English Grammar for the Utterly Confused - Laurie Rozakis 2003
Questions
Chapter 14 Words and Expressions to Avoid
Part 5 Struttin Your Stuff with Style
True-False Questions
1. Always use bias-free language, language that uses words and phrases that don’t discriminate on the basis of gender, physical condition, age, race, gender, or any other quality.
2. Today, the term Oriental is preferred over Asian.
3. Likewise, Latina is the preferred designation for males with Central and Latin American backgrounds.
4. Only give someone’s race if it is relevant to your narrative. Further, if you do mention one person’s race, be sure to mention everyone else’s.
5. The nonbiased term is “the deaf”; the biased term is “people with hearing impairments.”
6. Sexist language assigns qualities to people on the basis of their gender.
7. Sexist language discriminates only against women, not men.
8. Nonsexist language treats both sexes neutrally.
9. Avoid using man, he, or him to refer to both men and women.
10. In a business setting, professional titles do not take precedence over Mr. and Ms.
11. To make your language nonbiased, use plural pronouns and nouns whenever possible.
12. If you want your documents to sound important, use a little inflated language, words and expressions that make the ordinary seem extraordinary.
13. Avoid euphemisms if they obscure your meaning.
14. Use euphemisms to spare someone’s feelings, especially in delicate situations.
15. Cliches are wordy and unnecessarily complex. As a result, cliches become meaningless because they are evasive and wordy.
Completion Questions
Rewrite each sentence to remove the bias.
1. We need more manpower.
2. Mrs. Yu looks remarkably good for her age.
3. These stockings are available in black, suntan, and flesh color.
4. I see that Marci forgot to bring her lunch. She’s acting a little blonde today.
5. Mrs. Clinton and George W. Bush met to discuss strategy.
6. Pat really went on the warpath when her son stayed out past his curfew.
7. The club now admits women and other minorities.
8. Women can leave their children at the daycare center.
9. Win a fabulous vacation: a day at the spa for her and 18 holes of golf for him.
10. We welcomed all guests, their wives, and their children.
11. I completely forgot where I put the package; I must be having a senior moment.
12. Studying the techniques by which an actor achieved his success can help other actors succeed.
13. Each doctor should send one of his nurses to the seminar.
14. If you use a technical word that he won’t understand, explain it to him.
15. Each department head should report her progress by May 1.
Multiple-Choice Questions
Choose the best answer to each question.
1. Which of the following terms is considered sexist today?
(a) Senator
(b) Representative
(c) Average person
(d) Mankind
2. Today, all the following terms are considered biased except
(a) Fireman
(b) Policeman
(c) Humanity
(d) Female lawyer
3. A cliche is
(a) An overused expression, often a metaphor or simile
(b) A fresh, vivid description
(c) Rarely found in everyday speech and writing
(d) Inflated language that contains many unnecessary words
4. All the following expressions are considered cliches except
(a) As fresh as a daisy
(b) A torrid thunderstorm
(c) Right as rain
(d) Sick as a dog
5. All the following expressions are examples of evasive, dishonest language except
(a) Made redundant
(b) Fresh bread
(c) Laid off
(d) Involuntarily leisured
6. The phrase “automotive internists” for car mechanics is an example of
(a) A simile
(b) Inflated language
(c) A metaphor
(d) A cliche
7. Euphemisms are best defined as
(a) Words and phrases that don’t discriminate on the basis of gender, physical condition, age, race, gender, or any other quality
(b) Overused words and phrases
(c) Inflated language that contains many unnecessary words
(d) Inoffensive or positive words or phrases used to avoid a harsh reality
8. Language that is wordy and unnecessarily complex is often called
(a) Euphemisms
(b) Cliches
(c) Bureaucratic language
(d) Sexist
9. George Orwell gave writers all the following advice except
(a) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(b) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(c) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(d) Never use the active voice when you can use the passive voice.
10. All the following advice about writing style is valid except
(a) Write as you speak.
(b) Write simply, clearly, and directly.
(c) Suit your words to your purpose, audience, and topic.
(d) Use fresh and descriptive words and expressions.
Further Exercises
Briefly describe the style of each of the following selections, identifying the purpose and audience. Then decide which style is closest to your own and why. If you wish to change your writing style, which essay is closest to the style you want to adopt?
1. When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under the circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and, especially, to mingle the Marvelous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
2. And so the reliance on property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he sees that it is accidental—came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire; and what the man acquires, is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. “Thy lot or portion of life,” said the Caliph Ali, “is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! The young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! Will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and, so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly fights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
3. The film industry changed from silent films to the “talkies” in the late 1920s, after the success in 1927 of The Jazz Singer. Mickey Mouse was one of the few “stars” who made a smooth transition from silent films to talkies. Mickey made his first cartoon with sound in November 1928. The cartoon was called Steamboat Willie. Walt Disney (1901-1966) drew Mickey as well as used his own voice for Mickey’s high- pitched tones. Within a year, hundreds of Mickey Mouse clubs had sprung up all across the United States. By 1931, more than a million people belong to a Mickey Mouse club. The phenomenon was not confined to America. In London, Madame Tussaud’s famous wax museum placed a wax figure of Mickey alongside its statues of other famous film stars. In 1933, according to Disney Studios, Mickey received 800,000 fan letters—an average of more than 2,000 letters a day. This was the same number of letters sent to the top human stars of the day such as Douglas Fairbanks, Senior. To date, no “star” has ever received as much fan mail as Mickey Mouse. (Laurie Rozakis)
4. While there are currently no societies where we can observe creolization occurring with a spoken language, we can observe the creolization of sign languages for the deaf. Since 1979, in Nicaragua, children at schools for the deaf have essentially formed a pidgin. None of them had a real signing system, so they pooled their collections of makeshift gestures into what is now called the Lenguaje de Signos Nicaraguense (LSN). Like any spoken pidgin, LSN is a collection of jargon that has no consistent grammar, and everyone who uses it uses it differently.
When younger children joined the school, after LSN existed, they creolized it into what is called Idioma de Signos Nicaraguense (ISN). While LSN involves a lot of pantomime, ISN is much more stylized, fluid and compact. And children who use ISN all use it the same way—the children had created a standardized language without need for textbooks or grammar classes. Many grammatical devices, such as tenses and complex sentence structures, that didn’t exist in LSN, were introduced by the children into ISN. (Charles Rozakis)