Xem mẫu
- 515
CHAPTER 19 - A CONCISE GUIDE TO PUNCTUATION
Examples mother-in-law
president-elect
runner-up
good-for-nothing
twenty-one
Compound words made from combining verb forms are frequently hyphen-
ated: The psychiatrist insisted his birthday presents be shrink-wrapped.
4. Some words with prefixes use a hyphen; again, check your dictionary if
necessary.
Examples all-American
ex-wife
self-esteem
non-English
5. Use a hyphen to mark the separation of syllables when you divide a
word at the end of a line. Do not divide one-syllable words; do not leave one or
two letters at the end of a line. ( In most dictionaries, dots are used to indicate
the division of syllables: va • ca • tion.)
Examples In your essays you should avoid using frag-
ment sentences.
Did your father try to help you with your home-
work?
19m UNDERLINING* ( ) P
1. Underline or place quotation marks around a word, phrase, or letter
used as the subject of discussion. Whether you underline or use quotation
marks, always be consistent. (See also pages 509–510.)
Examples No matter how I spell offered, it always looks wrong.
Is your middle initial X or Y?
Her use of such words as drab, bleak, and musty give the poem a
somber tone.
* In some printed matter, words that might otherwise be underlined are presented in italics:
She had just finished reading T he Great Gatsby.
- 516 PART FOUR - A CONCISE HANDBOOK
2. Underline the title of books, magazines, newspapers, movies, works of
art, television programs ( but use quotation marks for individual episodes),
airplanes, trains, and ships.
Examples Moby Dick
The Reader’s Digest
Texarkana Gazette
Gone with the Wind
Mona Lisa
60 Minutes
Spirit of St. Louis
Queen Mary
Exceptions: Do not underline the Bible or the titles of legal documents, includ-
ing the United States Constitution, or the name of your own essay when it ap-
pears on your title page. Do not underline the city in a newspaper title unless
the city’s name is actually part of the newspaper’s title.
3. Underline foreign words that are not commonly regarded as part of the
English language.
Examples He shrugged and said, “C’est la vie.”
Under the “For Sale” sign on the old rusty truck, the farmer had
w ritten the words “caveat emptor,” meaning “let the buyer
beware.”
4. Use underlining sparingly to show emphasis.
Examples Everyone was surprised to discover that the butler didn’t do it.
“Do you realize that your son just ate a piece of my priceless
sculpture?” the artist screamed at the museum director.
19n ELLIPSIS POINTS (. . . OR . . . .) P
1. To show an omission in quoted material within a sentence, use three
periods, with spaces before and after each one.
Original Every time my father told the children about his
having to trudge barefooted to school in the snow,
the walk got longer and the snow got deeper.
Quoted with omission In her autobiography, she wrote, “Every time my fa-
ther told the children about his having to trudge
barefooted to school . . . the snow got deeper.”
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CHAPTER 19 - A CONCISE GUIDE TO PUNCTUATION
Note: MLA style now recommends brackets around ellipsis points that indicate
omitted material to distinguish this use from ellipses appearing in the original
text: In her autobiography, she wrote, “Every time my father told the children
about his having to trudge barefoot to school [. . .] the snow got deeper.”
2. Three points with spaces may be used to show an incomplete or inter-
rupted thought.
Example My wife is an intelligent, beautiful woman who wants me to live a
long time. On the other hand, Harry’s wife . . . oh, never mind.
3. If you omit any words at the end of a quotation and you are also ending
your sentence, use three points plus a fourth to indicate the period. Do not
add space before the first point.
Example Lincoln wrote, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought
forth upon this continent, a new nation. . . .”
4. If the omission of one or more sentences occurs at the end of a quoted
sentence, use four dots with no space before the first dot.
Example “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. . . . he leadeth me in
the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.”
PRACTICING WHAT YOU’VE LEARNED
Errors with Parentheses, Brackets, Dashes, Hyphens,
Underlining, and Ellipses
Correct the following errors by adding, changing, or deleting parentheses,
brackets, dashes, hyphens, underlining, and ellipses.
1. Many moviegoers know that the ape in King Kong the original 1933
version, not the re-make was only an eighteen inch tall animated fig-
ure, but not everyone realizes that the Red Sea Moses parted in the
1923 movie of The Ten Commandments was a quivering slab of Jell O
sliced down-the-middle.
2. We recall the last words of General John B. Sedwick at the Battle of
Spotsylvania in 1864: “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist .”
3. In a person to person telephone call the twenty five year old starlet
promised the hard working gossip columnist that she would “tell the
truth . . . and nothing but the truth” about her highly-publicized feud
with her exhusband, editor in chief of Meat Eaters Digest.
4. While sailing across the Atlantic on board the celebrity filled yacht
Titanic II, Dottie Mae Haskell she’s the author of the popular new self
help book Finding Wolves to Raise Your Children confided that until
recently she thought chutzpah was an Italian side dish.
- 518 PART FOUR - A CONCISE HANDBOOK
5. During their twenty four hour sit in at the melt down site, the anti nu-
clear protestors began to sing, “Oh, say can you see . . . ”
6. Few people know that James Arness later Matt Dillon in the long run-
ning television series Gunsmoke got his start by playing the vegetable
creature in the postwar monster movie The Thing 1951.
7. Similarly, the well known TV star Michael Landon he died of cancer
in 1991 played the leading role in the 1957 classic I Was a Teenage
Werewolf.
8. A French chemist named Georges Claude invented the first neon sign
in 1910. For additional information on his unsuccessful attempts to
use seawater to generate electricity, see pages 200–205.
9. When Lucille Ball, star of I Love Lucy, became pregnant with her first
child, the network executives decided that the word expecting could
be used on the air to refer to her condition, but not the word pregnant.
10. In mystery stories the detective often advises the police to cherchez
la femme. Editor’s note: Cherchez la femme means “look for the
woman.”
Semicolons Apostrophes
C 62 00 00 00 00 00 09 45 C 62 00 00 00 00 00 17 66
End
Italics
Punctuation
C 62 00 00 00 00 00 17 64 C 62 00 00 00 00 00 17 69
Commas
C 62 00 00 00 00 00 17 65
- Chapter 20
A Concise Guide to Mechanics
20a CAPITALIZATION CAP
1. Capitalize the first word of every sentence.
Example The lazy horse leans against a tree all day.
2. Capitalize proper nouns—the specific names of people, places, and
products—and also the adjectives formed from proper nouns.
Examples John Doe
Austin, Texas
First National Bank
the Eiffel Tower
Chevrolets
Japanese cameras
Spanish class
an English major
3. Always capitalize the days of the week, the names of the months, and
holidays.
Examples Saturday, December 14
Tuesday’s meeting
Halloween parties
Special events are often capitalized: Super Bowl, World Series, Festival of
Lights.
4. Capitalize titles when they are accompanied by proper names.
Examples President Jones, Major Smith, Governor Brown, Judge Wheeler,
Professor Plum, Queen Elizabeth
- 520 PART FOUR - A CONCISE HANDBOOK
5. Capitalize all the principal words in titles of books, articles, stories,
plays, movies, and poems. Prepositions, articles, and conjunctions are not
capitalized unless they begin the title or contain more than four letters.
Examples “The Face on the Barroom Floor”
A Short History of the War Between the States
For Whom the Bell Tolls
6. Capitalize the first word of a direct quotation.
Examples Shocked at actor John Barrymore’s use of profanity, the woman
said, “Sir, I’ll have you know I’m a lady!”
Barrymore replied, “Your secret is safe with me.”
7. Capitalize “east,” “west,” “north,” and “south” when they refer to par-
ticular sections of the country but not when they merely indicate direction.
Examples The South has produced many excellent writers, including William
Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. [“South” here refers to a section
of the country.]
If you travel south for ten miles, you’ll see the papier-mâché
replica of the world’s largest hamburger. [In this case, “south” is a
direction.]
8. Capitalize a title when referring to a particular person;* do not capital-
ize a title if a pronoun precedes it.
Examples The President announced a new national holiday honoring Frank H.
Fleer, inventor of bubble gum.
The new car Dad bought is guaranteed for 10,000 miles or until
something goes wrong.
My mother told us about a Hollywood party during which Zelda
and F. Scott Fitzgerald collected and boiled all the women’s purses.
20b ABBREVIATIONS AB
1. Abbreviate the titles “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” “Ms.,” “St.,” and “Dr.” when they
precede names.
Examples Dr. Scott, Ms. Steinham, Mrs. White, St. Jude
* Some authorities disagree; others consider such capitalization optional.
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CHAPTER 20 - A CONCISE GUIDE TO MECHANICS
2. Abbreviate titles and degrees when they follow names.
Examples Charles Byrd, Jr.; David Hall, Ph.D.; Dudley Carpenter, D.D.S.
3. You may abbreviate the following in even the most formal writing: A.M.
(ante meridiem, before noon), P.M. (post meridiem, after noon), A.D. (anno Do-
mini, in the year of our Lord), B.C. ( before Christ), C.E. (common era), etc. (et
cetera, and others), i.e. (id est, that is), and e.g. (exempli gratia, for example).
4. In formal writing, do not abbreviate the names of days, months, cen-
turies, states, countries, or units of measure. Do not use an ampersand (&)
unless it is an official part of a title.
Incorrect in formal writing Tues., Sept., 18th century, Ark., Mex., lbs.
Correct Tuesday, September, eighteenth century,
Arkansas, Mexico, pounds
Incorrect Tony & Gus went to the store to buy ginseng
root.
Correct Tony and Gus went to the A & P to buy ginseng
root. [The “&” in “A & P” is correct because it
is part of the store’s official name.]
5. Do not abbreviate the words for page, chapter, volume, and so forth,
except in footnotes and bibliographies, which have prescribed rules of
abbreviation.
( For additional information on proper abbreviation, consult your dictio-
nary.)
20c NUMBERS NUM
1. Use figures for dates, street or room numbers, page numbers, tele-
phone numbers, percentages, and hours with A.M. and P.M.*
Examples April 22, 1946
710 West 14th Street
page 242
room 17
476–1423
40 percent
10:00 A.M.
* 8:00 A.M. or 8 A.M., but eight o’clock in the morning
- 522 PART FOUR - A CONCISE HANDBOOK
2. Some authorities say spell out numbers that can be expressed in one or
two words; others say spell out numbers under one hundred.
Examples ten thousand dollars or $10,000
twenty-four hours
thirty-nine years
five partridges
$12.99 per pair
1,294 essays
3. When several numbers are used in a short passage, use figures.
Examples In the anchovy-eating contest, Jennifer ate 22, Juan ate 21, Pete ate
16, and I ate 6.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, on an average day 11,000 ba-
bies are born, 6,000 people die, 7,000 couples marry, and 3,000
couples divorce.
4. Never begin a sentence with a figure.
Incorrect 50 spectators turned out to watch the surfing exhibition at Niagara
Falls.
Correct Fifty spectators turned out to watch the surfing exhibition at Nia-
gara Falls.
PRACTICING WHAT YOU’VE LEARNED
Errors with Capitalization, Abbreviations, and Numbers
A. Correct the errors in capitalization in the following phrases.
1. delicious chinese food
2. memorial day memories
3. fiery southwestern salsa
4. his latest novel, the stor y of a prince among thieves
5. my son’s Wedding at the baptist church
6. count Dracula’s castle in transylvania
7. african-american heritage
8. a dodge van driven across the golden gate bridge
9. sunday morning newspapers
10. the british daughter-in-law of senator Snort
- 523
CHAPTER 20 - A CONCISE GUIDE TO MECHANICS
B. Correct the following errors by adding, deleting, or changing capitals,
abbreviations, and numbers. Skip any correct words, letters, or numbers you
may find.
1. Speaking to students at Gallaudet university, Marian Wright Edelman,
Founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, noted that an
american child is born into poverty every thirty seconds, is born to a
teen mother every 60 seconds, is abused or neglected every 26 sec-
onds, is arrested for a violent crime every five minutes, and is killed
by a gun every two hours.
2. My sister, who lives in the east, was amazed to read studies by
Thomas Radecki, MD, showing that 12-year-olds commit 300 percent
more murders than did the same age group 30 years ago.
3. In sixty-seven A.D. the roman emperor Nero entered the chariot race
at the olympic games, and although he failed to finish the race, the
judges unanimously declared him the Winner.
4. According to John Alcock, a Behavioral Ecologist at Arizona State Uni-
versity, in the U.S.A. the chance of being poisoned by a snake is 20
times less than that of being hit by lightning and 300 times less than
the risk of being murdered by a fellow American.
5. The official chinese news agency, located in the city of xinhua, esti-
mates that there are ten million guitar players in their country today,
an amazing number considering that the instrument had been banned
during the cultural revolution that lasted 10 years, from nineteen
sixty-six to nineteen seventy-six.
6. 231 electoral votes were cast for James Monroe but only 1 for John
Quincy Adams in the 1820 Presidential race.
7. The british soldier T. E. Lawrence, better known as “lawrence of ara-
bia,” stood less than 5 ft. 6 in. tall.
8. Drinking a glass of french wine makes me giddy before my 10 a.m. en-
glish class, held in wrigley field every other friday except on New
Year’s day.
9. When a political opponent once called him “two-faced,” president
Lincoln retorted, “if I had another face, do you think I would wear
this one?”
10. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, died in nova scotia
on aug. 2, 1922; 2 days later, on the day of his burial, for 1 minute no
telephone in north america was allowed to ring.
20d SPELLING SP
For some folks, learning to spell correctly is harder than trying to herd cats.
Entire books have been written to teach people to become better spellers, and
- 524 PART FOUR - A CONCISE HANDBOOK
some of these are available at your local bookstore (and, no, not listed under
witchcraft). Here, however, are a few suggestions that seem to work for many
students:
1. Keep a list of the little beasties you misspell. After a few weeks, you
may notice that you tend to misspell the same words again and again or that
the words you misspell tend to fit a pattern—that is, you can’t remember
when the i goes before the e or when to change the y to i before ed. Try to
memorize the words you repeatedly misspell, or at least keep the list some-
where handy so you can refer to it when you’re editing your last draft ( listing
the words on the inside cover of your dictionary also makes sense).
2. Become aware of a few rules that govern some of our spelling in English.
For example, many people know the rule in the jingle “I before E except after C
or when it sounds like A as in neighbor and weigh.” Not everyone, however,
knows the follow-up line, which contains most of the exceptions to that jingle:
“Neither the weird financier nor the foreigner seizes leisure at its height.”
3. Here are some other rules, without jingles, for adding suffixes (new
endings to words), a common plague for poor spellers:
• Change final y to i if the y follows a consonant.
bury → buried
marry → marries
• But if the suffix is -ing, keep the y.
marry + ing = marrying
worry + ing = worrying
• If the word ends in a single consonant after a single vowel and the
accent is on the last syllable, double the consonant before adding the
suffix.
occur → occurred
cut → cutting
swim → swimmer
• If a word ends in a silent e, drop the e before adding -able or -ing.
love + able = lovable
believe + able = believable
4. And here’s an easy rule governing the doubling of letters with the addi-
tion of prefixes (new beginning syllables): most of the time, you simply add all
the letters you’ve got when you mix the word and the prefix.
mis + spell = misspell
un + natural = unnatural
re + entry = reentry
- 525
CHAPTER 20 - A CONCISE GUIDE TO MECHANICS
5. Teach yourself to spell the words that you miss often by making up
your own silly rules or jingles. For instance:
dessert (one s or two?): I always want two helpings so I double the s.
apparently (apparantly?): Apparently, my parent k nows the whole story.
separate (seperate?): I’d be a rat to separate from you.
a lot (or alot?): A cot (not acot) provides a lot of comfort in a tent.
questionnaire (one n or two?): Surveys have numerous numbered ques-
tions (two n’s).
And so on.
6. Don’t forget to proofread your papers carefully. Anything that looks
misspelled probably is, and deserves to be looked up in your dictionary. Read-
ing your paper one sentence at a time from the end helps, too, because you
tend to start thinking about your ideas when you read from the beginning of
your paper. (And if you are writing on a word processor that has a spell pro-
gram, don’t forget to run it.)
Although these few suggestions won’t completely cure your spelling prob-
lems, they may make a dramatic improvement in the quality of your papers
and give you the confidence to continue learning and practicing other rules
that govern the spelling of our language. Good luck!
Spelling Abbreviations
C 62 00 00 00 00 00 17 67 C 62 00 00 00 00 00 17 70
Capitals Numbers
C 62 00 00 00 00 00 17 68 C 62 00 00 00 00 00 17 71
- Chapter 21
Exposition: Development
by Example
Darkness at Noon
Harold Krents
Harold Krents was a Washington, D.C., attorney and activist for the rights of the dis-
abled. Before his death in 1987, Krents served on the President’s Committee on Em-
ployment of the Handicapped and was a member of the Vera Institute of Justice and
Mainstream, Incorporated. His autobiography To Race the Wind was published in
1972; his life was the inspiration for the Broadway play and popular movie Butterflies
Are Free. T his essay originally appeared in The New York Times in 1976.
Blind from birth, I have never had the opportunity to see myself and
1
have been completely dependent on the image I create in the eye of the
observer. To date it has not been narcissistic.
There are those who assume that since I can’t see, I obviously also
2
cannot hear. Very often people will converse with me at the top of their
lungs, enunciating each word very carefully. Conversely, people will also
often whisper, assuming that since my eyes don’t work, my ears don’t
either.
For example, when I go to the airport and ask the ticket agent for as-
3
sistance to the plane, he or she will invariably pick up the phone, call a
ground hostess and whisper: “Hi, Jane, we’ve got a 76 here.” I have con-
cluded that the word “blind” is not used for one of two reasons: Either
they fear that if the dread word is spoken, the ticket agent’s retina will
immediately detach, or they are reluctant to inform me of my condition
of which I may not have been previously aware.
On the other hand, others know that of course I can hear, but believe
4
that I can’t talk. Often, therefore, when my wife and I go out to dinner, a
waiter or waitress will ask Kit if “he would like a drink” to which I re-
spond that “indeed he would.”
This point was graphically driven home to me while we were in En-
5
gland. I had been given a year’s leave of absence from my Washington
law firm to study for a diploma in law at Oxford University. During the
- 530 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
year I became ill and was hospitalized. Immediately after admission, I
was wheeled down to the X-ray room. Just at the door sat an elderly
woman—elderly I would judge from the sound of her voice. “What is his
name?” the woman asked the orderly who had been wheeling me.
“What’s your name?” the orderly repeated to me.
6
“Harold Krents,” I replied.
7
“Harold Krents,” he repeated.
8
“When was he born?”
9
“When were you born?”
10
“November 5, 1944,” I responded.
11
“November 5, 1944,” the orderly intoned.
12
This procedure continued for approximately five minutes at which
13
point even my saint-like disposition deserted me. “Look,” I finally blurted
out, “this is absolutely ridiculous. Okay, granted I can’t see, but it’s got to
have become pretty clear to both of you that I don’t need an interpreter.”
“He says he doesn’t need an interpreter,” the orderly reported to the
14
woman.
The toughest misconception of all is the view that because I can’t see,
15
I can’t work. I was turned down by over forty law firms because of my
blindness, even though my qualifications included a cum laude degree
from Harvard College and a good ranking in my Harvard Law School class.
The attempt to find employment, the continuous frustration of
16
being told that it was impossible for a blind person to practice law, the
rejection letters, not based on my lack of ability but rather on my dis-
ability, will always remain one of the most disillusioning experiences of
my life.
Fortunately, this view of limitation and exclusion is beginning to
17
change. On April 16 [1976], the Department of Labor issued regulations
that mandate equal-employment opportunities for the handicapped. By
and large, the business community’s response to offering employment to
the disabled has been enthusiastic.
I therefore look forward to the day, with the expectation that it is cer-
18
tain to come, when employers will view their handicapped workers as a
little child did me years ago when my family still lived in Scarsdale.
I was playing basketball with my father in our backyard according to
19
procedures we had developed. My father would stand beneath the hoop,
shout, and I would shoot over his head at the basket attached to our
garage. Our next-door neighbor, aged five, wandered over into our yard
with a playmate. “He’s blind,” our neighbor whispered to her friend in a
voice that could be heard distinctly by Dad and me. Dad shot and missed; I
did the same. Dad hit the rim: I missed entirely: Dad shot and missed the
garage entirely. “Which one is blind?” whispered back the little friend.
I would hope that in the near future when a plant manager is touring
20
the factory with the foreman and comes upon a handicapped and non-
handicapped person working together, his comment after watching them
work will be, “Which one is disabled?”
- 531
CHAPTER 21 - E XPOSITION: DEVELOPMENT BY E XAMPLE
Black Men and Public Space
Brent Staples
Brent Staples has written essays, reviews, and editorials for a number of newspapers
and journals, including the Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Review of Books, and
Harper’s, and his memoir Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (1994) won
the Anisfield Wolff Book Award. He currently writes about culture and politics for the ed-
itorial page of The New York Times. This essay was originally published in Ms. maga-
zine in 1986.
My first victim was a woman—white, well dressed, probably in her
1
late twenties. I came upon her late one evening on a deserted street in
Hyde Park, a relatively affluent neighborhood in an otherwise mean, im-
poverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the avenue behind her,
there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not
so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man—a
broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands
shoved into the pockets of a bulky military jacket—seemed menacingly
close. After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was
soon running in earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into a cross
street.
That was more than a decade ago, I was twenty-two years old, a grad-
2
uate student newly arrived at the University of Chicago. It was in the
echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the un-
wieldy inheritance I’d come into—the ability to alter public space in ugly
ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a
rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking
sleep, not defenseless wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take
a knife to a raw chicken—let alone hold one to a person’s throat—I was
surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight made me
feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was indis-
tinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area
from the surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that fol-
lowed, signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedes-
trians—particularly women—and me. And I soon gathered that being
perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a cor-
ner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a
foyer somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a
policeman. Where fear and weapons meet—and they often do in urban
America—there is always the possibility of death.
In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become
3
thoroughly familiar with the language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersec-
tions, I could cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic light and elicit the
thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver—black, white, male, or female—
hammering down the door locks. On less traveled streets after dark, I
grew accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the
- 532 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
other side of the street rather than pass me. Then there were the stan-
dard unpleasantries with policemen, doormen, bouncers, cabdrivers,
and others whose business it is to screen out troublesome individuals be-
fore there is any nastiness.
I moved to New York nearly two years ago and I have remained an
4
avid night walker. In central Manhattan, the near-constant crowd cover
minimizes tense one-on-one street encounters. Elsewhere—in SoHo, for
example, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings shut
out the sky—things can get very taut indeed.
After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live, I often
5
see women who fear the worst from me. They seem to have set their
faces on neutral, and with their purse straps strung across their chests
bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against
being tackled. I understand, of course, that the danger they perceive is
not a hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street vio-
lence, and young black males are drastically overrepresented among the
perpetrators of that violence. Yet these truths are no solace against the
kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, a fearsome entity
with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact.
It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of
6
twenty-two without being conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestri-
ans attributed to me. Perhaps it was because in Chester, Pennsylvania,
the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960s, I was
scarcely noticeable against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings,
and murders. I grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen
fistfights. In retrospect, my shyness of combat has clear sources.
As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried
7
several, too. They were babies, really—a teenage cousin, a brother of
twenty-two, a childhood friend in his mid-twenties—all gone down in
episodes of bravado played out in the streets. I came to doubt the virtues
of intimidation early on. I chose, perhaps unconsciously, to remain a
shadow—timid, but a survivor.
The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often
8
has a perilous flavor. The most frightening of these confusions occurred
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I worked as a journalist in
Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was writing for
with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken for a burglar. The office
manager called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued me through
the labyrinthine halls, nearly to my editor’s door. I had no way of proving
who I was. I could only move briskly toward the company of someone
who knew me.
Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time
9
before an interview. I entered a jewelry store on the city’s affluent Near
North Side. The proprietor excused herself and returned with an enor-
mous red Doberman pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She stood,
the dog extended toward me, silent to my questions, her eyes bulging
- 533
CHAPTER 21 - E XPOSITION: DEVELOPMENT BY E XAMPLE
nearly out of her head. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade
her good night.
Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black
10
male journalist. He went to nearby Waukegan, Illinois, a couple of sum-
mers ago to work on a story about a murderer who was born there. Mis-
taking the reporter for the killer, police officers hauled him from his car
at gunpoint and but for his press credentials would probably have tried
to book him. Such episodes are not uncommon. Black men trade tales
like this all the time.
Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being
11
taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have led to madness. I
now take precautions to make myself less threatening. I move about with
care, particularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to nervous peo-
ple on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have
exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a build-
ing behind some people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them
clear the lobby before I return, so as not to seem to be following them. I
have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare occasions when
I’ve been pulled over by the police.
And on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an
12
excellent tension-reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven
and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers. Even steely New
Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occa-
sionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense
that a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons. It is my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they
know they are in bear country.
Rambos of the Road
Martin Gottfried
Martin Gottfried began his career as a music critic for the Village Voice and then became
the drama critic for The New York Post and Saturday Review. He has published eleven
books, including A ll His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse (1990), S ondheim
(1993), George Burns and the Hundred Year Dash (1996), and Balancing Act (2000),
and is currently the drama critic for the New York Law Journal. This essay was first pub-
lished in Newsweek in 1986.
The car pulled up and its driver glared at us with such sullen inten-
1
sity, such hatred, that I was truly afraid for our lives. Except for the Mo-
hawk haircut he didn’t have, he looked like Robert DeNiro in “Taxi
Driver,” the sort of young man who, delirious for notoriety, might kill a
president.
He was glaring because we had passed him and for that affront
2
he pursued us to the next stoplight so as to express his indignation and
- 534 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
affirm his masculinity. I was with two women and, believe it, was afraid
for all three of us. It was nearly midnight and we were in a small, sleeping
town with no other cars on the road.
When the light turned green, I raced ahead, knowing it was foolish
3
and that I was not in a movie. He didn’t merely follow, he chased, and
with his headlights turned off. No matter what sudden turn I took, he fol-
lowed. My passengers were silent. I knew they were alarmed, and I
prayed that I wouldn’t be called upon to protect them. In that cheerful
frame of mind, I turned off my own lights so I couldn’t be followed. It was
lunacy. I was responding to a crazy as a crazy.
“I’ll just drive to the police station,” I finally said, and as if those were
4
the magic words, he disappeared.
It seems to me that there has recently been an epidemic of auto
5
macho—a competition perceived and expressed in driving. People fight
it out over parking spaces. They bully into line at the gas pump. A toll
booth becomes a signal for elbowing fenders. And beetle-eyed drivers
hunch over their steering wheels, squeezing the rims, glowering, prepar-
ing the excuse of not having seen you as they muscle you off the road.
Approaching a highway on an entrance ramp recently, I was strong-
armed by a trailer truck, so immense that its driver all but blew me away
by blasting his horn. The behemoth was just inches from my hopelessly
mismatched coupe when I fled for the safety of the shoulder.
And this is happening on city streets, too. A New York taxi driver
6
told me that “intimidation is the name of the game. Drive as if you’re deaf
and blind. You don’t hear the other guy’s horn and you sure as hell don’t
see him.”
The odd thing is that long before I was even able to drive, it seemed
7
to me that people were at their finest and most civilized when in their
cars. They seemed so orderly and considerate, so reasonable, staying in
the right-hand lane unless passing, signaling all intentions. In those days
you really eased into highway traffic, and the long, neat rows of cars
seemed mobile testimony to the sanity of most people. Perhaps memory
fails, perhaps there were always testy drivers, perhaps—but everyone
didn’t give you the finger.
A most amazing example of driver rage occurred recently at the Man-
8
hattan end of the Lincoln Tunnel. We were four cars abreast, stopped at a
traffic light. And there was no moving even when the light had changed.
A bus had stopped in the cross traffic, blocking our paths: it was a
normal-for-New-York-City gridlock. Perhaps impatient, perhaps late for
important appointments, three of us nonetheless accepted what, after
all, we could not alter. One, however, would not. He would not be help-
less. He would go where he was going even if he couldn’t get there. A Wall
Street type in suit and tie, he got out of his car and strode toward the
bus, rapping smartly on its doors. When they opened, he exchanged
words with the driver. The doors folded shut. He then stepped in front of
the bus, took hold of one of its large windshield wipers and broke it.
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CHAPTER 21 - E XPOSITION: DEVELOPMENT BY E XAMPLE
The bus doors reopened and the driver appeared, apparently giving
9
the fellow a good piece of his mind. If so, the lecture was wasted, for the
man started his car and proceeded to drive directly into the bus. He
rammed it. Even though the point at which he struck the bus, the folding
doors, was its most vulnerable point, ramming the side of a bus with
your car has to rank very high on a futility index. My first thought was
that it had to be a rented car.
To tell the truth, I could not believe my eyes. The bus driver opened
10
his doors as much as they could be opened and he stepped directly onto
the hood of the attacking car, jumping up and down with both his feet.
He then retreated into the bus, closing the doors behind him. Obviously
a man of action, the car driver backed up and rammed the bus again. How
this exercise in absurdity would have been resolved none of us will ever
know for at that point the traffic unclogged and the bus moved on. And
the rest of us, we passives of the world, proceeded, our cars crossing a
field of battle as if nothing untoward had happened.
It is tempting to blame such belligerent, uncivil and even neurotic
11
behavior on the nuts of the world, but in our cars we all become a little
crazy. How many of us speed up when a driver signals his intention of
pulling in front of us? Are we resentful and anxious to pass him? How
many of us try to squeeze in, or race along the shoulder of a lane merger?
We may not jump on hoods, but driving the gantlet, we seethe, cursing
not so silently in the safety of our steel bodies on wheels—fortresses for
cowards.
What is it within us that gives birth to such antisocial behavior and
12
why, all of a sudden, have so many drivers gone around the bend? My
friend Joel Katz, a Manhattan psychiatrist, calls it, “a Rambo pattern.
People are running around thinking the American way is to take the law
into your own hands when anyone does anything wrong. And what con-
stitutes ‘wrong’? Anything that cramps your style.”
It seems to me that it is a new America we see on the road now. It has
13
the mentality of a hoodlum and the backbone of a coward. The car is its
weapon and hiding place, and it is still a symbol even in this. Road Ram-
bos no longer bespeak a self-reliant, civil people tooling around in family
cruisers. In fact, there aren’t families in these machines that charge
headlong with their brights on in broad daylight, demanding we get out
of their way. Bullies are loners, and they have perverted our liberty of
the open road into drivers’ license. They represent an America that de-
rides the values of decency and good manners, then roam the highways
riding shotgun and shrieking freedom. By allowing this to happen, the
rest of us approve.
nguon tai.lieu . vn
