Question 1

It really helps your reader if your sentences move from ______.

Question 2

Given how often we design and deliver written messages, we might think of ourselves as _________ of information.

Question 3

One of the class clips offered an opinion on the wisdom of “trying to sound smart” when writing. Fill in the blank to complete that opinion. “Trying to sound smart is a pretty _____ strategy.”

Question 4

The “Clarity and Cohesion” chapter of Good with Words suggests that “your sentences need to listen to each other. They need to pay attention to and expand on what came before, like a good dinner guest advancing the conversation.” It then says that "you can imagine your sentences having big, attentive, _______-like ears, ones that catch and catalog not just everything that has been said in a previous sentence but also everything that has been said in previous paragraphs, sections, and chapters.” Fill in the blank with the missing Disney character.

Question 5

One of the videos mentioned a book called Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Everyday by Jake Knapp and John Zerastky, two self-professed “time dorks” who used to work for Google Ventures. We focused on a particular sentence: “Most of our time is spent by ______.” Fill in the missing word, remembering that one of the concerns the authors have is that we often aren’t deliberate enough about how we schedule our days.

Question 6

The Punctuation and Professionalism segment this week focused on instances in which skilled writers intentionally deviate from the comma conventions surrounding coordinating conjunctions. It ended with the following (spoken) paragraph: “Deliberate deviations from convention are fine, so long as your readers know you are in fact being deliberate. But _______ deviations—deviations that leave people wondering whether you are even aware of the conventions—those are the ones we’ll want to address.” Fill in the missing word after “But.”

Question 7

We learned about three new moves in our “Notes on Nuance” segment this week. Identify them below.

“He rolled the light blue sheet that covered the man’s face down a little ways, to a point where his bushy eyebrows were visible. He had a formidable crop of white hair, unthinned by time.” —Luke Dittrich, Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets (2016)

“ If the Bay of Pigs was the Kennedy administration’s nadir, the Cuban missile crisis was its zenith, a moment when Kennedy and his team creatively engineered a positive result under extreme pressure.” —Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (2015)

“When I was twenty and living in San Francisco, I had a three-year-old son, two jobs, and two rented rooms with cooking privileges down the hall. My landlady, Mrs. Jefferson, was kind and grandmotherly. She was a ready babysitter and insisted on providing dinner for her tenants. Her ways were so tender and her personality so sweet that no one was mean enough to discourage her disastrous culinary exploits. Spaghetti at her table, which was offered at least three times a week, was a mysterious red, white, and brown concoction. We would occasionally encounter an unidentifiable piece of meat floating on the plate. There was no money in my budget to afford restaurant food, so my son and I were often loyal, if unhappy , diners at Chez Jefferson.” —Maya Angelou, Hallelujah! The Welcome Table (2009)

“Here in the very first sentence of the Declaration the colonists lay claim to a station on the world’s stage equal to Britain’s. This they do not by pulling Britain down but by pulling themselves up. They want respect. This must have sounded audacious, if not outrageous.” —Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration in Defense of Equality (2014)

Question 8

The “Old Friends” assignment borrowed an idea from Yale law professor Noah Messing. In the Art of Advocacy, Messing suggests that telling readers what they already know before you tell them something new is “the cognitive equivalent of what happens to most people when they walk into a crowded room. If they immediately see a few friends, they will calm down. But if they see a slew of unfamiliar faces, most people will be anxious and uncomfortable.” He therefore offers this advice to lawyers and law students: “Your briefs and motions will make judges comfortable if your sentences greet them with old friends.” Which statement below best aligns with the idea of figuring out what will seem like “old friends” to your readers?

“When presented with different examples mixed together, students learn to create abstract generalizations that allow them to apply what they learned to material they have never encountered before. For example, say you plan a visit to a museum and want to be able to identify the artists (Cezanne, Picasso, or Renoir) of paintings there that you have never seen. Before you go, instead of studying a stock of Cezanne flash cards, then a stack of Picasso flashcards, and then a stack of Renoir, you should put the cards together and shuffle.” —David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (2019)

Research institutes for nature and health are opening at major medical centers, electronic health-record systems have begun to incorporate nature prescriptions just as they do pharmacological ones, and at least one major health insurer has begun offering incentives for nature prescriptions. Those prescriptions take many forms, from general encouragement to get outside at least twice a week to specific instructions for activity, location, duration, and frequency. In a world where we increasingly live our lives indoors, says Zarr, one of the movement’s pioneers, ‘We are starting to think about nature not just as a place to recreate, but also as a social determinant of health.’ There’s no diagnostic code for nature-deficit disorder—the term coined by Richard Louv in his 2008 book Last Child in the Woods —but if there were, Zarr says, ‘I would use it a lot.’” —Aaron Reuben, “Science’s Newest Miracle Drug is Free” (2019)

“None of my professors at BYU had examined my writing the way Professor Steinberg did. No comma, no period, no adjective or adverb was beneath his interest. He made no distinction between grammar and content, between form and substance. A poorly written sentence was a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction. “Tell me,” he would say, “why have you placed this comma here? What relationship between these phrases are you hoping to establish?” —Tara Westover, Educated (2018)

“If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.” —David Ausbel, Educational Psychology (1968)

Question 9

What is the rhetorical term for when skilled writers (and speakers) take the same language that ended one sentence or clause and use it to begin the next sentence or clause? You can think of it as a stylistically exaggerated form of going from old information to new information.

Question 10

One of the videos mentioned an American writer who once expressed his love for the craft of writing in the following way: “I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.” Identify the writer.