Learning new vocabulary in the context of your reading, and copying the sentences of professional writers while paying attention to how they are putting language together will help you develop and improve your own style. The English language is an incredibly rich and varied language, so put your mind to work on acquiring and mastering the new vocabulary. Don't let yourself slip into old bad habits of auto-pilot -- working without thinking.
intrinsic • ubiquitous • ossified • corollary • contentious • permeate • prosaic • aphorism
ADDED 9/11/16: OK, who contributed these words? I'll start you out, but those of you who know where to find these words, please post!
intrinsic (Johnson, 71)
But because those ideas were by definition successful ones, it's tempting to attribute their success to intrinsic causes: the sheer brilliance of the idea itself, or the sheer brilliance of the mind that came up with it.
ubiquitous (Shirkey, 13)
A few years ago Evan wouldn't have been able to get the story heard either. Before the Web became ubiquitous, he wouldn't have been able to attract an audience, much less one in the millions, and without the audience he would not have been able to get the police to change the complaint.
Contentious (Johnson, 171)
ReplyDelete"The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional production cycles-and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates."
corollary (Shirkey, 60)
ReplyDelete"The corollary is also true: what doesn't go into a newspaper is whatever is too expensive to print and deliver."
permeate (Shirkey, 15)
ReplyDelete"We readily understand the difference between transitive labels like 'my wife's son' and 'my son's wife,' and this relational subtlety permeates our lives."
Ossified (Johnson, 28)
ReplyDelete"We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition."
Ubiquitous (Shirky 78)
ReplyDelete"Rather, this technological story is like literacy, wherein a particular capability moves from a group of professionals to become embedded within society itself, ubiquitously, available to a majority of citizens."
prosaic (Shirkey, 185)
ReplyDeleteWhat does a service like Twitter, whose public face is banal, offer...Egyptian activists? Some of the value is fairly prosaic -- free speech activists are harassed or detained in several countries...so they use Twitter to alert one another...
I can't find "aphorism" in the texts! How weird is that?
ReplyDeleteHere it is on Google news:
Oxford Leader, September 14, 2016
It’s often been said those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Erica DiCosmo, Korey Bailey and Julie Fracker are taking that well-known aphorism to heart.
(It would be OK to just use initials instead of their full names when you try to jam that sentence into your notebooks)
Delete