英语单词大师：Wise Writing Instead of '-Wise'

 AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER, our guest is the author of a new book called "On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work -- and Don't."RS: Paula LaRocque has worked for many years as a writing instructor¹ and newspaper writing coach. Her advice to English language learners is to try to avoid bad habits that can be found even in the work of professional writers.

PAULA LaROCQUE: "If they're thinking about beauty and clarity, they won't be seduced² by the things that cheapen the language. And, to my mind, that's the proliferation of unnecessary euphemisms³ or fad⁴ and cliché, the things that are embedded⁵ in the language like the proliferation of the -ize and the -wise suffixes⁶. I remember reading in an obituary⁷ this sentence: 'The officer will be funeralized Tuesday.'"AA: "Someone actually wrote that?"PAULA LaROCQUE: "Yes, somebody actually wrote it. And you and I have no difficulty in seeing how even silly but ugly that is and how it cheapens the language and makes it less elegant than it could be. But a person speaking the language as second language might say, 'Oh, this is what a professional writer does and so this is what I should do.'

"Let's say that a member of your audience turns on the television here and gets the weather and the person says 'Let's see what the picture is weather-wise.' It's more elegant to say 'Let's see what the weather is.'"RS: "You do talk about words in the media and you come down a little bit hard on the media. Tell us why and what are the things that perhaps an English language learner might want to avoid when listening to the media."PAULA LaROCQUE: "When they listen to the media, the first thing they're going to hear is what I think of as media-speak. It's a small vocabulary, flat because it's overused; verbs such as spawned⁸, spurred, fueled, triggered, decimated, sparked. They have these little bunches of words that fall into the sentence kind of fully⁹ born: 'He is the architect of a plan hammered out in wide-ranging discussions.'"RS: "Isn't written language different from spoken language? Not to defend these words, but -- "PAULA LaROCQUE: "I know you're not defending it, but here's what I think: no. The only thing that should be different between speech and writing is that writing can be more elegant, because you can edit it. You go back and look at the sentence. We don't have that luxury when we're speaking. But everything else should be the same.

"For example, Avi, if you were going to tell me a story and you walked into my office, you would probably do a subject-verb-object sentence."AA: "That's right, that's the natural way people tend to speak."PAULA LaROCQUE: "And if we were working on the newspaper, I'd say 'That's really interesting, maybe you should do a story on that.' So you go out and sit at the computer and write something entirely¹⁰ different. You write something like 'Amid a firestorm of criticism, spawned on Thursday when ... '

"I mean, we know how to engage each other's interests, how to be dramatic without being melodramatic. We know how to deliver a message so that we're not boring, bewildering, annoying people -- in person. And yet we sit down and we write and we do bore, bewilder and annoy."AA: "And one last question. We're about to start a new academic year here in the United States and thousands of students from around the world will be attending classes and getting an introduction to academic American English. What suggestions would you offer them to prepare for the experience?"PAULA LaROCQUE: "When they sit down to write, if they wouldn't think about how I'm going to impress the reader, but only, or rather, how I'm going to get my message across in a pleasing and clear way. I'm not going to try to use a vocabulary that's not mine, because I know what will happen is, some of the words will be just a little bit off.

"And in terms of writing itself, if they would just sit down and write something as a roadmap before sitting down at the computer and just putting a sentence into the thing and start writing that way. If you have a beginning, a middle and an end planned -- sometimes now we just simply sit down at the computer, we change things out, we treat paragraphs like interchangeable modules¹¹. It stops being organic with really firmly knit transitions between one paragraph that grows out of another. We put the last period on and we say we're done, without ever realizing that what we just wrote was a rough draft."DAVID BURKE: "So I got this idea: What if I took a fairy tale, 'Cinderella'? We start it in the native language of the reader, so let's say in English for the American market. So we start in English, and as the reader moves forward, the story starts to morph into another language."ENGLISH-MANDARIN¹² INSTRUCTION: "Once upon a time, there lived a poor girl - nuhaizi - named Cinderella who was very pretty - pioaliang. The nuhaizi, who was very piaoliang, lived in a small house - fangzi."Burke has compiled books of fairy tales with accompanying CDs in Mandarin Chinese, French, Italian, German, Hebrew, Japanese and Spanish.

ENGLISH-SPANISH INSTRUCTION: "Once upon a time, there lived a poor girl - muchacha - named Cinderella who was very pretty - bonita."A separate Spanish-language version helps teach English to Latin American youngsters.

Young readers learn about 20 words at each level, then move to the next level as they read a different fairy tale.

DAVID BURKE: "For example, I've taken the story of 'Goldilocks,' and I bring back all the words the kids have learned in 'Cinderella,' and I add 20 more. And level three is 'Beauty and the Beast.' I bring back all the words from level one, level two, and add 20 more words. So by the end of the entire series, which will be level nine, that will be 100 percent in the target language."Burke says he has a series of comic books planned for teenagers.

DAVID BURKE: "That will have all the words they've learned in the series, plus more words we'll keep introducing. We'll also talk about events that pertain¹³ to teenagers. So it will be in their context, but in the language that they've been learning."He says as parents and children read the books, both will benefit.

DAVID BURKE: "Under their radar¹⁴, the kids are going to be learning foreign languages, and their parents too."Burke says students often think of language learning as dull, but it doesn't have to be.

DAVID BURKE: "What I always hear from students is, ugh, I've got to go take French class, I've got to take Spanish class. And that really is painful."Working with an illustrator, he designed his books with colorful cartoon-like illustrations that capture the young reader's imagination.

DAVID BURKE: "In 'Goldilocks,' of course, Goldilocks gets tired and she yawns. And in the book when she yawns, her mouth is as big as big can possibly be. So what we see, she's tired. She's cansada (in Spanish), fatiguee (in French), she's stanca, Italian."He says foreign language learning can become a daily habit.

DAVID BURKE: "When it's bedtime, time for storytelling, the parents can pop on the CD, open the book, and actually learn the foreign language with the child."He says many Europeans are known for their facility with languages, and people in other parts of the world often speak at least two. Americans have a different reputation.

DAVID BURKE: "There's a joke in the linguistic¹⁵ world that's painful, and funny. It's, 'What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. And what do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. And what do you call a person who speaks one language? American."Not all Americans are monolingual, of course. The country's many immigrants bring languages and cultures from all parts of the world. But Burke says too many Americans are fluent only in English, and he is working to change that.

And that's Wordmaster for this week. Archives are online at www.voanews.com/wordmaster and our e-mail address is [email protected].

I'm Mike O'Sullivan in Los Angeles.

RS: Writing coach Paula LaRocque. Her new book is called "On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work -- and Don't."AA: You can learn much more about how American English works at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

1 instructor   

n.指导者，教员，教练

参考例句：

• The college jumped him from instructor to full professor.大学突然把他从讲师提升为正教授。
• The skiing instructor was a tall,sunburnt man.滑雪教练是一个高高个子晒得黑黑的男子。

2 seduced   

诱奸( seduce的过去式和过去分词 )； 勾引； 诱使堕落； 使入迷

参考例句：

• The promise of huge profits seduced him into parting with his money. 高额利润的许诺诱使他把钱出了手。
• His doctrines have seduced many into error. 他的学说把许多人诱入歧途。

3 euphemisms   

n.委婉语，委婉说法( euphemism的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• No point is in mincing words or hiding behind euphemisms. 没有必要闪烁其词或者羞羞答答。 来自辞典例句
• No point in mincing words or hiding behind euphemisms. 没必要闪烁其词或者羞羞答答。 来自辞典例句

4 fad   

n.时尚；一时流行的狂热；一时的爱好

参考例句：

• His interest in photography is only a passing fad.他对摄影的兴趣只是一时的爱好罢了。
• A hot business opportunity is based on a long-term trend not a short-lived fad.一个热门的商机指的是长期的趋势而非一时的流行。

5 embedded   

a.扎牢的

参考例句：

• an operation to remove glass that was embedded in his leg 取出扎入他腿部玻璃的手术
• He has embedded his name in the minds of millions of people. 他的名字铭刻在数百万人民心中。

6 suffixes   

n.后缀，词尾( suffix的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Many domain name suffixes have failed to gain general popularity. 很多域名后缀没有获得一般的通用性。 来自互联网
• For example, consider the use of prefixes and suffixes. 例如，那前缀和后缀的使用来说。 来自互联网

7 obituary   

n.讣告，死亡公告；adj.死亡的

参考例句：

• The obituary records the whole life of the deceased.讣文记述了这位死者的生平。
• Five days after the letter came,he found Andersen s obituary in the morning paper.收到那封信五天后，他在早报上发现了安德森的讣告。

8 spawned   

（鱼、蛙等）大量产（卵）( spawn的过去式和过去分词 )； 大量生产

参考例句：

• The band's album spawned a string of hit singles. 这支乐队的专辑繁衍出一连串走红的单曲唱片。
• The computer industry has spawned a lot of new companies. 由于电脑工业的发展，许多新公司纷纷成立。

9 fully   

adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地

参考例句：

• The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气，然后全部呼出。
• They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。

10 entirely   

ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The fire was entirely caused by their neglect of duty. 那场火灾完全是由于他们失职而引起的。
• His life was entirely given up to the educational work. 他的一生统统献给了教育工作。

11 modules   

n.模块( module的名词复数 )；单元；（宇宙飞船上各个独立的）舱；组件

参考例句：

• The course consists of ten core modules and five optional modules. 这门课程包括十个必修单元和五个选修单元。
• Our English course is divided into modules on poetry, drama, and novels. 我们的英语课分为诗歌、戏剧和小说等单元。 来自《简明英汉词典》

12 Mandarin   

n.中国官话，国语，满清官吏；adj.华丽辞藻的

参考例句：

• Just over one billion people speak Mandarin as their native tongue.大约有十亿以上的人口以华语为母语。
• Mandarin will be the new official language of the European Union.普通话会变成欧盟新的官方语言。

13 pertain   

v.(to)附属，从属；关于；有关；适合，相称

参考例句：

• His remark did not pertain to the question.他的话同这个问题不相干。
• It does not pertain to you to instruct him.你不适合教训他。

14 radar   

n.雷达，无线电探测器

参考例句：

• They are following the flight of an aircraft by radar.他们正在用雷达追踪一架飞机的飞行。
• Enemy ships were detected on the radar.敌舰的影像已显现在雷达上。

15 linguistic   

adj.语言的，语言学的

参考例句：

• She is pursuing her linguistic researches.她在从事语言学的研究。
• The ability to write is a supreme test of linguistic competence.写作能力是对语言能力的最高形式的测试。