how to revise a sentence #4
I began with this sentence:
These opportunities in my early life allowed me to become not only natively proficient in Spanish and English, but also multicultural.
But I felt something was slightly off with “but also multicultural.” It’s hard to figure out exactly what I didn’t like about it. Maybe its meaning was too opaque? Or the proportions of “natively proficient in Spanish and English” compared to “multicultural” were awkwardly lopsided?
Whatever the reason, I rewrote it as this:
Due to these opportunities in my early life, I am natively proficient in Spanish and English, and culturally embedded in multiple contexts.
Immediately, I disliked the “Due to” construction, so I wrote a third version:
These opportunities in my early life allowed me to develop native proficiency in Spanish and English and gave me an intuition for multiple cultural contexts.
I prefer the latest version because it connects cause and effect using verbs rather than with logical statement. Specifically, to express the causal relationship between the “opportunities in my early life” and my consequent skills, the third version uses the verbs “allowed me to develop” rather than the more abstract, logical connecting bits “Due to” and “I am” of the second version. The reader sees the relationship directly in the sentence without having to translate it from a logical statement.
I realize this might sound like nitpicky minutiae. But I think there is an effective difference in immediacy of meaning here. By writing “Due to X…” a writer signals to the reader that they must remember “X” until its promised role is revealed. Until that promise is fulfilled, the reader may have to digest bits of information related to “X” and its yet unknown role, all the while maintaining “X” in working memory. This is an unnecessary chore that writers should avoid putting onto the reader.
The final problem I tried to fix was the potential buzzwordiness of “an intuition for multiple cultural contexts.” I think multicultural people would likely grasp what I mean, but it’s not very concrete and could invite cynical dismissal as a non-statement. I tried this:
These opportunities in my early life allowed me to develop native proficiency in Spanish and English and gave me an intuition that allows me to inhabit multiple cultural contexts.
But was yet unsatisfied. It sounds like something someone writes about themselves on their resume or LinkedIn profile. Still too abstract to be trusted as referring to something real. So I tried to get specific:
These opportunities in my early life allowed me to develop native proficiency in Spanish and English and gave me an intuition for cultural subtleties that differ across the US, Mexico, and Canada.
Now we’re getting more concrete. Part of the solution is simply to name the specific countries I’m referring to. This avoids suggesting I could fit into any culture in the world, which would dilute the substance of my statement and tempt readers to distrust it altogether. I think the phrase “cultural subtleties” also helps despite still being somewhat abstract because it is suggestive of specific things that people experience in daily life, like social cues. It is general yet concrete by virtue of
evoking a distinct mental sensationhow to write concretely
Writing how to revise a sentence #4 prompted me to finally put in words my thoughts on “concrete” writing. By “concrete” I don’t mean things that are literally tangible, but things that can be grasped mentally, intuitively, beyond the abstract symbols (words) that represent it. In other words, a word or phrase is more concrete the more it translates in a reader’s mind to a distinct mental image or sensation.
The hollowness of buzzwords is related to their inablility to cause a specific mental effect. They are duds not because the words themselves are meaningless, but because they seem to refer to nothing in particular. Words become buzzwords when too many people use them to avoid saying something, when they wield them like a blunt object, swatting away invocations to say something of substance, something concrete.
This failure infects the words themselves. They lose their vigor not only when present in the platitudinous speech of dishonest politicians and interested businesspeople, but when used thoughtfully by people who mean them in a particular way. My mom for example uses the word “synergy” in a genuine, intentional way, but I am skeptical that even her optimism is enough to revitalize the word, which is arguably as lifeless as a carcass, all the meat of its meaning picked away to beef up the keynote speeches of glib business executives.
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