| 词组 | nature |
| 释义 | nature Nature is one of those words, like case, character, and fact, that you find in handbooks accompanied by the label "wordy" or "superfluous" or "redundant" along with the assertion that such a quality is one of the chief characteristics of its use in English. Anyone who had to wade through the citational evidence for nature in our files in search of these wordy phrases would soon develop a contrary opinion; most uses of the word do not embed it in phrases like in the nature of or of such a nature as to. Janis 1984 observes that it is difficult to frame a concise sentence using such phrases as in the nature of. His observation is true enough, but underlying it seems to be the notion that concise sentences are what every writer wants (or should want) all the time, which is patently false. The concise sentence has its uses and its great merits, but even Hemingway managed a long one from time to time. We think it fairly certain that when a writer chooses to tangle with of the nature of, of such a nature, or in the nature of, a concise sentence is not what he or she has in mind, and often for very sound reasons involving shades of meaning, authorial tone, sentence rhythm, or other important considerations. The assumption the critics make when they call an example wordy or roundabout is that the sentence in which the construction occurs could be readily improved by omitting or shortening the expression. You might challenge this assumption by seeing what you would do with each of our examples below. How many can you shorten easily? And how many are noticeably improved by your revision? Does revision alter the meaning? Does it alter the tone? • I have observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure, 'till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an Author —Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 1, 1 Mar. 1711 • Her political affiliations are of a very independent Republican nature —Current Biography 1951 • Something in the nature of an ovation was their reward—Virgil Thomson, The Musical Scene, 1947 • They profess to be very concerned about the nature of the Soviet threat and want all we can give them on that score —Oliver North, in The Tower Commission Report, 1987 • ... the chapter dealing with the philosophical developments was in the nature of an afterthought — Times Literary Supp., 19 Oct. 1951 • ... use a thin bookmarker Don't use scissors or old letters or anything of that nature —Lionel McColvin, in The Wonderful World of Books, ed. Alfred Stefferud, 1952 • We are in a time of stress of a nature such as this country has never before experienced —Vannevar Bush, N.Y. Times Mag., 13 June 1954 • Yet the losses we inflicted upon them in the month of May were, I think, in the nature of three-quarters of the losses they inflicted upon us—Sir Winston Churchill, The Unrelenting Struggle, 1942 • They are mostly books of a religious nature, popular rather than scholarly, and of passing value —Dictionary of American Biography, 1929 • He also began to suffer from the intense nature of tennis —Adrian McGregor, National Times (Sydney), 5 Apr. 1975 • Many stocks close for the month with prices a little lower than at the opening, but there has been nothing of a startling nature in the mild decline —The Bulletin (Sydney), 31 Mar. 1954 |
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英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。