rnprdk

5 ms·

1. 1.▲
   by rnprdk 13y ago

   Ad hominem can be completely appropriate if you're making a point about someone's character/credibility. I don't know why people think that ad hominem means you should never make arguments "to the man." In this
2. 2.▲
   by rnprdk 13y ago

   "Very" is a fine word. There's nothing about it that inherently "degrades semantics and syntax." In fact, I think that's probably a meaningless statement. How could it possibly degrade syntax? It can also be us
3. 3.▲
   by rnprdk 13y ago

   I once had a professor who assigned regular essays with a maximum length of one properly formatted page. He was quite demanding, and I think I probably learned more about writing from those than most other multi-page assignments. He was als
4. 4.▲
   by rnprdk 13y ago

   I went to Butler University and I struggled much like the Penn student above. Two hospitalizations while there, I believe. Everyone involved there--all the professors I knew, and all the administrators who took on my case--were just excepti
5. 5.▲
   by rnprdk 13y ago

   Many "good writing style manual[s]" are kind of full of it. An interesting bit from the wiki(1) on passive voice: "For example, despite Orwell's advice to avoid the passive, his Politics and the English Language (1946) e
6. 6.▲
   by rnprdk 13y ago

   A fun contrast to this would be kottke.org's "Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace" from a while back: http://kottke.org/09/03/growing-sentences-with-david-foster-... Also: I haven't rea