|
Блог > Коментарі до замітки
The Injunction on TerminologyNo contempt for the ordinary reader is necessarily intended in this approach. On the contrary, in the EISs we examined, there is good evidence of the author's efforts to follow the injunction on terminology given in the Editorial Management Handbook: "The necessity of maintaining the readability of an EIS...requires that the Resource Specialists must carefully ensure that only that level of technical language essential to the average reader's understanding is retained". To meet this goal of communication, the authors courteously define technical terms, at least on first use, and provide glossaries of important words. Trusted prepared guide on how to write an essay prepared by talented essay helpers for college students! Of course, saturation may still result from the introduction of too many technical terms in a short space. But for the most part, familiar words seem to be preferred to technical terminology. Native plants, for example, are called "saltbush" and "mesquite" rather than by some Latin words unfamiliar to most farmers and ranchers, and to avoid confusion (how many desert plants are called "saltbush"?), photographs are included. The approach to language of the Editorial Management Handbook is nevertheless a slight and ultimately trivial step toward effective communication. It is weak because it is atomistic; it keeps the authors' and editors' attention focused on individual words. The treatment of single terms may demonstrate an honest concern with the public readership and may decrease slightly the characteristic detachment of scientific writing, but the detachment and the general tone of cool efficiency are thoroughly preserved in the syntactic and structural features of the EISs. Not the individual words themselves but the combinations of them place this prose into the category that Richard Lanham has named "voiceless." The authors prefer the "noun style," which favors expressions of stasis, over the "verb style," which favors expressions of actions ("I came. I saw. I conquered."). The verb style pictures a world full of human actors performing purposeful actions upon objects in an ever-changing scene; it requires active verbs and human subjects, as well as a full range of adjectives, adverbs, phrases, and clauses that delineate subtleties of modification and relation. By contrast, the objectivist syntax of the noun style -- expressive of a world frozen into stasis and broken (analyzed) into its odd components -- is dominated by features like passive voice, nominalizations, strings of noun modifiers, grammatical indefiniteness, impersonality, and high levels of abstraction. понеділок, 30.11.2009, moror9
|
|
|
||||