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at the editing stage of producing a paper, as part of polishing the final draft. This assumption is only partly true. Getting the style right is not as simple as proofreading for errors in grammar or punctuation. Proofreading occurs in the relatively comfortable linguistic world of simple right and wrong. Stylistic considerations, by contrast, take place in the more exploratory terrain of making choices among more and less effective ways of formulating and communicating your meaning. Most writers do delay a full-fledged stylistic revision until a late stage of drafting, but that doesn’t mean that they totally ignore stylistic questions as they draft. The decisions you make about how to phrase your meaning inevitably exert a powerful influence on the meaning you make.

If stylistic considerations are not merely cosmetic, then it follows that rethinking the way you have said something can lead you to rethink the substance of what you have said.

HOW STYLE SHAPES THOUGHT: A BRIEF EXAMPLE

How does the difference in sentence structure affect the meaning of the following two sentences?

Draft: The history of Indochina is marked by colonial exploitation as well as international cooperation.

Revision: The history of Indochina, although marked by colonial exploitation, testifies to the possibility of international cooperation.

In the draft, the claim that Indochina has experienced colonial exploitation is equal in weight to the claim that it has also experienced international cooperation. But the revision ranks the two claims. The “although” clause makes the claim of exploitation secondary to the claim of cooperation. The first version of the sentence would probably lead you to a broad survey of foreign intervention in Indochina. The result would likely be a static list in which you judged some interventions to be “beneficial” and others “not beneficial.” The revised sentence redirects your thinking, tightens your paper’s focus to prioritize evidence of cooperation, and presses you to make decisions, such as whether the positive consequences of cooperation outweigh the negative consequences of colonialism. In short, the revision leads you to examine the dynamic relations between your two initial claims.

Rethinking what you mean is just as likely to occur when you attend to word choice. Notice how the change of a single word in the following sentences could change the entire paper.

Draft: The president’s attitude toward military spending is ambiguous.

Revision: The president’s attitude toward military spending is ambivalent.

In the draft, the use of the word “ambiguous” (meaning “open to many interpretations”) would likely lead to a paper on ways that the president’s decisions are unclear. If the president’s policies aren’t unclear—hard to interpret—but are conflicted over competing ways of thinking, then the writer would want the word “ambivalent.” This recognition would lead not only to reorganizing the final draft but also to refocusing the argument, building to the significance of this ambivalence (that the president is torn between adopting one of two stances) rather than to the previous conclusion (that presidential policy is incoherent).

“RIGHT” AND “WRONG” WORDS: SHADES OF MEANING

The nineteenth-century English statesman Benjamin Disraeli once differentiated between misfortune and calamity by using these words in a sentence describing his political rival William Gladstone: “If Mr. Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune; but if someone dragged him out, it would be a calamity.” Misfortune and calamity might mean the same thing to some people, but in fact the two words allow a careful writer to discriminate fine shades of meaning.

One of the best ways to pay attention to words as words is to practice making subtle distinctions among related words. The “right” word contributes accuracy and precision to your meaning. The “wrong” word, it follows, is inaccurate or imprecise. The most reliable guide to choosing the right word and avoiding the wrong word is a dictionary that includes not only