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    Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts Into Finished Work
    Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts Into Finished Work
    Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts Into Finished Work
    Ebook122 pages1 hour

    Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts Into Finished Work

    By Steven M Cahn, Victor L. Cahn and Mary Ann Caws

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    About this ebook

    This singular book illustrates how to edit a piece of prose to enhance its clarity of thought and felicity of style. The authors first present ten principles of effective composition, and then scrutinize three extended paragraphs, suggesting with remarkable specificity how to improve them. The volume also offers challenging practice questions, as well as two finished essays, one serious and one humorous, that demonstrate how attention to sound mechanics need not result in mechanical writing.

    Steven M. Cahn & Victor L. Cahn help readers deploy a host of corrective strategies, such as avoiding jargon, bombast, and redundancy; varying sentence structure; paring the use of adjectives and adverbs; properly deploying phrases and clauses; and refining an argument. Here is a book for all who seek to increase their facility in written communication.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherColumbia University Press
    Release dateMar 5, 2013
    ISBN9780231532013
    Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts Into Finished Work
    Author

    Steven M Cahn

    Steven M. Cahn is Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Among the seven books he has authored are 'Fate, Logic, and Time; Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia, Revised Edition; and Puzzles & Perplexities: Collected Essays'. He has edited twenty-two books, including 'Classics of Western Philosophy, Sixth Edition; Classics of Political and Moral Philosophy; Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Religion; Exploring Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology; The Affirmative Action Debate, Second Edition'; and 'Philosophy for the 21st Century: A Comprehensive Reader'.

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    • 4/5
      This is a practical guide to improving your writing without getting pedantic about grammar. I very much appreciated the samples for practice, as well as the sample paragraphs they fixed phrase by phrase. But let's face it. The two essays at the end were a bit of puffery.

    Book preview

    Polishing Your Prose - Steven M Cahn

    [ POLISHING YOUR PROSE]

    POLISHING YOUR PROSE

    HOW TO TURN FIRST DRAFTS INTO FINISHED WORK

    STEVEN M. CAHN & VICTOR L. CAHN

    COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS • NEW YORK

    COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

    Publishers Since 1893

    New York  Chichester, West Sussex

    cup.columbia.edu

    Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

    All rights reserved

    E-ISBN 978-0-231-53201-3

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Cahn, Steven M.

    Polishing your prose : how to turn first drafts into finished work / Steven M. Cahn and Victor L. Cahn.

    p.  cm.

    ISBN 978-0-231-16088-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16089-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53201-3 (electronic)

    1. English language—Rhetoric. 2. Report writing. 3. English language—Style. 4. Editing.

    I. Cahn, Victor L. II.Title.

    PE 1408.c24 2013

    808'.042—dc23

    2012020433

    A Columbia University Press E-book.

    CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

    References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the authors nor Columbia University Press are responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

    BOOK DESIGN by VIN DANG

    TO THE MEMORY OF OUR PARENTS , EVELYN BAUM CAHN AND JUDAH CAHN

    [ CONTENTS ]

    Foreword • Mary Ann Caws

    Acknowledgments

    INTRODUCTION

    [ PART 1 ] STRATEGIES

    1. Use concrete subjects and verbs

    2. Avoid too many adverbs and adjectives

    3. Avoid jargon and bombast

    4. Avoid redundancy

    5. Use transitions to link sentences and ideas

    6. Vary sentence structure

    7. Use parallel structures for coordinate elements

    8. Place modifiers properly

    9. Place the most dramatic material at the end of sentences

    10. Make sure that every pronoun has a clear antecedent

    [ PART 2 ] PASSAGES

    A. The First Paragraph

    B. The Second Paragraph

    C. The Third Paragraph

    CONCLUSION

    EPILOGUE

    Turning Point • Steven M. Cahn

    The Universe and Dr. Cahn • Victor L. Cahn

    About the Authors

    [ FOREWORD ]

    MARY ANN CAWS

    The authors want to have made this book both short and readable: a double bravo. And it is both those things, as well as eminently useful. Before you plunge into reading this how to guide, you might well wonder what use it would serve. Even should you be without desire for improvement in your writing—more clarity, more concision, more, well, all sorts of things—you might actually enjoy reading these pages.

    I would make the rather peculiar suggestion of starting from the end—peculiar because the tendency in reading whatever kind of document is to start at the beginning. But at the end of this book, Victor L. Cahn’s delightful remembering of his confronting the universe of academia is sufficiently wry, condensed, and convincing to persuade you (it does me) that this man knows how to write. Just listen to this:

    Physics. My world. My thing.

    Yet would the challenge be sufficient? Basic Concepts had a juvenile tone, and I was not interested in mere basics, for I was already involved in relativity.

    Nothing is more appealing than obvious arrogance, especially when the author of it is clearly making fun of himself.

    That is, among so many other things, what a manual of writing (or anything) necessitates: a sense of humor. Without that, all the suggestions would fall dreadfully flat. Humor serves the purpose of making us feel included in the telling; this is not a sermon but rather a discussion with us, full of helpful illustration. Amazingly, the chosen exemplary sentences—and then paragraphs—seem in every case appropriate to what the authors want to prove. These goals include, for example, removing a drearily inept sentence here, eliminating there a group of words that prove utterly unnecessary, or, elsewhere, inserting a quite, as in a recognizable quotation from Oscar Wilde:

    To be sure, sometimes an appropriate qualifier helps. Such is the case, for instance, when the writer seeks to be dryly ironic, as in this line from Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

    All authority is quite degrading.

    Without quite, the sentence languishes. With quite, it clicks.

    As someone who finds choosing examples to illustrate grammatical or theoretical points particularly trying, even extraordinarily difficult, let me say how impressive these selections are. Each is exactly, precisely fitting to the point being made.

    This is an entirely different talent from that of clarity, although I hasten to say that the Cahn brothers have a fine sense of the clear, and of the harmony of the whole. I wonder if this might have to do with their musical experience: Victor as a violinist, Steven as a pianist. Their ears are trained and so are sensitive to each nuance of each phrase: here too much, here too little, overall the right harmony.

    We know that to write well, we have to think well. We also know that one of the best ways to proceed, in writing as in thinking, is to encounter a successful example of the kind of work we would like to undertake and complete. The Cahns are offering here first, a series of strategies, and then, an experiential guide. What I greatly enjoyed, and with some surprise, was, after an intelligent choice of practice sentences and paragraphs, the concluding decision to leave the final working out to the writers themselves. Now they, having read the rest, could go their own way.

    Apart from the useful strategies and models of concision and elegance, what we have here is a narrative. As unexpected a gift as anyone could wish for, the storyline moves from advice of the apparently simplest kind (not too many adjectives, no jargon, that sort of thing) to a series of paragraphs and their repeated and repeating alteration. It aims at uncluttering, and is itself uncluttered. The conclusion is a wonderful encomium about unending change: we never stop bettering what we write.

    What a grand end to the narrative: that there is no perfect end. There is no finished and final smooth overlay to the work. Thus it continues, and far beyond the student days. This book is about real things, in real time, on the real page. More important still, it is about the real writing mind, in which we absolutely have to have confidence. This book develops confidence, through its completely convincing narrative.

    Mary Ann Caws, past president of both the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association, is distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature at The City University of New York Graduate Center.

    [ACKNOWLEDGMENTS]

    The plan for this book was developed primarily by Steven M. Cahn, and the bulk of the writing was done by Victor L. Cahn. We share equal responsibility for the final product.

    We are particularly pleased that Mary Ann Caws has provided a foreword, and deeply appreciate her generous words.

    We wish to thank Wendy Lochner, our editor at Columbia University Press, for her support and guidance. We also

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