An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Creativity - always yours

EXERCISES 19
• Use positive rather than negative terms. "The room was clean" rather than
"The room was not dirty."
• A good test is to read a passage aloud and see if it sounds clumsy. Easy-toread
text has a higher chance of being understood.
Tip 5: Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite
Good writing does not finish with your first draft. A good author will reread every
word and sentence and think about how to make the text even better. Hemingway,
who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954, said he rewrote the ending to A
Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, just to "get the words right." 2 Leonardo da
Vinci used a mirror to look at his own painting in reverse so it would look less
familiar and he could criticize his work better. This is why it is a good idea to leave
your finished writing aside for a while. Read it aloud again later with a fresh eye,
and it will be easier to spot problems. Of course, you can also get someone else
to read it and give some advice. But try as hard as you can to find something that
can be improved, even if it is just deleting a word or changing the order of a few
sentences. Good writing is often like a great performance—beautiful to behold
and seeming to be without effort, but in reality it is the product of intense labor
and love.
Rereading what we have written sounds obvious, but it is surprising how few
people do it, even when mistakes are costly. A survey of UK recruitment firms
found that more than half of the application CVs they have received contain grammatical
and spelling errors, leaving a bad impression on prospective employers.
Furthermore, applicants aged between 21 and 25 years made the most mistakes.
Most firms also said applicants were wasting their time by including details about
their hobbies and interests (BBC, 2010).
EXERCISES
2.1 For each pair of sentences below, explain whether they differ in literal meaning.
a) Do not be evil. Be good.
b) I like lobsters. I like eating lobsters.
c) We do not add preservatives to our food. Our food contains no preservatives.
d) Do not say anything if the police are here. Do not say anything in case
the police are here.
e) You may kiss the bride. You must kiss the bride.
f) Everyone is not sick. Not everyone is sick.
2 He also has this to say about his experience working at a newspaper: "On the Star you were forced to
learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone." He also told F. Scott Fitzgerald, "I
write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. ... I try to put the shit in the wastebasket."