Language Here, Language There

Discuss any questions in English. Practise your writing skills.

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Xander
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#51

Сообщение Xander »

Viverra пишет: 08 авг 2018, 17:06 Xander, have you ever seen such a giant gap between these skills? Is it even possible? I doubt.
There is also a statement of results though, so all the data is always available at the same certificate, not only a band.
Which gap are you talking about?
The biggest one was imagined to be ridiculously huge just to make a better point. ))) Why do you even ask about its possibility in real world? ))

The smallest one is more than real (the difference of 25 points). One grade (A, B, or C) usually covers the range between 5 and 10 points / the whole lelel (C1, B2, B1, et al) covers 20 points.

I personally have a gap of 29 in my statement of results (sounds almost like 2 levels difference, no?))).
And right now am looking at another certificate (not mine) with two 21 points gaps; one more - 18 points gap. All of this supports my proposition about real levels being artificially boosted by overall statement. The devil is in the details. The level is in speaking & writing.
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#52

Сообщение Viverra »

Xander, the first example is absolutely unreal as a person with 230 points for use of English, listening and reading hardly can get only 155 for writing. Thus there is nothing to discuss.
The second one is more likely to happen, as you've noted, but only to a certain extent because the gap of 50 (50, Carl!) points is still imaginary.
And only the last case is quite real, but it "is not that bad". As for me, I have pretty the same gap of 21 points between speaking and writing with 204 and 183 respectively, so I'm puzzled by your idea that only these skills are significant because they are absolutely not equal.
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#53

Сообщение alanta »

I don't know about the numbers but I myself have a huge gap between the so-called passive and aktive skills.
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#54

Сообщение tourist »

Xander,
remember the logic game you suggested?
From another post of yours:
Yes, sure. Sometimes it might work
So: sometimes it might work and sometimes it might not.
If you are sure,why do you use might?
If sometimes it might not work, how can you be sure ? )
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#55

Сообщение acapnotic »

Apparently he is sure there is a slight chance that it will work.
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#56

Сообщение Mary May »

acapnotic, as a matter of fact, this sure must refer to the question, it was something like "Should I try it?"- "Sure." And the reason is, "it might work."
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#57

Сообщение acapnotic »

Mary May, yes, you are right, I later came accross it in the other thread.
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#58

Сообщение tourist »

Mary May,
thanks,great parsing skills )
My post was just an in-joke ...sort of )
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#59

Сообщение Xander »

tourist,
for a sec I was afraid you were being serious.
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#60

Сообщение Yety »

Just loved the article from The Monthly. Simply had to share it.) Hope it fits the thread, more or less.
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/200 ... d-sentence
The perfectly bad sentence
BY Clive James
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In writing, to reach the depths of badness, it isn't enough to be banal. One must strive for lower things. Almost five years have gone by since I cut out from a British newspaper the article containing the following passage, and I think I am finally ready to examine the subtleties of its perfection. But first, let the reader judge its initial impact.
Now, the onus is on Henman to come out firing at Ivanisevic, the wild card who has torn through this event on a wave of emotion ...
(Neil Harman, Sunday Telegraph sports section, front page, 8 July 2001)
Time has elapsed, Tim Henman has dropped out of the top 50 after never sticking long in the top five, the original clipping has gone a mellow colour at the edges, and the featured sentence is at last ready to be analysed, as a fine wine slowly makes itself ready to be tasted. Ivanisevic aside, there are two men involved here: Henman and Harman. One is a tennis player, and one writes about tennis. It is Mr Harman, I think, who is better equipped for his career. Tim Henman was always a bit too lightly built in the chest and shoulders. Mr Harman has what it takes to go on serving his clichés and solecisms with undiminished strength forever.

But let's take a look at how he does it - or how he did it, on the day that no spectator of bad writing will ever forget. At this point the reader should scan the sentence once again, slowly, as with an action replay.

An "onus" is a weight, but the word has been so long in the language that its derivation can safely be left for dead: Shakespeare himself would have no quarrel there. For Henman "to come out firing", however, is borderline at best. We can leave it neutral, but would prefer to know why the metaphor is military. Baudelaire, in Mon coeur mis à nu, warned us that journalists with a fondness for military metaphors were proving their unwarlike nature. For all we know, Baudelaire's stricture fails to fit Mr Harman, who might have been in the SAS before he turned journalist. We can't help suspecting, though, that Mr Harman has no accurate picture in his mind of what sort of weapons Tim Henman might be firing at Ivanisevic. The writer simply means that the British tennis player is behaving aggressively. But then we find that the British tennis player is a wild card behaving aggressively. The wild card, again, is metaphor that can be left for dead: it was brought in from gambling, but we court pedantry if we ask for it to be brought alive. All we can ask for is that it be not too grotesquely transfigured in its death: the corpse should not be mutilated. If a wild card tears through something, it should not be on a wave of emotion. Suddenly the British tennis player, weighed down with his unnamed weapons, has become a surfer. And the sentence isn't even over.

But neither is its impact, which has only just begun. Speaking as one whose flabber is hard to gast, I'm bound to say I was floored. Not bound in the sense of being tied up with ropes by a burglar, or floored in the sense of having tipped my chair over while trying to reach the telephone with my teeth: I mean floored in the sense of having my wings clipped. One of my convictions about the art of composing a prose sentence in English is that for some of its potential metaphorical content to be realised, the rest must be left dormant. You can't cash in on the possibilities of every word. In poetry you do more of that than in prose, but even in poetry, pace Baudelaire, you must concentrate your forces to fight your battles, and there is no concentrating your forces in one place without weakening them in another - a fact that Field Marshal von Manstein vainly tried to point out to Hitler.

To achieve conscious strength in one area, we must will a degree of inattention in other areas: such has been my conclusion from long experience. But here, from out of the blue, is a sentence that demonstrates how the whole construction can be inattentive, and achieve an explosive integrity through its having not been pondered at all. Imagine the power of being that free! Imagine being able to use a well-worn epithet like "out of the blue" without checking up on whether its implied clear sky comes into conflict with a storm later in the sentence, or whether it chimes too well, but in the wrong way, with a revelation in the previous sentence that the person being talked about once rowed for Oxford or Cambridge! Imagine not having to worry about "explosive integrity"! Imagine, just imagine, what it would be like to get on with the writing and leave all the reading to the reader!

Too late. I missed the wave, perhaps because I was carrying too many weapons. A kind of wild card myself, I might have ridden my potato-chip surfboard more easily if I had not been burdened with all my onerous ordinance. The mine detector, especially, was the straw that broke the camel's back - or, as Mr Harman (and Australia's prime minister) might have put it, was the bridge too far. At high school in Sydney I was taught not just to parse a sentence but to make sure that any pictures it evoked matched up. Our teacher, Mr Aked, was not a professional philologist, but like all people with an ear for language he was a philologist at heart. He taught us enough Latin roots to make us realise that etymology was a force in the language, and the more likely to be a confusing force the less it was recognised. He didn't make it all fun. Some of it was hard work. But he made the hard work satisfactory, which is the beginning of good teaching, and I suppose that period was my one and only beginning of good learning: I began to become the student I would be in later years, long after I had proved that formal study was not my gift.

It was also, alas, the beginning of my suffering. My antennae for linguistic anomaly were extended and I could never afterwards draw them in. Even today, half a century later, I can't use a word like "antennae" without first picturing in my mind what kind of antennae I mean. Are they metal antennae, like the basket-work arrays of a radar station, or are they fleshly antennae, as on a bug? Having decided, I try to make something else in the sentence match up, so as not to leave the word lying inert, because it is too fancy a word to be left alone, while not fancy enough to claim its own space. Having finished the piece, I comb through it (what kind of comb?) to look for what I overlooked: almost always it will be a stretch of too-particular writing, where the urge to make everything vivid gets out of hand. But I will still question what kind of urge gets out of hand, and I might even have to look up the origin of "out of hand", to make sure it has nothing to do with wild cards.

Purple patches call attention to themselves and are easily dealt with by the knife. The freckle-sized blotches of lifeless epithet, unintended repetition and clueless tautology are what do the damage. In the first rough draft of this piece, in the first paragraph after the quotation from Mr Harman, I had a clause, which I later struck out, that ran thus: "with the bonus of its proud owner's barely suppressed grief". But "barely suppressed" is the kind of grief that any journalist thinks a subtle stroke; and, even less defensibly, "bonus" echoes "onus", one of the key words of the fragment under discussion. All that could be said for my use of "bonus" was that I used it without tautology. In journalism, the expression "added bonus" is by now almost as common as it is in common speech. (My repetition of "common" is intentional, and the reason you know is that you know I must know, because the repeated word comes so soon.)

Too many times, on the way to Australia by air, the helpless passenger will be informed over the public-address system that his Qantas flight is "co-shared" with British Airways. The tautology is a mere hint of how the Australian version of English is rapidly accumulating new tautologies as if they were coinages: as an Australian police officer might say, it is a prior warning. Already the spoken term "co-shared" is appearing as "code-shared" when written down: I saw it this year at a Qantas desk in Terminal 4 at Heathrow, and Terminal 5 isn't even built yet. If the language goes on decaying at this rate, an essay consisting entirely of errors is on the cards. In the television studio it is already on autocue. (In America I could have said "cue-cards" for "autocue" and got a nice intentional echo to make "on the cards" sound less uninspired, but it would have been unfair: American English is the version of the language least prone to error at present - or, as the Americans would say, at this time.) But when all the nits are picked, and the piece is in shape and ready to be printed, one can't help feeling that to be virtuous is a hard fate. Most of the new errors I couldn't make if I tried. In the Melbourne Age of 27 August 2001, an article that it took two people to write included the sentence, "The size of the financial discrepancies were eventually discovered." I couldn't match the joyous freedom of that just by relaxing.

What I would like to do, however, is relax my habitual attention to the sub-current of metaphorical content. Most of the really hard work is done down there, deep under the surface, where the river runs in secret. (Watch out for the sub-current and the river! Do they match?) No doubt it would be a sin just to let things go, but what a sweet sin it would be. It is sometimes true of poetry, and often true of prose, that there are intensities of effect which can be produced only by bad writing. Good writing has to lay out an argument for the collapse of a culture. Bad writing can demonstrate it: the scintillating clangour of confusion, the iridescent splendour of decay. A box of hoarded fireworks set off at random will sacrifice its planned sequential order, but gain through its fizzing, snaking, interweaving unpredictability.

The handcart of culture has to go a long way downhill before the hubs wobbling on its worn axles can produce a shriek like Mr Harman's prose. You will have noticed how, in my previous paragraph, I have switched my area of metaphor from chaos to decay, and then from pyrotechnics back to chaos. I would like to think that this process was deliberate, although there is always a chance that I undertook it in response to a reflex: the irrepressible urge to turn an elementary point into a play of fancy. If it is a reflex, however, I hope it lurks in a deeper chamber than my compositional centre, and so leaves room for conscious reflection - a word from the same root, but suggesting a very different tempo.

Mr Harman's reflex occupies his whole mind. But he should worry: look at what he can do without pausing for thought. In his classic sentence, Mr Harman does not commit a single technical error. It is on a sound grammatical structure that he builds his writhing, Art Nouveau edifice of tangled imagery, as if Gaudi, in Barcelona, had coated his magic church of the Sagrada Familia with scrambled eggs, and made them stick. Mr Harman has made a masterpiece in miniature. There is an exuberant magnificence to it. As Luciano Pavarotti once said, I salute him from the heart of my bottom.
CLIVE JAMES
Clive James is an author, critic, broadcaster and poet. He has written more than 20 books, including his memoir, The Blaze of Obscurity, and a collection of essays, The Revolt of the Pendulum.
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#61

Сообщение Yety »

The gruesome true story behind Nabokov's Lolita (first published in 1955 - less than ten years after it took place).
The Real Story That Inspired “Lolita” Is Somehow More Disturbing Than The Book
You will be disturbed...
Sally’s story and Lolita have a lot in common. They took place in nearly the exact same year, and the girls were nearly the same age, with single mothers. However, beyond the narrative similarities between Sally Horner’s captivity and Lolita, Nabokov also had numerous newspaper clippings of the event, so he was clearly reading about and inspired by it. Even so, scholars didn’t make the connection between the book and the history until more than 50 years following publication.
This really makes you hope Sally's family never got to read the book.

PS And a 1-hour video Google recommended about a book on the same subject:
Sarah Weinman, "The Real Lolita" (w/ Laura Lippman)Показать
the country song they refer to at 2:25Показать

Somehow, sounds a little different after 'If Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her.'
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#62

Сообщение Yety »

A little too Confucian, perhaps, but a great read still:
George Orwell’s Six Rules For Great Writing
“(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
The rules for yeties to follow ...(
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#63

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

Yety пишет: 02 ноя 2019, 11:40 George Orwell’s Six Rules For Great Writing
Great stuff, but KISS still beats it any day. ))
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#64

Сообщение acapnotic »

I think the main rule is to enjoy your writing. If you don't, there is no point in it. It will be slavery.
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#65

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

acapnotic пишет: 02 ноя 2019, 13:29 I think the main rule is to enjoy your writing.
I know many a person who thoroughly enjoys their writing. Not so sure about their audiences, though. ))
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#66

Сообщение acapnotic »

Easy-Breezy English, but why would you be someone's audience if you don't like their writing? If you are a masochist, it's not the author's problem, is it? :)
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#67

Сообщение Mary May »

acapnotic пишет: 02 ноя 2019, 15:43 why would you be someone's audience
as part of professional duties, maybe?
Or, for the sake of valuable content?
Последний раз редактировалось Mary May 02 ноя 2019, 15:54, всего редактировалось 1 раз.
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#68

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

acapnotic, )))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
YOU should definitely write more here. ))
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#69

Сообщение Ленья »

Mary May пишет: 02 ноя 2019, 15:52 Or, for the sake of valuable content?
Or just an avid puzzle-solver))
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#70

Сообщение acapnotic »

Mary May пишет: 02 ноя 2019, 15:52
acapnotic пишет: 02 ноя 2019, 15:43 why would you be someone's audience
as part of professional duties, maybe?
Or, for the sake of valuable content?
In either case you will have your audience no matter what, so why not write in the way that you enjoy? :)
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#71

Сообщение Mary May »

Why?
My misplaced optimism:
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for the love of your neighbour
???
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#72

Сообщение acapnotic »

Everything is good in moderation. Besides, your closest neighbor is yourself. Shouldn't you love her?
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#73

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

acapnotic пишет: 03 ноя 2019, 07:07 your closest neighbor is yourself
Sounds a bit like a split personality disorder, don't you think? :-)

Don't you want to transcend the borders of your little personal universe on occasion? Communicate your message to the world?
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#74

Сообщение acapnotic »

Easy-Breezy English пишет: 03 ноя 2019, 12:12 Sounds a bit like a split personality disorder, don't you think? :-)
If only just a bit. :)
Easy-Breezy English пишет: 03 ноя 2019, 12:12 Don't you want to transcend the borders of your little personal universe on occasion? Communicate your message to the world?
Wouldn't it be a bit conceited of me? Consider the difference in size between me and the world. I don't think it would even notice something was going on.
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#75

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

acapnotic пишет: 03 ноя 2019, 15:25 Wouldn't it be a bit conceited of me? Consider the difference in size between me and the world. I don't think it would even notice something was going on.
Oh, how convenient. That's defeatist, my friend. :-)
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