人学习，转载请注明出处，遵守著作权法及其他相关法律的规定。

Chapter 2/第二章

Strategy and Style/策略和风格

Purpose, the end you're aiming at, determines strategy and style. Strategy involves choice - selecting particular aspects of a topic to develop, deciding how to organize them, choosing this word rather than that, constructing various types of sentences, building paragraphs. Style is the result of strategy, the language that makes the strategy work.

Think of purpose, strategy, and style in terms of increasing abstractness. Style is immediate and obvious. It exists in the writing itself; it is the sum of the actual words, sentences, paragraphs. Strategy is more abstract, felt beneath the words as the immediate ends they serve. Purpose is even deeper, supporting strategy and involving not only what you write about but how you affect readers.

A brief example will clarify these overlapping concepts. It was written by a college student in a fifteen-minute classroom exercise. The several topics from which the students could choose were stated broadly - "marriage", "parents", "teachers", and so on - so that each writer had to think about restricting and organizing his or her composition. This student chose "marriage":

Why get married? or if you are modern, why live together? Answer: Insecurity. "Man needs woman; woman needs man." However, this cliche fails to explain need. How do you need someone of the opposite sex? Sexually is an insufficient explanation. Other animals do not stay with a mate for more than one season; some not even that long. Companionship, although a better answer, is also an incomplete explanation. We all have several friends. Why make one friend so significant that he at least partially excludes the others? Because we want to "join our lives." But this desire for joining is far from "romantic" - it is selfish. We want someone to share our lives in order that we do not have to endure hardships alone.

The writer's purpose is not so much to tell us of what she thinks about marriage as to convince us that what she thinks is true. Her purpose, then, is persuasive, and it leads to particular strategies both of organization and of sentence style. Her organization is a refinement of a conventional question/answer strategy: a basic question("Why get married?"); an initial, inadequate answer("Insecurity"); a more precise question("How do we need someone?"); a partial answer("sex"); then a second partial answer("companionship"); a final, more precise question("Why make one friend so significant?"); and a concluding answer("so that we do not have to endure hardships alone").

The persuasive purpose is also reflected in the writer's strategy of short emphatic sentences. They are convincing, and they establish an appropriate informal relationship with readers.

Finally, the student's purpose determines her strategy in approaching the subject and in presenting herself. About the topic, the writer is serious without becoming pompous. As for herself, she adopts an impersonal point of view, avoiding such expressions as "I think" or "it seems to me." On another occasion they might suggest a pleasing modesty; here they would weaken the force of her argument.

These strategies are effectively realized in the style: in the clear rhetorical questions, each immediately followed by a straightforward answer; and in the short uncomplicated sentences, echoing speech.(There are even two sentences that are grammatically incomplete - "Answer: Insecurity" and "Because we want to 'join our lives.'") At the same time the sentences are sufficiently varied to achieve a strategy fundamental to all good prose - to get and hold the reader's attention.

Remember several things about strategy. First, it is many-sided. Any piece of prose displays not one but numerous strategies - of organization, of sentence structure, of word choice, of point of view, of tone. In effective writing these reinforce one another.

Second, no absolute one-to-one correspondence exists between strategy and purpose. A specific strategy may be adapted to various purpose. A specific strategy may be adapted to various purpose. The question/answer mode of organizing, for example, is not confined to persuasion: it is often used in informative writing. Furthermore, a particular purpose may be served by different strategies. In our example the student's organization was not the only one possible. Another writer might have organized using a "list" strategy:

People get married for a variety of reasons. First...Second...Third...Finally...

Still another might have used a personal point of view, or taken a less serious approach, or assumed a more formal relationship with the reader.

Style/写作风格

In its broadest sense "style" is the total of all the choices a writer makes concerning words and their arrangements. In this sense style may be good or bad - good if the choices are appropriate to the writer's purpose, bad if they are not. More narrowly, "style" has a positive, approving sense, as when we say that someone has "style" or praise a writer for his or her "style." More narrowly yet, the word may also designate a particular way of writing, unique to a person or characteristic of a group or profession:"Hemingway's style," "an academic style."

Here  we use style to mean something between those extremes. It will be a positive term, and while we speak of errors in style, we don't speak of "bad styles." On the other hand, we understand "style" to include many ways of writing, each appropriate for some purposes, less so for others. There is no one style, some ideal manner of writing at which all of us should aim. Style is flexible, capable of almost endless variation. But one thing style is not: it is not a superficial fanciness brushed over the basic ideas. Rather than the gilding, style is the deep essence of writing.

For Practice

>Selecting one of the topics you listed at the end of Chapter 1, work up a paragraph of 150 to 200 words. Before you begin to write, think about possible strategies of organization and tone. organization involves (1) how you analyze your topic, the parts into which you divide it, and (2) the order in which you present these parts and how you tie them together. Tone means (1) how you feel about your subject - angry, amused, objective, and so on; (2) how you regard your reader - in a formal or an informal relationship; and (3) how you present yourself.

When you have the paragraph in its final stage, on a separate sheet of paper compose several sentences explaining what strategies you followed in organizing your paragraph and in aiming for a particular tone, and why you though these would be appropriate.

(以上为本书第二章原文，译文请看《牛津写作指南第二章（Oxford Essential Guide to Writing, Chapter2）-译文》