- Tags: 🗞️Articles , Writing tips
- Author: William Zinsser
- Link: The American Scholar: Writing English as a Second Language - William Zinsser
- Source date: 2009-12-01
- Read date: 2021-02-12
Yo creo que escribir frases cortas también aplica bien al Español, but:
My Spanish-speaking students must be given the bad news that those long sentences will have to be cruelly chopped up into short sentences with short nouns and short active verbs that drive the story forward. What’s considered “good writing” in Spanish is not “good writing” in English.
Ojo con los sufjios -ion o -ent.
How do those Latin words do their strangling and suffocating? In general they are long, pompous nouns that end in –ion—like implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!)—or that end in –ent
Frasaza acerca de pensar. De nuevo Writing is thinking:
The epidemic I’m most worried about isn’t swine flu. It’s the death of logical thinking. The cause, I assume, is that most people now get their information from random images on a screen—pop-ups, windows, and sidebars—or from scraps of talk on a digital phone. But writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?”