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STYLE IN PROFESSIONAL WRITING

In my previous article I discussed word choice, a major factor in establishing a writer's style-the manner in which a writer uses language. To a great extent style is a personal and individual matter, like the way one parts one's hair. Still, some approaches to using language in writing succeed more than others, and some basic principles exist that allow us to distinguish between, and note what contributes to, ineffective and effective prose style.

Three major flaws contribute to poor style: weakness, imprecision, and vagueness or abstraction. What makes writing weak? The excessive Latinization mentioned by The Elements of Style above is a major factor. Since, as it says, "Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin," writing that turns away from simple Anglo-Saxon vocabulary time and again will tend to sound as dead as the Latin language itself. No valid reason exists under any circumstance to choose "utilize" over "use"; no one would ever say to his or her partner on a date, "Pardon me while I utilize the bathroom."
Nominalizations often tend to weaken writing. Nominalizations are nouns derived from verbs, such as "data collection" from "collecting data." They pose problems because too many nouns in a sentence as opposed to verbs make the sentence heavy and inert by focusing on the mere presence or existence of things rather than on what happens concerning them, as Lunsford and Connors illustrate in The New St. Martin's Handbook: "The effect of the overuse of nouns in writing is the placing of too much stress on the inadequate number of verbs and the resultant prevention of movement of the thought." The authors intentionally pile nominalizations into their sentence to produce the effect they describe. It would be quicker and easier to write and to read the alternative they provide: "Overusing nouns places a big strain on the verbs and consequently slows down the prose." Regarding nominalizations specifically, Lunsford and Connors add, "Although nominalization can help make prose clearer and more concise-for example, using abolition instead of the process of abolishing-it can also produce the opposite effect, making a sentence unnecessarily wordy and hard to read. . . . Too often, writers use nominalizations not to make a complex process easier to talk about but to make an idea sound more complex and abstract than it really is." This attempt to fancify writing usually backfires: it confuses less sophisticated readers and to more

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