Paul's Style Response 2
From Mizzou Wiki
Chapter three of the book explains two principles of clear writing. The noun or nouns in a sentence that determine whether a verb is singular or plural are called the simple subject, and the whole subject is anything that is attached to the simple subject. The first principle is that main characters of a sentence should be the subjects. Sentences that don’t have their main characters as simple subjects can be confusing. The second principle is to make important actions verbs. The author of the book points out that writing seems much clearer when the subject of a sentence is a character and the action in a sentence is a verb. The chapter then moves on to the revision process. Step one of revision should be to diagnose, followed by an analysis, and finally rewriting. A nominalization is a verb or adjective that has been turned into a noun. While in most cases a sentence with a nominalization should be rewritten, that is not always the case.
This chapter of book was more focused on the mechanics of clear writing than the first chapter. There were many examples of clear and unclear sentences to illustrate the points being made. The book doesn’t assume a high level education in English; the author defines many terms and only seems to assume that the reader knows what verbs, nouns, and adjectives are. There were many examples of the principles the chapter covered. The examples made it very obvious how subjects and actions in sentences affected their clarity.
The main topic of this chapter was not to use nominalizations. I had never heard of a nominalization before reading this, and I can see how they might make writing unclear. The chapter was similar to the first in that it used simple principles that are actually very important. I found the examples very helpful. The author’s use of bold and capitalized text made it very apparent how clarity is affected by actions and subjects. The sentences that used main characters as subjects and described actions using verbs clearly looked less complex.
