henry never cared who saw him do anything, whether it was decorous or not, and he usually offended my friends in some way. the cat made himself quite comfortable, on the top of the television, across stranger's feet or laps, in beds, drawers, sacks, closets, or nooks. the difference between them is imperceptible to strangers.
if a reader is lost, it is generally because the writer has not been careful enough to keep him on the path. this carelessness can take any number of forms. perhaps a sentence is so excessively cluttered that the reader, hacking his way through the verbiage, simply doesn't know what it means. perhaps a sentence has been so shoddily constructed that the reader could read it in any of several ways. perhaps the writer has switched tenses, or has switched pronouns in mid-sentence, so the reader loses track of when the action took place or who is talking. perhaps sentence b is not logical sequel to sentence a —— the writer, in whose head the connection is clear, has not bothered to provide the missing link. perhaps the writer has used an important word incorrectly by not taking the trouble to look it up. he may think that "sanguine" and "sanguinary" mean the same thing, but the difference is a bloody big one. the reader can only infer what the writer is trying to imply.共3页123
speaking and writing are different in many ways. speech depends on sounds. writing uses written symbols. speech developed about 500 000 years ago. written language is a recent development. it was invented only about six thousand years ago. speech is usually informal. the word choice of writing is often relatively formal. pronunciation and accent often tell where the speaker is from. pronunciation and accent are ignored in writing. a standard