Style Revision – Principles 17-19
Bowdlerized from “Joyas Voladoras” by Brian Doyle. Revise with the stated principle in mind. Your task is to show an understanding of the aspects of style at hand; the result may or may not approximate the original. Work in pairs if you’re willing to share the score (0-3). Move this to your word-processing program and work there. Send signed work to gordoe3@rpi.edu. You’ll have 15 minutes.
Purple passages are unchanged from the original.
#17 - Omit Needless Words
It is no doubt useful and interesting to consider the hummingbird. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times per second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart constitutes a good portion of it's actual weight. Joyas Voladoras, or “flying jewels,” is what the first white explorers of the Americas gave to them, having never seen them before, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, and nowhere else in the universe. There are more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring[e1] in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.
#18 – Avoid a succession of loose sentences (continues from the above passage).
Each hummingbird visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour, fly backwards, and fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. Rest, however, brings them close to death. On frigid nights they retreat into torpor; their metabolic rate slows to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate. Barely beating are their hearts, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be.
#19 – Express coordinate ideas in coordinate form
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have racecar hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. To support that eye-popping rate, their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut.[e2] They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity, inertial forces, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. Your engines are melted. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred, or you can spend them quickly, like a hummingbird, and live to the age of two.
[….]
#19 (help with). Coordinate ideas expressed in coordinate form. Unchanged. Nothing to do here. An example.
Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.
[e1]Hint to help later with Rule #19: Nectaring is an invented word that is better than gathering nectar, say, because it makes the list of 3 verbs, all gerunds (-ing words), coordinate.
[e2]Hint: Is there a word parallel to stiffer that says more taut? “Tauter” is not a word and as a coined word sounds odd. But if it were a word and the writer didn’t mind the sound, it would coordinate better with stiffer better than more taut does.
[e3]Hint: and usually joins coordinate words.
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