Timeline for Is my essay on group learning clear and well-organized?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 15, 2011 at 16:25 | comment | added | Michael Lorton | A lot of teachers recommend "Tell them what you're going tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them" (and it seems you've taken that advice to heart). I don't buy it at all. Newspaper reporter -- who write to be read, not to be graded -- use "pyramidal style": the first paragraph has the big, important facts; the next, all the important supplementary information; each subsequent paragraph is less and less significant until it's basically just amusing trivia. I don't think that form would work for you either, but you might look for a compromise. | |
| Apr 15, 2011 at 16:18 | comment | added | Michael Lorton | An example of shortening: You wrote, "Self-study, be it extracting knowledge from books or from other materials, is one-sided information flowing process, meaning that we only accept facts from the material while our feedbacks are not supervised by it." I would write: "Studying alone is necessarily one-directional." Then I would write another sentence to explain why that's so, and a third to say why I think that's bad (or at least suboptimal). | |
| Apr 15, 2011 at 16:14 | comment | added | Michael Lorton | There's a episode of the TV show "Friends" where an uneducated man finds the thesaurus feature on his word-processor. "A button to make me sound smart," he crows, in a bit of naïveté that should make every writer writhe a bit in self-recognition. Don't be that guy! You think Hemingway or Orwell had small vocabularies? Of course not. Strive to use the right word for the situation -- sometimes that word is "feculence" and sometimes that word is "shit". | |
| Apr 15, 2011 at 16:01 | comment | added | Michael Lorton | (2) It's not that real-life examples are necessarily persuasive, but they're illustrative, they demonstrate your point. About (3), first, you missed my point, which was that emphatic but non-specific words like "irreplaceable" don't convince anybody: they just tempt the reader to think "Yeah, I think I could replace it." You don't have to avoid those words, but if you use one, you definitely have to back it up (how would you prove something really was irreplaceable?) Second, an essay doesn't exist to show off your vocabulary; your vocabulary exists to improve your essay! (cont.) | |
| Apr 15, 2011 at 7:02 | comment | added | xzhu | (4) Yes, one of my biggest problem is to control the length of my sentences. Could you please particularly take a few sentences the above essay and help me analyze how to shorten them? That would be very helpful! | |
| Apr 15, 2011 at 6:58 | comment | added | xzhu | (3) I agree that MEGO is bad for readability, but do readers think writing all in simple English shows the author's poor vocabulary? | |
| Apr 15, 2011 at 6:47 | comment | added | xzhu | @Malvolio: (2) I always thought that an concrete example should be a well known story like a famous person had done something famous. Do real life examples persuasive? I mean the readers don't know this "Bob Smith", and they may have the impression that I made that up. | |
| Apr 15, 2011 at 6:31 | comment | added | xzhu | @Malvolio: Thank you. (1) I reread the first sentence and you are right, after reading a seemed-shocking starter, the read would expect the following paragraphs is going to give them the explanation rather than blah about something else. | |
| Apr 15, 2011 at 3:34 | history | answered | Michael Lorton | CC BY-SA 3.0 |