ecology

Another point of style suggesting the discourse of a closed community is the trend toward extreme condensation of expression -- the proliferating acronyms in the BLM's EISs, for example. The problem with amassing acronyms is that not only do they cause the reader unused to government jargon the inconvenience of constant page turning to locate original references or lists of abbreviations, but they also increase the density of information that must be absorbed in a short space. Largely because of this density, most EISs intimidate the average reader. The authors of the "Standards of Style and Usage" section of the Editorial Management Handbook, perhaps unwittingly, encourage such style. Term paper writing is not easy, but our Term paper is your solution to writing concerns! "The economical use of words is stressed in the new CEQ Regulations," the manual reads, without indicating in the immediate context what the CEQ is, "and every review looks for ways to shorten the text without sacrificing clarity and meaning". This passage, very typically, gives advice without examples or methods by which to achieve the goals it sets. Though it does not give examples, however, it certainly sets them in its own use of acronyms. In addition to risking saturation of the reader's capacity for absorbing information by using great numbers of acronyms, the authors also favor high-density graphics like long, multicolumned tables with nested categories and multiple footnotes, elaborate technical mapping, and detailed photographs. High-density graphics are powerful summarizing tools, highly efficient in their ability to display large amounts of comparative data in very little space. They are, for these reasons, potentially valuable instruments for decision making. But several commentators on graphics warn that such graphics, like the acronyms, can lead quickly to information overload. The systems of management by which EISs are produced seem to prefer high-density efficiency or stylistic "economy" to rhetorical effectiveness. This preference is quite explicit in the "Standards" section of the manual: "Every word and every revision in an EIS, in effect, costs money, and this should be the prime consideration in EIS writing. The EISs therefore compile information economically without communicating it effectively. An ordinary reader is quickly saturated and easily frustrated by the resulting prose.

The features of objectivist style have been diagnosed in bureaucratic and technical prose and have been treated with editorial antidotes elsewhere (Williams; Killingsworth, Thingishness). Here we introduce them not so much as objects of revision but as the chief syntactical means by which the authors of EISs achieve distance from their subject matter and audiences. Following are some features of objectivist style that we discovered in our reading of the EISs: Passive Voice (obliterates agents of actions and thereby obscures responsibility and/or authority): Sample 1: Two herbicides, Grasland and Tordon 10K, are currently proposed for use on pinyon-juniper and rabbitbrush encroachment. ...both are pelletized, and would be broadcasted aerially or by hand on each individual plant species.... Sample 2: Prescribed burning on 234,880 acres would be conducted only during periods that would disperse smoke, thereby causing only very short duration, minimal impacts on air quality. Sample 3: The Forest has been inventoried for visual quality. Nominalizations (favor stasis over action by using words in their noun forms when they might just as well be written as verbs or adjectives): Sample 1: Improvement in the naturalness of the areas would occur as a result of eliminating or curtailing vehicle use on 153 miles of vehicle ways. Sample 2: VQLs Visual Quality Levels of preservation, retention, partial retention, modification and maximum modification are assigned to each based on the inventory criteria. The criteria include visibility, number of viewers, and the uniqueness or variety of a landscape. Strings of Noun Modifiers (obscure relationships among people and things by increasing the number of nouns and extending their function to replace that of adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, and dependent clauses): Sample 1: ESRVA = Enhancement of Sensitive Resource Values Alternatives. Sample 2: Dispersed recreation capacity was determined using the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (ROS) analysis conducted during the development of the Analysis of the Management Situation (AMS). Do not know how to purchase college admissions essay and get professional assistance with admission essay writing? Capacity, including wildlife recreation but excluding wilderness, is 2,226,000 recreation visitor days (RVD's) annually. No doubt, general readability and comprehension suffer because of such writing. More importantly, the expert's style limits access to the information of the EIS to those accustomed to reading and interpreting this form of discourse.

No 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.

Our analysis of EIS rhetoric is based on a 1985-86 study, in which (with the help of Dean Steffens) we subjected to rhetorical criticism a library of EISs developed for projects in central New Mexico and filed in the Socorro District Office of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In addition, we analyzed the U.S. Department of the Interior Editorial Management Handbook for Environmental Impact Statement and Environmental Assessment, and we interviewed a number of writers and resource managers working in the Socorro office. While thesis writing is a problem for you, our the best Custom thesis writing writers are ready to assist you! In 1988, we followed up the initial study with telephone interviews. Our aim was to get at the particular traits of the government expert's rhetoric as a step toward evaluating the effectiveness of the EIS as a communicative document. The predominant tone in the BLM documents is one of disinterest. The perspective requires distance from subject matter and audience. Despite any personal feelings the various authors may have -- several we interviewed expressed a deep love of the region they studied and a commitment to the New Mexican people as well as to environmentalist values -- the language of the expert nullifies potential identifications with the ordinary reader and with the environment that is examined, both the "physical environment" (land, air, water, plants, animals) and the "social environment" (people). The objective tone does, however, preserve a social identification within the community of experts; the very identity of the expert depends on this language of disinterest and distance. As surely as it objectifies the land, water, air, plants, animals, and people that constitute the environment under study, this objectification extends even to the self -- the personality of the author is expunged by impersonal constructions and passive voice -- and to those of the author's immediate social group (other technical experts reduced to names attached to studies that compose the technical "literature"). This implicit denial of the self attempts to replace a subject-subject relation (between the authors and their readers) and a subject-object relation (between the authors and the environment in question) with an ideal object-object relation between the expert and the objects of study. The EIS author presents indirectly a self-portrait of a data-gathering machine, a computer with an optical scanner and word-processing capabilities.

Instead, the power of expertise and the gospel of efficiency prevailed. The principal authors of the EISs are usually government agents with scientific training. Occasionally hired consultants will supplement the findings of these agency employees, but the bulk of the work is done by in-house "Resource Specialists," as they are called in the parlance of the Department of the Interior. These agents are assisted by government technical writers and editors. The research and writing are nearly always a team effort, but little or no effort is made to include contributions from commentators outside the inner circle of the authoring agency. The primary readers of the EIS are people who make decisions about land use and air and water quality -- executive administrators and sometimes judges and legislators. Custom Essay editing help provided by experienced essay editors for university students at low price! The intended audience also consists of invited commentators, related government agencies, and concerned citizens -- all of whom may in principle influence the final decision of the primary audience through testimony, advice, lobbying, and voting. Our research, however, like that reported in other studies of EIS, shows that the likelihood of an outsider influencing an agency action is slight. While the system constructed, maintained, and reproduced by the EIS process has little or no effect upon the lifeworld of the agency experts and primary decision-makers, those whose worlds are most deeply affected are systematically excluded from participation in the process, even while their rights to be heard are ostensibly maintained. The very language of the EIS ensures this exclusion of the interested public. The authors strictly maintain the rhetorical conventions of the "objective style" in their presentation, thus manifesting the ethos of detachment associated with scientific investigation. This stance further closes the communicative discourse process by hampering the general readability of the EIS; it makes the information of the EIS least accessible to those who want it most -- decision-makers and politicians outside the agency and the people who seek to influence them (and whose interests the decision-makers ostensibly represent).