The final Notes on Nuance move for this second part
of the specialization ties in to one of
our key concepts: parallel structure. It
involves the phrase "at once." Notice the rhythmic
balance it creates in the following sentence
from Things I've Been Silent About by
the Iranian author, Azar Nafisi, who also
wrote the popular book, Reading Lolita in Tehran. "It took me some time
to accept the fact that my father's family had its
own secrets and untruths. They were at once intellectually adventurous and
extremely puritanical." See how "intellectually
adventurous" and "extremely puritanical"
have the same structure? Adverb, adjective,
adverb, adjective? That's not an accident. Nor is it an accident when the American book
critic, Ruth Franklin, uses the same grammatical
arrangement in a 2018 article about
the Norwegian writer, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and his monumental sixth
volume opus, My Struggle. "It's 3,600-some pages, at once weirdly self-deprecating and
breathtakingly egoistic, began to appear in English at the rate of a volume
a year in 2012, culminating this fall with
the translation of Book Six." Adverb, adjective,
adverb, adjective. You'll see additional
varieties in the reading. As always, test out a bunch. I hope you'll soon
see that the move can be at once playful and elegant.