=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= EDline Vol. 8, no. 40 (15 April 2003) Editorial mailing list (digest version) Published by the Electric Editors =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Contents: Q & A [2xu] Stylistic issue - repetition of governing word or words =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ---[2]-- Q & A -------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 11 April 2003 From: Nick Hudson, ur015429@a1.com.au Odile Sullivan-Tarazi wrote: > Have any of you seen a principle like this one explained in a > text? If so, I would very much like to know in which text and > where. It could well be that I've got just such a discussion > lurking here on my shelves somewhere, but if so, I cannot find > it. And it is so very useful, when working with some folks, to > be able to cite a published text. The following is not about the specific example you give, but it provides a label for it ('refresher') and supports the general point you are making. Unfortunately it concludes that there are no rules about it. It comes from Modern Australian Usage (OUP, 2nd Ed, 1998) *repetitions and refreshers* If St Paul had had a keen sense of economy and less sense of theatre, he might have written 'Charity... beareth, believeth, hopeth, and endureth all things'. However, he was repetitious: 'Charity... beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things'. When we hear that we should not use the same word over and over again (a very sound piece of advice) we should remember that there are odd occasions on which repetition is very desirable. The rhetorical device illustrated above is one of them. Like many rhetorical devices, it rings false if used badly, but can be very effective if used well. Its main effect is rhythmic rather than semantic. A second use of repetition is the refresher. The term is borrowed from commerce, where it refers to the sums which have to be fed at regular intervals into time-based devices like parking meters and barristers. In rhetoric, it refers to the optional repetition of words, either to resolve ambiguities or to remind the hearer or reader of the construction. It is thus the opposite of ELLIPSIS. The simplest examples are refreshers hitched to ambiguous pronouns by means of brackets: _He said that he (the defendant) had not bailed him (the witness) up or taken his (the judge's) watch._ This crude device may be the only one available if the text is a verbatim transcript, but a writer, faced with the same problem, will be able to remove the ambiguity more subtly. Thus: _The witness said that the defendant had not bailed him up or taken the judge's watch._ The following sentence describes a further use of a refresher and (in the italic phrase towards the end of it) gives an illustration of the refresher itself: If the writer fears that the reader is liable to have lost track of the grammatical construction in a long and complex sentence, one which uses a large number of subordinate clauses each of which has its own structure, so that the initial structure will have been forgotten long before the end is reached, as is the case with the present sentence (and not many readers would at this point remember clearly that what we are waiting for is the apodosis of a conditional phrase, or even know what the _apodosis_ of a conditional phrase is, though it is explained in the section on IF... CLAUSES in this book); _if, as I say, the writer fears this,_ a refresher is a possible answer. In general, a better solution to the problem described above is to chop the sentence into two or more simpler sentences; but there are occasions when chopping it up would destroy an important symmetry, and this is where the refresher is particularly useful. In other cases, the refresher may be added early, to signal what is to follow. The word _both_ in _both ... and_, the word _either_ in _either ... or_ and the words _not only_ in _not only ... but also_ are essentially refreshers, clarifying but not altering the meaning of the sentences. The old Spanish convention about question marks provides another example; see PUNCTUATION. There are no rules about the provision of refreshers. We are often unaware that a phrase of ours could be misunderstood and needs clarification until we find that we have been misunderstood. Significantly, however, great orators use refreshers extensively, recognising that they add clarity as well as thunder to a speech. --- I hope you find this useful, as I wrote it. Meanwhile I found your points very useful, providing an excellent example of a refresher which I would like to include in the next edition, if there is one. ------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 April 2003 From: Odile Sullivan-Tarazi, odile@mindspring.com Thank you so very much for taking the time to transcribe that passage and send it along. I really enjoyed it. I have never heard the term "refresher" used here in the States, though I have seen discussion of the rhetorical use of repetition along the same lines as the passage you cite. An example that comes readily to mind, no doubt because I've encountered it in such discussions, is this of Churchill's -- We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. . . Such careful and well-balanced repetition--just enough, but not too much, carefully positioned and just as carefully and deliberately sundered--can confer elegance, power, and solemnity on an occasion and the words which mark it. This is rhetoric at its best, isn't it? To my mind that's so -- pieces so well and thoughtfully constructed that they become art, pieces we can read over time after time, never tiring of the intelligence and beauty and suppleness of expression, of the shape and feel of the words, thought and word so deftly interwoven as to seem inseparable. These are the pieces we remember from generation to generation, the excerpts that become famous, the speeches anthologized ("I have a dream" is another that comes to mind), all of which employ, and so also illustrate, the general principles of rhetorical effectiveness. But then, that's perhaps also my background speaking, my context. The material I'm editing, alas, is far more pedestrian. Its purpose is not to stir, not to declaim, but to inform. And to inform rather busy folks. In the sense that "everything's an argument," persuasion plays a role, but it must do so with a lighter touch, all the while not seeming to at all. Which is only to say that anything that smacks too much of "rhetoric" is suspect, know what I mean? The style itself of high rhetoric would be out of place in these technical white papers and journals. Yet this principle of repetition, in more modest dress, still applies. It still has a role to play, one often not recognized and utilized, at least all too often not in the text I review. And what I have not found, I don't think (unless I'm now forgetting something from long ago), is a discussion of this far simpler, more utilitarian, sort of repetition. The sort that calls little attention to itself, the sort applied with a fine stroke here or there, lightly, almost transparently. The sort particularly of what I've been calling, for lack of any standard term, governing words or phrases. I like the term "refresher," as it points to what else these governing words do for reader or auditor, but I don't think I'll encounter that term in any American texts. It has a distinctly British flavor to it. I've only a very few British texts, but I can rummage around in those, just to see. It may be that the author or authors of the text you cite coined the term? As for my situation, most of the time, when I mark in such repetition, the writer can hear the difference and incorporates the change in one manner or another. When the repetition is needed for clarity, as you might expect, this is particularly the case. Sometimes, however, it is the balance of the sentence that is improved, and it it is in these cases that I wish I could point to a guideline -- a guideline, not a rule -- in a published text, to support the markup. It would be ever so helpful. And there must be discussion of this somewhere, in some text, when so many of us employ the principle in our own writing and recognize it in the writing of others. I'll need to undertake a search, when I've an afternoon free. If I find anything, I'll let you know. I've collected a few other instances of this sort of repetition at work in expository and technical text, which I can send along if you're interested. Right now, we're about to dash, and I've not got time to scrounge them up. I'd love to hear further examples from anyone else on the list, as well. ------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 April 2003 From: David Ibbetson, isserlis@rogers.com Odile Sullivan-Tarazi wrote: > is this of Churchill's -- > > We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall > fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. > We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall > fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and > on the hills. . . What is Odile's source? The version in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (5th edition) is somewhat different: We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. Since the ODQ says it is from a speech in the Commons, I presume that their source is Hansard which, as this was a prepared speech, is more likely to be based on Churchill's "script" than on their shorthand notes. (I use script advisedly. The "notes" for these speeches were set out like poetry or music, indicating every pause, and every rise and fall in his voice.) ------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 April 2003 From: Odile Sullivan-Tarazi, odile@mindspring.com Oh, being rather in a hurry -- we're readying to leave town -- I just grabbed the quote from an online source. I ought to have double-checked it in a standard text. Mea culpa. ------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 April 2003 From: Simon Cauchi, simon.cauchi@paradise.net.nz Odile Sullivan-Tarazi wrote: > And what I have not found, ... is a discussion of this far > simpler, more utilitarian, sort of repetition. The sort that > calls little attention to itself, the sort applied with a fine > stroke here or there, lightly, almost transparently. ... I like > the term "refresher," as it points to what else these governing > words do for reader or auditor, but I don't think I'll > encounter that term in any American texts. ... It may be that > the author or authors of the text you cite coined the term? Nick Hudson was himself the (now Australian) author of the passage he cited, and also the author of that splendid example of a long and complex sentence in which the reader is likely get lost. I was going to cite the same passage myself, but he beat me to it. You are referring more to workaday, utilitarian prose and to the problem of deciding whether to repeat or not to repeat short grammatical words such as prepositions and articles and relative pronouns and the infinitive marker "to". I think that precisely the same considerations apply to utilitarian writing as to oratory and literature. There are indeed no rules. The problem isn't even mentioned in the 1842-page (sic!) Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, so far as I can see, and that work is thoroughly indexed. The judgment that must be made in any particular situation is simply whether clarity requires greater explicitness or economy requires less. But perhaps Nick's advice is wrong. Perhaps someone, somewhere, has in fact stated some rules which, once read, carry instant conviction. If so, we as well as you would love to know what they are! ------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 April 2003 From: Odile Sullivan-Tarazi, odile@mindspring.com Simon Cauchi wrote: > Nick Hudson was himself the (now Australian) author of the > passage he cited, and also the author of that splendid example > of a long and complex sentence in which the reader is likely > get lost. Now I am impressed . . . it's a wonderful passage. I'll have to hunt down a copy of the book. > You are referring more to workaday, utilitarian prose ... I > think that precisely the same considerations apply to > utilitarian writing as to oratory and literature. There are > indeed no rules. ... The judgment that must be made in any > particular situation is simply whether clarity requires greater > explicitness or economy requires less. I agree as to the need for judgment and the weighing of the various factors at work in the sentence, as well in the larger piece. I was hoping to find a discussion of this issue somewhere, not absolute rules. There can be no "rules," I don't think, for a principle such as this one. But surely there must be some discussion of it somewhere, and not simply within the context of high rhetoric. So I am hoping. ------------------------ Date: Sun, 13 April 2003 From: Patsy Price, beyondwords@shaw.ca Odile wanted references about repeated elements such as prepositions or infinity markers in compound phrases. Sorry, I have no references, just a different slant on the question from someone who has worked in EFL/ESL and adult literacy. Back in the 1960s, when I was studying linguistics and learning to teach EFL/ESL, we looked at many sentence structures as having been formed through abridgement or ellipsis of longer structures. Compound phrases were often seen as coming from compound sentences. To be concise, English speakers remove as many of the duplicate or optional elements as possible while still maintaining clarity and the intended emphasis in the context. Sometimes certain elements need to remain in place in order to avoid ambiguity. Audiences at lower reading levels, including ESL/EFL readers, need to have more of the duplicate or optional elements left in--to provide redundancy and to make relationships clear. To fix an unclear or ambiguous sentence, we don't add in these elements--we restore them (put them back in where they came from). The examples you've given are ones where the elements need to stay and repeat to make a parallel relationship clear. Actually, I just now found a reference about parallelism. It's from Marcella Frank's 1972 book _Modern English: A practical reference guide_, published by Prentice-Hall. I can't imagine why she speaks only of formal English. Clarity is important for all varieties of English. Here's what she says on page 210. Where she used bold I've used asterisks. In formal English, such structural signals as articles (and other determiners), auxiliaries, prepositions and conjunctions are often repeated to make the parallelism clear, especially of the parallel items are long. In Columbus' Day [sic] people believed *that* the earth was square and *that* a person could fall off the edges. A huge celebration dinner was given *for* all the office holders in the party, *for* all those who had contributed sizable amounts of money to their campaign, and *for* all the party workers who had helped bring about their victory at the polls. So look in those books on your shelves for discussions of parallelism and of abridgment, and maybe you'll find something there. ------------------------ Date: Mon, 14 April 2003 From: Odile Sullivan-Tarazi, odile@mindspring.com What a lucid and thoughtful commentary on this issue, and from a perspective different from (different to, for all you Brits) my own. I'd not thought of it in quite that way, this balancing of the principles and advantages of ellipsis (with repeating elements removed) against those of careful and conscious repetition. As I reread Nick's note, I see he too is addressing this same balance. When ought the principles of concision to prevail? When are those elided markers unduly repetitive, when necessary either for sound or sense? Sometimes retaining those phrasal or clausal markers prevents misreading; sometimes retaining them simply renders the passage more satisfying, more emphatic. (Though I would argue that in correcting for misreading, we also introduce greater balance.) I had thought to pursue the issue in discussions of parallelism, and had even done some quick checking, but I'd not thought to look under discussions of abridgment or concision, or even coordination. In that first quick check of parallelism, what I found seemed to leave the issue of the repetition (or not) of phrasal and clausal markers implicit. We are frequently told that coordinate structures must be like structures -- which, if you consider the matter closely, means that such repetition is sometimes necessitated, other times simply encouraged -- but this point itself of the use of those markers seemed never to be directly addressed. I say "seemed," as I'd done only a cursory check before throwing that question out to the list. I'm looking now more closely at Style: Towards Clarity and Grace (Joseph Williams, U of Chicago Press, 1990), one of my all-time favorite texts, and I've found two passages which I think get at what we've been saying here in this thread. I'll transcribe the relevant commentary for those who might be interested. On 136 begins a section on coordination, this in a chapter on handling lengthy structures. Williams notes two potential problems with coordinate structures: faulty parallelism and lost connections. The bit on faulty parallelism illustrates like structures marked by the repetition of phrasal or clausal markers, but, again, does not directly comment on the issue of such repetition. However, in the second section, that discussion on lost connections, is exactly what we've all been saying, organized around a passage that looks to have been taken from a student paper. And I quote -- What will bother readers more than mildly faulty parallelism [as he's just illustrated both severely unbalanced and only mildly unbalanced structures] is a coordination so long that they either lose track of its internal connections or, worse, misread them: Every teacher ought to remind himself daily that his students are vulnerable people, insecure and uncertain about those everyday, ego-bruising moments that adults no longer concern themselves with, and that they do not understand that one day they will become as confident and as secure as the adults that bruise them. That momentary flicker of hesitation about where to connect ... and that they do not understand that one day they ... is enough to interrupt the flow of the sentence. To revise a sentence like this, try to shorten the first half of the coordination so that the second half is closer to that point in the sentence where the coordination begins: Every teacher ought to remind himself that his students are more vulnerable to those ego-bruising moments that adults have learned to cope with and that those students do not understand that one day ... If you can't do that, try repeating a word that will remind the reader where the second half of the coordination begins: Every teacher ought to remind himself that his students are vulnerable to those ego-bruising moments that adults have learned to cope with, to remind himself that those students do not understand that one day ... And, of course, you can always begin a new sentence: ... adults no longer concern themselves with. Teachers should remind themselves that their students do not understand ... [End of quoted passage, which I hope retained all its indents.] In this last revision possibility, with the original sentence broken into two, the principles of balanced coordinate structures still apply: there's a full stop between those two thoughts now, but the two are still both syntactically and semantically coordinate. We're still reminded at the start of the second structure of where and how we began in the first. Additionally, at the opening of his chapter on elegance, Williams makes this statement: "Coordination itself will grace a sentence with a movement more rhythmic and satisfying than that of most noncoordinate structures." Then, after an illustration in which he takes a very balanced and coordinate passage and recasts it so as to unravel that coordination, he remarks: In my version, the sentences just run on from one phrase to the next, from one clause to another. In his version, Lippmann balances phrase against phrase, clause against clause, creating an architectural symmetry that supports the whole passage. He then examines the structure of the original passage by displaying it in something of the manner of a tree diagram, as seen in linguistics texts. (I'm an old Reed-Kellogg gal myself.) Hmmmm, all of this is leading me now to wonder whether there might not be something related to be found in discussions of the distinction between loose and periodic sentences, and whether some of us might not have had this sense of repetition at the beginning of coordinate structures informed by such study. You think? At any rate, to continue, in Martha Kolln's Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects (4th ed., Longman, 2003), another text I quite like, there's a discussion touching on similar points in a section on the coordinate series (214 ff.), and most particularly within this overall discussion in the description and illustration of repetition as a stylistic device (216 ff.). She's also got brief and more general discussions earlier in the book of repetition for cohesion (on 38 - 40), and of repetition versus redundancy (on 40 - 41 and 216). No doubt this is not the end of it, but I'm feeling like this is a worthy start. I think that these principles are relevant both in those contexts where lengthy sentences are encouraged (as in, for instance, critical or philosophical writing) and where they are not (as in, for instance, the environment in which I currently work). So, as you say, both in formal and informal writing, as I think we're all saying, both for clarity and for impact. The writing I work with does not generally balance such lengthy structures as are found in formal or critical writing, and cannot call undue attention to itself stylistically, but I still find that restoring these phrasal and clausal markers to coordinate structures can correct or clarify an otherwise flawed sentence and that, used judiciously, such restoration can also lend just the right touch of drama or emphasis. And by this I mean not only in and of itself, but also as against the all too common trend, in my world, of simply reducing every thought to its smallest common denominator, and so the shortest possible sentence structure, the results of which can be a rather jerky style of primer prose. I don't think that's the solution, and I don't think the resulting text is necessarily easier to read. (Ah, but that's another axe to grind, isn't it?) Thanks so much, both to you and to Nick, for a most interesting discussion. I'm much obliged, and greatly enlightened. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= END OF EDline 8.40 Admin page: < http://www.electriceditors.net/edline/admin.htm > ** The views expressed in this mailing list are strictly those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the moderators or of the Electric Editors. ** Articles (c) 2002--2003, by individual contributors Design (c) 1996--2003 Iain Brown Compilation (c) 2003 Iain Brown / The Electric Editors =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=