一 Takeaways

1. 修改：上学时老师一再强调写完一定要检查修改，由于懒，态度不认真，只是检查个文法typo就完事了。要好好看看Zinsser的修改学习学习（对比左右两段文字，理解一下Zinsser为什么这样改）；

2. 相信写作材料，不过度解释，夸张等。以前写文章，总爱搞些文字游戏，看重形式多于内容。现在倒是务实多了，意识到好好说话，尊重事实最基本；

3. Write with zest. 写自己感兴趣的才会写得好，才有humanity和warmth。

二 Summary

三 词（组）

1. brunette

Men get mugged; a woman who gets mugged is a shapely stewardess or a pert brunette.

having black or dark-brown hair, often along with dark eyes and a dark complexion

Brunette 过去很长一段时间用来指肤色黝黑的女人；现今多用于指头发的颜色。通常brunette 只指女人，而不如其常用的变体brunet可用于指男人和男女都有的群体。 两词的区别正如blonde 和 blond 的区别， 被看成带有性别的含意。brunette 不可能被看成一个中性词， 因为后缀-ette 与女性紧密联系。Brunet从道理上来说适用于男人和女人，但很少用于指男人。男人相应的肤色仅用brown表述即可。

2. flurry

Their point is that women can chair a committee as well as a man and are equally good at spoking. Hence the flurry of new words like “chairperson” and “spokeswoman.”

a sudden occurrence of many things at once: barrage （突然同时出现或发生的）一系列事物

例句：I am suddenly receiving a flurry of e-mails asking me to clarify what was done, who did it, etc.

3. be stuck with

But let’s face it: the English language is stuck with the generic masculine (“Man shall not live by bread alone”).

to be saddled with, unable to get rid of (an unwanted person or thing). 无法摆脱

例句：Like it or not, she and Grant were stuck with each other.

4. clog

To turn every “he” into a “he or she,” and every “his” into a “his or her,” would clog the language.

to overload (as a work of art) with irrelevant matter so as to obscure the essence 妨碍

例句：a great deal of … philosophizing clogs such movement as the book has — Elizabeth Janeway

5. slant

I reject “he/she” altogether; the slant has no place in good English.

a view from a particular angle: a peculiar or personal point of view, attitude, or opinion (尤指有失偏颇的)观点，看法

例句：I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or nonpolitical, that doesn’t have a slant (New Yorker).

6. nudge

Over the years, however, many women wrote to nudge me about this. They said that as writers and readers themselves they resent always having to visualize a man doing the writing and reading, and they’re right; I stand nudged. Most of the nudgers urged me to adopt the plural: to use “readers” and “writers,” followed thereafter by “they.”

coax or gently encourage (someone) to do something 愿义是用胳膊肘碰以提示，引申为助推

例句：We have to nudge the politicians in the right direction.

7. cumbersome

Nevertheless I found three or four hundred places where I could eliminate “he,” “him,” “his,” “himself” or “man,” mainly by switching to the plural, with no harm done; the sky didn’t fall in. Where the male pronoun remains in this edition I felt it was the only solution that wasn’t cumbersome.

awkward, inconvenient, or difficult to handle, carry, or manage: of an excessive size, shape, or length （同义词：clumsy, unwieldy）

例句：If a task manager is too cumbersome to use, you won't bother with it.

8. stall

The voice of a Dr. Spock talking to the mother of a child with a fever, or the voice of a Julia Child talking to the cook stalled in mid-recipe, is one of the most reassuring sounds a reader can hear.

to force to a sandstill: hinder from going on 停顿

例句：soldiers were stalled here for four days by heavy enemy fire — Toni Howard

9. verbose

The newly hatched sentence almost always has something wrong with it. It’s not clear. It’s not logical. It’s verbose. It’s klunky. It’s pretentious. It’s boring. It’s full of clutter. It’s full of clichés. It lacks rhythm. It can be read in several different ways. It doesn’t lead out of the previous sentence. It doesn’t … The point is that clear writing is the result of a lot of tinkering.

abounding in words: containing more words than necessary: prolix, tedious

例句：There are few professions that allow one to be as verbose as a judge.

10. loose end

When you read your writing aloud with these connecting links in mind you’ll hear a dismaying number of places where you lost the reader, or confused the reader, or failed to tell him the one fact he needed to know, or told him the same thing twice: the inevitable loose ends of every early draft.

a detail that is not yet settled or explained 遗留问题

例句：The plot does not follow a straight path whereby all the loose ends are tied up and everything finally starts to make sense.

11. pregnant

I don’t like baseball movies that go into slow motion when the batter hits a home run, to notify me that it’s a pregnant moment.

Pregnant can also mean "filled with something," like inspiration or "rich in significance or implication," like your pregnant pause before answering your friend's question, "You like my new boyfriend, don't you?" 意味深长的，意义重大的

12. quirky

1. What people do—and what people say—continues to take me by surprise with its wonderfulness, or its quirkiness, or its drama, or its humor, or its pain.

2. No subject is too specialized or too quirky if you make an honest connection with it when you write about it.

Your friend with the pink hair, the excellent vocabulary, and the totally inappropriate wit? You could probably call her quirky, meaning she’s unconventional and has a strange mix of traits that somehow end up being kind of interesting or charming.

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我也想问为什么修改只有一个小节而不是一章哇TT