There is nothing to make you like other human beings so
much as doing things for them.
The motives for human behavior are so ambivalent, so mysterious, that a writer attempting to put in one sentence an explanation of even a simple act can easily tangle himself in abstractions and cryptic circumlocutions. Plain English doesn't seem adequate. Our sentence, from Zora Neal Hurston's autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) is splendid plain English, and the thought is far from plain.
Consider the kind of fussy tangles Hurston avoided:
"There is nothing" instead of "There is hardly any human activity"
"To make you like" instead of "to enable one to have affection for"
"Other human beings" instead of "prospective acquaintances"
"So much as" instead of "to a similar extent as"
"Doing things for them" instead of "performing acts of kindness toward them."
The sentence she might have written is surely "decent," but what Hurston wrote is immensely more effective. Hurston's thought is subtle and challenging, involving several unconventional notions about human motives: First, that people want to like other people. Second, that liking another person does not rest only or primarily on that person's likeability. And third, that doing something for another person makes your attitude toward that person positive, not necessarily his toward you. An entire essay could be written explaining and illustrating each of those ideas. Hurston's plain English sentence does not oversimplify them; it removes the irrelevant excess and integrates them in a single statement
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