Too Much Trouble to Think Straight?

Louis Foley Babson College

Abstract

A sentence should have from the beginning a definite plan to be kept clearly in view. When a writer becomes tangled in his grammar and goes off the track, we may believe that he started without being sure of what he wanted to say. Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1849: “A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plow instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.”

Journal
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
Published
1974-07-01
DOI
10.2190/xm5y-k8gu-l32r-1480
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References (59)

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  2. The New York Times, May 25, 1969.
  3. The Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1968.
  4. ibid., November 8, 1969.
  5. ibid., July 6, 1967.
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