CMOR Lunch'n'Learn
24 October 2024
Ross Wilson
This presentation gives a brief overview of some aspects of writing style and correct usage that I think are important, but is far from comprehesive.
I highly recommend reading good style manuals for advice and inspiration that goes far beyond what I can cover here. Some of the key references I used in preparing this presentation were:
The guiding metafor of classic style is seeing the world
You have seen something interesting that the reader has not yet noticed
Your role is to direct their gaze so they can see it for themselves
This requires that there is something to see
Think of engaging the reader in conversation
Practical style is another useful model for academic writing
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Judith Butler, Winner of the Bad Writing Prize 1998
OMIT
NEEDLESS
WORDS
Excessive signposting
Say what you're going to say, say it, then say what you've said
Don't do that
Aim to give the minimum needed for the reader to understand where they are being led
Professional navel-gazing
“In recent years, an increasing number of psychologists and linguists have turned their attention to the problems of child language acquisition. In this article, recent research on this process will be reviewed.”
These are wasted words
The reader is interested in what is known about the problem, not the fact that people have studied it
“Scare quotes”
Lazy writers often use scare quotes to distance themselves from a common idiom
Be confident in your own voice
If you're not comfortable using an expression without quotation marks, you probably shouldn't be using it at all
Compulsive hedging
apparently, rather, to some extent, etc.
Have confidence to stand behind what you are saying
If you need to qualify a statement or convey the magnitude of an effect, do so explicitly
Excessive jargon and technical terms
Some is unavoidable—and indeed desirable—when writing for a technical audience
But much is unnecessary
Rule of thumb: if there's an adequate non-technical term, use it
And avoid non-standard abbreviations
Helps keep the reader engaged
(they can see someone doing something)
Keeps the prose moving forward
Often makes your writing crisper and more concise
But don't overdo it
The passive voice can help you to direct the reader's gaze:
ACTIVE
PASSIVE
See that lady with the shopping bag? She's pelting a mime with zucchini.
See that mime? He's being pelted with zucchini by the lady with the shopping bag.
Turning a verb into a noun (with a suffix like -ance, -ment, -ation)
Used thoughtlessly, these can drain the life out of your prose
Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word.
We presented participants with a sentence, followed by the word TRUE or FALSE.
Comprehension checks were used as exclusion criteria.
We excluded people who failed to understand the task.
Many adjectives and adverbs are redundant
If the adjective carries the same meaning as the noun,
or the adverb as the verb: Omit it
If the adjective or adverb adds meaning, keep it
Grammar is what allows us to turn a jumbled web of ideas into a coherent string of words, and what allows the reader to reconstruct (some of) the web of thoughts from the string of words
To do that successfully, we need to get (at least) three things right:
Word order must do two things:
These requirements are not always aligned
Sentences are easier for the reader to parse if:
But standard English syntax requires Subject-Verb-Object
Luckily there are workarounds
We saw how the passive voice allows us to direct the order in which the reader encounters the different actors in our sentence
This can help us to implement two of the principles of composition:
We can move the subject of the sentence to the end when it is heavy, novel, or both
Consider this passage on Oedipus Rex
A man arrives from Corinth with the message that Oedipus's father has died. ... It emerges that this messenger was formerly a shepherd on Mount Cithaeron, and that he was given a baby. ... The baby, he says, was given to him by another shepherd from the Laius household, who had been told to get rid of the child.
This contains three passive clauses, with good reason
There are other tools for rearranging words & phrases
(Pinker's Sense of Style has a good discussion)
You can also simply change the verb:
gave
sold
robbed
fled
received
bought
stole
chased
Grammar rules are not unchanging laws of nature,
or proclamations handed down from on high
They are tacit conventions among users of a language
Many supposed “Rules of Grammar” ignore this fact
This is the “rule” that claims Captain Kirk should not have said
to boldly go where no man has gone before
but rather boldly to go or to go boldly
This is a myth. Ignore it.
What are you talking about?
Another myth. Ignore it.
This is useful advice, up to a point
Starting a sentence with a conjunction can be a sign that you've broken the sentence incorrecly
But used deliberately, there's nothing wrong with it
Maintain a consistent vantage point within a sentence
Switching vantage point unexpectedly will just confuse your reader
The number of the subject should agree with the number of the verb:
Slightly more complex, but the same simple rule applies:
But what about:
Almost done with number!
Can you grade the degree of an “absolute” adjective?
Many purists say no
Accepted usage would suggest otherwise:
But steer clear of very unique regardless
Singular “they” works in most contexts
Sometimes it helps to rewrite the sentence with a plural subject
Or rewrite so that no pronoun is needed
Commas have two main jobs:
Separating parenthetical phrases from the main body of the sentence:
Separating items in a list
Don't use commas join two complete sentences
Instead, write two sentences (if they are conceptually independent)
Apostrophes have two main purposes:
Not for marking plurals (the grocer's apostrophe):
Some journal articles are well written; many are not!
Read good edited non-fiction (i.e. books, from a quality publisher)
Read style manuals—for their content, and as an exemplar of the craft
And notice good writing when you read it
Get a good dictionary (and thesaurus)
If you're not sure about the meaning or usage of a word, look it up
Once you know something, you forget
what it's like for someone else not to know it
Remind yourself that your readers don't know everything you know about your specific subfield of research
And they definitely don't know everything about what you did in your study
Your job as a writer is to show them, clearly and intuitively
And more importantly:
Edit!
Your first draft will be sloppy, but you can't edit until you've got something written down
Read your writing out loud (or at least out loud inside your head)—preferably some time after you wrote it
If it doesn't sound right to you, it won't sound right to others
(although the converse is not necessarily true)