Last Week’s Action Points

1. Draft your paper, then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.2. Have your writing buddy read it critically.3. Activate your verbs.4. Write down the purpose of your paper in three

sentences or less.5. Why is your paper surprising?6. In the rhetorical triangle, writer ↔ subject ↔ reader,

understand what the reader needs.7. Give the reader “characters and action.” 8. Guide the reader by following the “old before new”

contract.9. Provide the reader connections between ideas. 

Eliminate “speedbumps” on the prose highway with rhetorical signposts.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense,

we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,

we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above

our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us

•that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion

•that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, •that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government

of the people, by the people,

for the people shall not perish from the earth.*

* Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

Action Points

• Write out each sentence on a blank sheet of paper and mark off its basic rhythmic units with a "/".

• Read the passage aloud with emphasis and feeling.

Action Points from Strunk and White

• Put statements in positive form • Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one

paragraph to each topic• As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic

sentence; end it in conformity with the beginning • Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form• Omit needless words

http://www.bartleby.com/141/index.html

“Use, Misuse and Abuse of Language in Scientific Writing”*

*

The main purpose of any scientific article is to convey in the fewest number of words the ideas, procedures and conclusions of an investigator to the scientific community. Whether or not this admirable aim is accomplished depends to a large extent on how skillful the author is in assembling the words of the English language.

The main purpose of any scientific article is to convey in the fewest number of words the ideas, procedures and conclusions of an investigator to the scientific community. Whether or not this admirable aim is accomplished depends to a large extent on how skillful the author is in assembling the words of the English language.

“Use, Misuse and Abuse of Language in Scientific Writing”*

Flab Factor = (55-35)/55= 36%

This example is taken from “The infectiousness of pompous prose,” by Martin Gregory

Graphs: Tuftehttp://www.washington.edu/computing/training/560/zz-tufte.html#IntroTables: Make them self explanatory Equations: punctuated and professional

This map drawn by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Niemen, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia. The width of the band indicates the size of the army at each position. In September, the army reached Moscow with 100,000 men. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales. The remains of the Grande Armée struggled out of Russia with 10,000 men. Minard’s graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army’s movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow. It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.

Challenger space shuttle data

"Above, a scatterplot shows the experience of all 24 launches prior to the Challenger [on January 28, 1986]. Like the table, the graph reveals the serious risks of a launch at 29°. Over the years, the O-rings had persistent problems at cooler temperatures: indeed, every launch below 66° resulted in damaged O-rings; on warmer days, only a few flights had erosion. In this graph, the temperature scale extends down to 29°, visually expressing the stupendous extrapolation beyond all previous experience that must be made in order to launch at 29°. The coolest flight without any O-ring damage was at 66°, some 37° warmer than predicted for the Challenger, the forecast of 29° is 5.7 standard deviations distant from the average temperature for previous launches. This launch was completely outside the engineering database accumulated in 24 previous flights." -- Visual Explanations, page 45.

What do you make of this table?

In Journal of Marketing, January 2004