英语单词大师：Wise Writing Instead of '-Wise'

 AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER, our guest is the author of a new book called "On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work -- and Don't."RS: Paula LaRocque has worked for many years as a writing instructor 1 and newspaper writing coach. Her advice to English language learners is to try to avoid bad habits that can be found even in the work of professional writers.

PAULA LaROCQUE: "If they're thinking about beauty and clarity, they won't be seduced 2 by the things that cheapen the language. And, to my mind, that's the proliferation of unnecessary euphemisms 3 or fad 4 and cliché, the things that are embedded 5 in the language like the proliferation of the -ize and the -wise suffixes 6. I remember reading in an obituary 7 this sentence: 'The officer will be funeralized Tuesday.'"AA: "Someone actually wrote that?"PAULA LaROCQUE: "Yes, somebody actually wrote it. And you and I have no difficulty in seeing how even silly but ugly that is and how it cheapens the language and makes it less elegant than it could be. But a person speaking the language as second language might say, 'Oh, this is what a professional writer does and so this is what I should do.'
"Let's say that a member of your audience turns on the television here and gets the weather and the person says 'Let's see what the picture is weather-wise.' It's more elegant to say 'Let's see what the weather is.'"RS: "You do talk about words in the media and you come down a little bit hard on the media. Tell us why and what are the things that perhaps an English language learner might want to avoid when listening to the media."PAULA LaROCQUE: "When they listen to the media, the first thing they're going to hear is what I think of as media-speak. It's a small vocabulary, flat because it's overused; verbs such as spawned 8, spurred, fueled, triggered, decimated, sparked. They have these little bunches of words that fall into the sentence kind of fully 9 born: 'He is the architect of a plan hammered out in wide-ranging discussions.'"RS: "Isn't written language different from spoken language? Not to defend these words, but -- "PAULA LaROCQUE: "I know you're not defending it, but here's what I think: no. The only thing that should be different between speech and writing is that writing can be more elegant, because you can edit it. You go back and look at the sentence. We don't have that luxury when we're speaking. But everything else should be the same.
"For example, Avi, if you were going to tell me a story and you walked into my office, you would probably do a subject-verb-object sentence."AA: "That's right, that's the natural way people tend to speak."PAULA LaROCQUE: "And if we were working on the newspaper, I'd say 'That's really interesting, maybe you should do a story on that.' So you go out and sit at the computer and write something entirely 10 different. You write something like 'Amid a firestorm of criticism, spawned on Thursday when ... '
"I mean, we know how to engage each other's interests, how to be dramatic without being melodramatic. We know how to deliver a message so that we're not boring, bewildering, annoying people -- in person. And yet we sit down and we write and we do bore, bewilder and annoy."AA: "And one last question. We're about to start a new academic year here in the United States and thousands of students from around the world will be attending classes and getting an introduction to academic American English. What suggestions would you offer them to prepare for the experience?"PAULA LaROCQUE: "When they sit down to write, if they wouldn't think about how I'm going to impress the reader, but only, or rather, how I'm going to get my message across in a pleasing and clear way. I'm not going to try to use a vocabulary that's not mine, because I know what will happen is, some of the words will be just a little bit off.
"And in terms of writing itself, if they would just sit down and write something as a roadmap before sitting down at the computer and just putting a sentence into the thing and start writing that way. If you have a beginning, a middle and an end planned -- sometimes now we just simply sit down at the computer, we change things out, we treat paragraphs like interchangeable modules 11. It stops being organic with really firmly knit transitions between one paragraph that grows out of another. We put the last period on and we say we're done, without ever realizing that what we just wrote was a rough draft."DAVID BURKE: "So I got this idea: What if I took a fairy tale, 'Cinderella'? We start it in the native language of the reader, so let's say in English for the American market. So we start in English, and as the reader moves forward, the story starts to morph into another language."ENGLISH-MANDARIN 12 INSTRUCTION: "Once upon a time, there lived a poor girl - nuhaizi - named Cinderella who was very pretty - pioaliang. The nuhaizi, who was very piaoliang, lived in a small house - fangzi."Burke has compiled books of fairy tales with accompanying CDs in Mandarin Chinese, French, Italian, German, Hebrew, Japanese and Spanish.
ENGLISH-SPANISH INSTRUCTION: "Once upon a time, there lived a poor girl - muchacha - named Cinderella who was very pretty - bonita."A separate Spanish-language version helps teach English to Latin American youngsters.
Young readers learn about 20 words at each level, then move to the next level as they read a different fairy tale.
DAVID BURKE: "For example, I've taken the story of 'Goldilocks,' and I bring back all the words the kids have learned in 'Cinderella,' and I add 20 more. And level three is 'Beauty and the Beast.' I bring back all the words from level one, level two, and add 20 more words. So by the end of the entire series, which will be level nine, that will be 100 percent in the target language."Burke says he has a series of comic books planned for teenagers.
DAVID BURKE: "That will have all the words they've learned in the series, plus more words we'll keep introducing. We'll also talk about events that pertain 13 to teenagers. So it will be in their context, but in the language that they've been learning."He says as parents and children read the books, both will benefit.
DAVID BURKE: "Under their radar 14, the kids are going to be learning foreign languages, and their parents too."Burke says students often think of language learning as dull, but it doesn't have to be.
DAVID BURKE: "What I always hear from students is, ugh, I've got to go take French class, I've got to take Spanish class. And that really is painful."Working with an illustrator, he designed his books with colorful cartoon-like illustrations that capture the young reader's imagination.
DAVID BURKE: "In 'Goldilocks,' of course, Goldilocks gets tired and she yawns. And in the book when she yawns, her mouth is as big as big can possibly be. So what we see, she's tired. She's cansada (in Spanish), fatiguee (in French), she's stanca, Italian."He says foreign language learning can become a daily habit.
DAVID BURKE: "When it's bedtime, time for storytelling, the parents can pop on the CD, open the book, and actually learn the foreign language with the child."He says many Europeans are known for their facility with languages, and people in other parts of the world often speak at least two. Americans have a different reputation.
DAVID BURKE: "There's a joke in the linguistic 15 world that's painful, and funny. It's, 'What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. And what do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. And what do you call a person who speaks one language? American."Not all Americans are monolingual, of course. The country's many immigrants bring languages and cultures from all parts of the world. But Burke says too many Americans are fluent only in English, and he is working to change that.
And that's Wordmaster for this week. Archives are online at www.voanews.com/wordmaster and our e-mail address is word@voanews.com.
I'm Mike O'Sullivan in Los Angeles.
RS: Writing coach Paula LaRocque. Her new book is called "On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work -- and Don't."AA: You can learn much more about how American English works at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.