Sun Tzu establishes a relationship between victory and death, believing that a general's pre-war calculations can provide a hint at the outcome of a battle. Sun Tzu compares generals who prepare for a war and those that do not by arguing “... the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculation beforehand” (Tzu 9). Tzu establishes an equal relationship between how preparation works in both situations. It has an equal effect on opposite sides; on the positive to negative scale. In Zinsser's On Writing Well he claims that “unity is the anchor of good writing” (Zinsser 50). Tzu creates unity between success and failure by establishing a common base of prewar calculations. By creating a relationship; with the unison of equality between two opposite outcomes that share a common base, Tzu uses this as an iteration of the utter importance of preparing for a war. Throughout his book Tzu tends to avoid tangled, complex sentences in order to keep the attention …show more content…
With his main basis being a total contrasts of length and victory. Tzu creates another relationship when he argues that generals should “let (their) great object be victory, not length” (Tzu 13). This is similiar to Ian Clark’s book; Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies, where he establishes the same relationship arguing that “clear prose is not just a product of sentence length” (Clark 9). Tzu and Clark both establish unequal relationships between length and victory. By establishing this relationship; Tzu urges generals reading the book, to avoid lengthy campaigns. For example; besieging cities. Tzu states that the essentials for victory are: to keep personal losses at a minimum. The unequal relationship creates an offsetting tone. When things are unequal it creates almost a bad middle in between the two. If you are on one side then you can not be on the other side. Tzu then continues by including an anaphora when he is describing the concept of supreme excellence. He argues that “to fight and conquer in all of your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting” ( Tzu 15). Tzu throws a curveball at the reader because typically anaphoras create equal relationships between scenarios; however in this instance, an obvious