Word: avoiding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Soviet police had barred the way with trucks and cars. When the cops refused to budge, the crowd began rocking a police car, intending to flip it over. Anxious to avoid bloodshed, and outnumbered 100 to 1, the police gave way after a brief scuffle. As English-speaking Russian youths-members of the Young Communist League-blocked the view from Western photographers, the students regrouped, marched through the heart of Moscow singing freedom songs. But the police regrouped too, and near Red Square, officials commandeered more trucks to block the entrance. Loudspeakers blared "Entry to Red Square is closed...
...elevator got stuck in the headquarters of the alliance, briefly trapping a dozen photographers. Then U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara narrowly missed sudden death when the four-engine jet carrying him from Orly Airport to Saigon braked to a jolting stop on the runway, just in time to avoid collision with an incoming plane. As for the meeting of NATO's defense, finance and foreign ministers, it went so smoothly that the session adjourned after only two days, a day ahead of schedule...
Washington termed Sihanouk's conditions "totally unacceptable." In fact, Sihanouk is probably only taunting the U.S. out of fear of the Red Chinese and wants to avoid an overt diplomatic break. Sihanouk is still anxious for a Geneva Conference to guarantee Cambodian neutrality, but such a conference is meaningless without U.S. participation. As Sihanouk himself said last week after closing Cambodia's embassy in London, "It appears necessary, without a diplomatic break, to put our relations in slumber...
...which mankind naturally thinks," calling its movement from subject to predicate "a sort of moving picture of thought." To follow the mind's natural order, he said, "keep your subject close to the beginning of your sentence" and "keep your verb as close to its object as possible." Avoid too many verbs; evoke the reader's imagination. "The fewer the words that can be made to convey an idea, the clearer and the more forceful that idea." Not We walked down the main street, which was very long, but We walked down the long main street...
...catches up with spontaneity-which is one of the greatest of the literary virtues." But rewriting is crucial-for example, to strengthen the beginning and the ending of each sentence, paragraph and the larger whole. Especially the endings: "What we hear last is usually the most vivid to us." Avoid grammatical fussiness: "In certain cases a preposition is the most emphatic word to end a sentence with." But worry about words: "There is rarely more than one right word to express an idea exactly. See that you get that one right word...