Style: Balance and Consistency

Tenses

Use the present tense or the past tense consistently throughout papers, but don't shift back and forth between them. The present tense is useful for all writing which analyzes events, ideas, words, works of art, or scientific results. It helps show that ideas are alive in your mind. With historical events you may choose the past tense to say what happened when, if the action is complete in the past:

In March, 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson declared that he would not seek the Presidency.

When analyzing such events in a present context, however, return to the present:

Johnson's stepping-down suggests that even powerful presidents have to recognize the limits of their power.

Use your course texts and secondary sources as a guide to the proper use of tenses in papers.

Parallel Structure and Balance

Virginia Woolf on reading:

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instinct, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
(Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read A Book?")

Loren Eisley on evolution:

We lost our hairy covering, our jaws and teeth were reduced in size, our sex life was postponed, our infancey became among the most helpless of any of the animals because everything had to wait upon the development of that fast-growing mushroom which had sprung up in our minds.
(Loren Eisley, "The Dream Animal" from The Immense Journey)

Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh on the beauty of mathematics:

Blindness to the aesthetic element in mathematics is widespread and can account for a feeling that mathematics is dry as dust, as exciting as a telephone book, as remote as the laws of infangtheif in fifteenth century Scotland.
(Davis and Hersh, The Mathematical Experience)

Parallel structure is more than correct grammar: it helps unify a sentence and clarify its intentions. In all three of the above examples, the parallel elements (infinitives, subject-predicate structures, or adjective clauses) derive from the same source. They are like repeated stitches of the same color in an embroidered belt. This unity helps show the relationship between cause and effect, or among items on a list. When parallels are faulty the sentence gives a slipshod effect, as Woolf's does when we deliberately mess it up:

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, following instincts is best and you must use your own reason, and to come to your own conclusions.

Balance in a sentence comes from a careful distribution of weight and purpose; in a balanced sentence (such as this one), clauses of equal importance have equal length. No exact rule for balancing will help you as much as reading aloud. Skillful writers can write long sentences without losing balance, because the writers know where they are going:

All along the street there are people who watched me grow up, people who grew up with me, people I watched grow up along with my brothers and sisters; and, sometimes in my arms, sometimes underfoot, sometimes at my shoulder -- or on it -- their children, a riot, a forest of children, who include my nieces and nephews.
(James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name)

Imbalanced sentences often end with a thud:

In face of nuclear war, widespread starvation and political imbalance, the world must do something about these things.

A vague predicate can dissipate the energy of a sentence's beginning. Here the writer needs a strong ending to carry forward her initial powerful phrase. Instead of sounding as though she got up to answer the phone in the middle of the sentence, she should carry out her own voice through that daunting first phrase to a decisive conclusion:

In face of nuclear war, widespread starvation and political imbalance, the world must reawaken its consciousness as a world, not just as an assortment of people.

   Passive Voice
   Intransitive Verbs
   Too Many Little Words
   Adverbitis
   Hitchhikers, Babblers, and Jaw-Flappers
   Windy and Pretentious Language
   Balance and Consistency