The World’s Language
Practical High-Level English Expertise for Graduate Students, Researchers, Tech Geeks and Language Lovers from All Linguistic Backgrounds.
Richard Summerbell
All chapters can be downloaded as free pdf files from this website.
Chapter 4
Chapter 4: English presents a more difficult writing style when compared to languages my parents spoke at home, respectively
The topic of ‘style’ in English covers a lot of ground. It includes matters of word order that are critical to understanding, as well as matters of simple taste and habit. Some of the habits and tastes may change over time, but they may impress editors and readers as terribly important at a given moment in history. People may behave rather crazily about text style just as they do about any other kind of style – some become privately obsessive about traditional matters like comma placement, while others join trendy mobs and develop whole new branches of style like txt msg style, u know 😊
I didn’t find out there was such a thing as written English style until the twelfth year of my education. I’d taken English courses every year and obtained good marks in composition and grammar. I thought that my language life was well in order. Suddenly, in grade 12, I had a tall, conspicuously intellectual teacher with an English accent, and he filigreed in red ink around everything I wrote. Mr. Roberts. My natural wordiness on paper (I had little to say on the audio channel) was sliced and diced. Conciseness snuck in. My smoke-trails of near-logic were dispersed. I was forced to connect my thoughts in places where the reader could see the connections. I discovered I was capable of making classic errors that were truly confusing and awkward. It seemed that I was getting myself into verbal trouble every time I rolled my ballpoint across the paper. For yes, there were no computers in schools in those days; responsibility for logic lay entirely with the students and teachers. To my amazement, I learned some of it. Though I undoubtedly made a few grammatical errors, most of the mistakes I made could be classified as errors of style. Style is what turns barely correct writing into good writing.
I must clarify one matter here. There are two distinct topics that fall under the heading of style. One is formatting style, which covers items like whether English or American spellings are used, and whether a sentence that ends in quoted text has a quotation mark (”) at the very end, or a period. The other is writing style, relating to whether sentences are logical, clear, and reasonably free of factors likely to cause annoyance. This chapter is only about the latter topic, writing style.
Luckily, there is a ‘bible’ of English writing style, a suitably thin one. It has its critics, and no one needs to be its slave, but it covers many aspects of style well in a minimal number of pages. That’s William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, first published by Strunk in 1918 and revised periodically ever since. White, best known as the author of Charlotte’s Web, an always-popular children’s novel called about a farmyard friendship between a pig and a spider, added his silken touch to the book starting in 1959. I recommend ‘Strunk and White,’ as it’s popularly known, to everyone. I don’t intend to reproduce its material here.
Also, I shall avoid duplicating the focus of another masterwork of style, the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) guideline Grammar, Punctuation, and Capitalization. A Handbook for Technical Writers and Editors, by Mary K. McCaskill, 1990. I’m only familiar with it as a 106-page pdf file that roams nomadically on the internet, popping up at various links for short to moderate periods of time. I think anyone using a search engine to detect the title will able to snag a copy from somewhere – legally, as far as I can see.
My focus for a significant part of this chapter comes from having watched people who write scientific papers – many of them students – struggling with English. People who speak other languages as first languages are in a particularly difficult situation, but even native English speakers can find the writing of science daunting. You might be surprised to learn that it isn’t the technical material that presents the difficulty – the would-be writers often know that information very well. The difficult part is the writing of well constructed sentences in order to communicate that technical information. Many of the problems these science students experience are shared with English speakers who don’t work in science but who also need to write well. There are many of us who never had a life-changing English teacher, as I was lucky to have, and there are also not a few who preferred to ignore teachers at critical moments in their lives. Recovery from that sort of misadventure can be an interesting challenge for late bloomers – but it’s never too late to bloom.
There is plenty of material in this chapter that isn’t from science-and-tech, including material from sources as diverse as novels, sports commentaries and the nightly news. Since the next chapter, however, is going to be entirely dedicated to literature, this one is pitched more in the direction of science and technology.
Some of the puzzling problems faced by emerging writers today derive from a new kind of internationalization that is taking place in English, especially among scientific and technical writers. We are all exposed to this new, internationalized English, whether we know it or not.
Although most people who don’t work directly in science don’t realize it, the status of English worldwide has been strongly changed by a revolution in science in the 1980s. For decades, researchers had judged the quality of scientific work largely by whether or not the work appeared to make a reliable contribution to the field of study. Their assessment was objective, in that the work had to stand up to independent testing (where applicable) and to offer a stable step upward for future developments; but it was also subjective, in that it was based on opinion and was not measured. In the 1980s, however, there was a surge in popularity of quasi-economic techniques for measuring scientific ‘impact.’ A statistic called the ‘impact factor’ was calculated mainly by letting computers search through the reference or bibliography sections of most scientific journal papers, and count the number of times individual papers were cited as references by other scientists. People worldwide noticed very quickly that papers with high impact were almost universally published in English.
Scientific literature prior to the 1980s had been published in many languages, and papers in Russian, French, German, Spanish and Japanese were common. In writing up the Introduction and Discussion sections of my own Ph.D. thesis in 1985, I translated important bits and pieces of papers not just in these major languages, but also in Belarussian, Romanian, Catalan, Hungarian and Polish, among others. Almost all of this non-English publication, for primary research of any importance, fell away in the 1980s as scientists rushed to preserve their jobs and their funding by publishing in high-impact journals. The end of multilingual science arrived with crash heard around the world in 1989, when the prestigious journal of the Pasteur Institute, Annales de l’Institut Pasteur – proudly publishing in French since 1887 – announced that it would make English its primary language of publication and change its name to Research in Microbiology.
The abrupt rush of scientists from all over the world to publish in English has had effects on all of us. English is now entrenched as a critical part of the general youth education system in many parts of the world. As a 21-year-old student in 1977, I went backpacking around Europe with a friend and found myself in many areas where, as far as I could tell, no one spoke English. In most of Spain, parts of Germany, most of Northwestern Greece, much of France, and so on, English was only spoken by the person working at the tourist information booth in the centre of town, and, after the booth closed for the day, by no one. Nowadays, there are countries like Finland and the Netherlands where it is hard to find anyone who doesn’t speak reasonably fluent English, even among schoolchildren between 8 and 12 years old. More recent trips to Spain and Greece have found English speakers everywhere. Iran, when I travelled there in late 2001, turned out to be a hotbed of friendly people wishing to speak English with travellers. Whenever politics allows, Iran exports hundreds of graduate students to European and Indian universities, all of them speaking English well. You get the picture.
Anyone who speaks with these international speakers may find that their English is somewhat different from the English you’d typically hear in an English-speaking country. That’s also true in their written language. My impression is that most international learners have studied English grammar, at least to a moderate extent, but that few of them have been offered the chance to study English style. They are lost in the same writer’s limbo that native English speakers become trapped in if they have never studied style. (How can you tell if you’ve studied style or not? I think a good test is whether or not the word ‘parallelism’ is something you can easily define in relation to written text. If not, you’ll find out about this critical factor in written English as you read on.)
International speakers also tend to plug their own language’s grammar into English wherever they’re uncertain about what to do next. This leads to the development of regular trends. For example, almost all Dutch speakers of English might refer to an aunt on their mother’s side of the family by saying ‘she is the sister of my mother.’ This completely understandable and grammatically correct expression replaces ‘she is my mother’s sister,’ the usual native English description. That’s simply because the aunt, in Dutch, is normally defined as ‘de zuster van mijn moeder,’ ‘the sister of my mother.’ Only in the closely related Afrikaans language can you say ‘my moeder se suster,’ ‘my mother’s sister.’ Dutch English tends to follow Dutch patterns.
I think that technical English is currently experiencing pressure to become sub-creolized, just as English itself was in the transition to Early Modern English, based on fusion of overlapping dialects. The difference this time is that the ‘dialects’ involved are mostly versions of English influenced by the grammar of other languages. Writers and academics who grew up speaking non-English languages chuckle amongst themselves about their nations’ mutated versions of English. They jokingly coin terms like Dunglish (Dutch English) and Japanglish for dialects that began as characteristic patterns of student grammatical errors, but soon become reinforced as genuine regional patterns of English composition. I once spoke to an American graduate student, doing her Ph.D. in Stockholm, who loved everything about Sweden except that the Swedish university people would relentlessly correct her English into proper Svenglish. Unfortunately, many of the otherwise interesting regional dialects of Global English result in technical prose that is difficult to read and, sometimes, apparently illogical.
The clarity of the texts involved is not helped by the mixing of dialects. As a lover of grammars, I am fascinated to see the English errors typical of German writers mixing it up with the errors typical of Hispano-Portuguese writers, all of them all coming together in a paper authored by, for example, a Swedish laboratory’s Kurdish graduate student. My fascination, however, is mixed with a degree of alarm. I’ve met several young academics from India who had been taught to speak English from the time of their teething, and who sounded almost like university-educated Canadians when they spoke. When they sat down to write, however, they wrote the most leaden English technical prose imaginable, full of redundant, grammar-flouting bafflegab. They wrote that way, I found out, mostly because they thought such text was normal and expected in the academic world.
Eventually, I decided that the creolized stew of errors I was seeing deserved a name of its own. I dubbed it ‘International Scientific Creole,’ ISC for short. Over the course of my editorship, I collected many examples of this phenomenon, but most of them contained so much technical detail mixed in with their English errors that they were terrifying to look at. Also, authors who have written nasty English may well be sensitive about it for decades afterwards, and a journal editor should be careful not to embarrass his faithful writers by writing about their mistakes.
One day, I experienced a nudge of inspiration that asked me, ‘What would happen if people wrote ordinary, everyday text in ISC?’ This idea seemed so amusing and potentially helpful that I immediately sat down to write an example. I fine-tuned it over the next few months until it contained nearly all the important features of ISC. Here, then, is a paragraph not about science, but about a high-school girl who is good at sports. It is written first in what I call ‘florid ISC,’ and then translated below into my version of standard English.
My sister is taller compared to me. She presents, with a very large bones structure, making her indeed taller as compared to the average person. To this end, she is capable to give a better performance in arm-wrestling compared to both me and also our additional brother, respectively. She is a stronger person with abilities similar to an all-star wrestler, and this is proven already in a number of contests, arranged by the physical education department of the SVTG (n=15). She has won contests in Europe, North America, and outstandingly performed in the game of football. Furthermore, she has in the past years also presented a high performance in association with school work, and remained pleasant in personal characters being very kind to: family members, (boy-) friends, pet animals e.g. dogs, sports officials and teachers. In a survey of her 4 brothers and sisters, 4 (100%) were shown to agree with the possibility that she may potentially be a likely winner of an Olympics Games medal and/or a World Cup in the future. Thus, it is concluded that she has a very high ability associated to sports.
My sister is taller than I am. Indeed, she has a very large bone structure, making her taller than the average person. As a result, she is able to outperform both our brother and me in arm-wrestling. She is a particularly strong person with abilities similar to those of an all-star wrestler; this has already been demonstrated in fifteen different wrestling competitions organized by the physical education department of her school, the School for Very Tall Girls (SVTG). She has won such competitions in Europe and North America, and has also performed outstandingly in football matches. Apart from these accomplishments, she has done very well in her school work in recent years, and has remained a pleasant individual, noted for her kindness to family members, sports officials, teachers, friends including her boyfriend, and pet animals such as dogs. In a survey of her four brothers and sisters, all agreed that she might very well be a future winner of an Olympic Games medal or a World Cup. Overall, her talent for sports is outstanding.
The reaction from two international scientists I’ve shown this pair of paragraphs to has been to point at the first paragraph and say, “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly how we write!” The top paragraph is exaggerated, of course, but it contains elements of ISC that are familiar to everyone in science – especially editors.
In this chapter, then, I’ll go through the stylistic and grammatical problems found in the upper paragraph, and explain where they come from, why they need to be changed, and and how to change them.
This approach is not just intended to help technical writers. The problems I will be talking about affect everyone. They include some of the most common devices native English speakers use to shoot themselves in the foot while writing. You’ll see what I mean when I start quoting examples from the national television news program I watch most evenings.
My sister is taller compared to me.
I am going to start off by talking about what I think of as ‘the National Anthem of International Scientific Creole.’ That’s the expression ‘more compared to.’ In the ISC paragraph about the girl athlete, I’ve used ‘taller compared to.’ It’s one of the very large number of possible variations on the theme of ‘more compared to,’ including its logical flipside, ‘less compared to.’ (‘Taller’ could be rephrased as ‘more tall,’ so ‘taller compared to’ reduces to ‘more [tall] compared to.’) It may surprise some people to know that such expressions are not good English. Among the people who would be surprised are the scriptwriters who write my favourite nightly national television news broadcast, the Canadian CTV National News. They use ‘more compared to’ and expressions related to it frequently – but only when reporting science news. Apparently, they pick up the ISC from the reports they are reading.
Comparison words like ‘more’ are often shown in language texts as part of a series of levels of comparison. An example of such a series is ‘much, more, most,’ where ‘much’ is the basic descriptive word (in this case, a so-called ‘quantifier’), ‘more’ is its ‘comparative form’ and ‘most’ is its ‘superlative form.’ I have much cake, you have more than I have, and she has the most. The expressions related to ‘more compared to,’ such as ‘bigger compared to,’ ‘smaller compared to,’ ‘taller compared to,’ and so on, all fit the formula “(descriptive word in ‘comparative’ form) compared to.” The reason these expressions are not good English is that they are redundant, repeating the same comparison twice. Comparatives like ‘more’ and ‘bigger,’ by nature, already have the concept ‘compared to’ built into them. Therefore, to say ‘bigger compared to’ is to say ‘big compared to compared to.’ To say ‘more compared to’ is to say ‘much (or many) compared to compared to.’
As I said earlier, Middle English was sometimes tolerant of redundant repetition, especially in its negative words. Both its ancestors, Old English and French, had regularly used double-negatives. Sometimes multiple negatives could be seen in a row, such as in this string of three in Chaucer’s sentence, ‘And therfore he … nolde nevere write in none of his sermons of swiche unkynde abhomynacions’ (‘And therefore he would not [nolde = ne wolde = would not] never [not ever] write in none [no one] of his sermons about such unkind abominations,’ or, converting the negatives to modern form, ‘And therefore he would never write in any of his sermons about such unkind abominations.’). Similarly, as late as Shakespeare’s time – as Henry Alexander points out in his history of English, The Story of Our Language – a doubling-up of comparatives was acceptable, at least in cases of high drama. Here’s Marcus Antonius speaking in the play Julius Caesar:
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel.
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar lov'd him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all;
for when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms,
quite vanquish'd him: then burst his mighty
heart…
(Marcus Junius Brutus, once an enemy of Julius Caesar, was forgiven and became a trusted ally. Later, he joined in with a group that stabbed Caesar and killed him. Marcus Antonius suggests here that it was Brutus’s lack of gratitude that made Caesar give up his grip on life, not the force of the traitors’ ‘arms,’ that is, their weapons.)
In modern English, we have zero tolerance for the kind of logical redundancy seen in the colourful ‘most unkindest.’ We can live with repeated words when each word has its own separate logical meaning, as in ‘I know that that person wasn’t the one who hit me’ (The first ‘that’ is a ‘subordinating conjunction’ and the second is a ‘determiner,’ pointing at the person who is being singled out.) One may regularly see sentences like ‘I had had to take the dog out, so I wasn’t home when the bat flew in the upstairs window.’ Also, much fun can be had with playful forms like, ‘Oh mom, I’m not not going to school; I’m just trying to finish my game.’ True logical redundancy, however is almost completely banned. In the last chapter, I mentioned one of the rare exceptions, ‘didn’t used to.’
Nowadays, ISC users are trying very hard, even though they don’t know it, to get ‘more compared to’ expressions included in the very short list of accepted logical redundancies in English. If my Canadian national news is any indication, they may be succeeding. The problem is that there’s no good reason for them to succeed. Anything that can be stated with ‘more compared to’ can be stated with the normal English ‘more than.’ ‘More than’ is a completely logical expression that breaks down as ‘relatively much, compared to the amount possessed by our comparison object.’ Even though ‘than’ is a logical conjunction, however, expressions based on ‘more than’ can present difficulties at times. The question is, are some of these difficulties driving international English speakers towards creole? Or is the creolization of ‘more than’ completely unnecessary?
Let’s pluck a random piece of creole from the internet and check it out to see what happens when it’s translated into regular English. “Although both drugs are prone to abuse, hydrocodone is abused more compared to oxycodone.” The least interventionist English translation of this is ‘Although both drugs are prone to being abused, hydrocortisone is abused more than oxycodone.’
(As an aside, I’ll explain that the original phrasing ‘both drugs are prone to abuse’ couldn’t be retained because it showed unacceptable style – in this case, defective logic. ‘Prone to’ means ‘given to’ or ‘inclined to,’ and drugs can’t have habits or personal preferences. Also, ‘abuse’ [as a noun rhyming with ‘noose’] is ‘wrong use,’ an active process that can’t logically be carried out by a drug. Drugs can only ‘be abused’ passively by an active abuser, a person. The writer meant to say ‘both drugs are likely to be abused,’ not ‘both drugs are inclined towards wrong usage,’ which is what the sentence literally said. Even my first rewrite, ‘both drugs are prone to being abused,’ is on shaky ground as technical writing, since it carries over the original sentence’s unintentional use of ‘personification:’ it attributes, to non-living materials, tendencies that are only truly found in conscious beings. At least, though, it doesn’t show the drugs as being the abusers.
Now, perhaps you worry that I’m ‘splitting hairs’ and being too tough on this writer. I’m well aware that by exerting what one could call a ‘leap of mental laziness,’ one could kinda-sorta turn ‘both drugs are prone to abuse’ into an understandable substitute for ‘both drugs are likely to be abused,’ or ‘both drugs tend to hook people into abusing them.’ The intentions behind the original error are clear. The whole purpose of learning about style, however, is to become confident that no one needs to write awkward ‘you-know-what-I-mean English’ when pure, clear phrasing is superior. Moreover, in many cases of sloppy writing, the writer’s intended meaning is not clear at all. There is much usefulness in learning how to write well.)
Prettying the sentence up, then, you could say ‘Although both drugs are frequently abused, hydrocortisone is abused more often than oxycodone.’ Then we come back to a problem we ran into in the previous chapter when we talked about the Comparison Rotator. Wouldn’t it be better to say, ‘Although both drugs are frequently abused, hydrocortisone is abused more often than oxycodone is’? Or should we use the Rotator and say, ‘Although both drugs are frequently abused, hydrocortisone is abused more often than is oxycodone’? The answer is, in this case, that all three are acceptable. The Rotator seems stuffy and formal when it only rotates a single word like ‘oxycodone,’ so most people wouldn’t use it in this situation. With regard to whether or not the second, parallel ‘is’ should be tacked on the end, that is the author’s free choice.
Perhaps that’s the scary thing about ‘more than’ sentences. They often offer a choice about how much parallel ending material to include. In formal grammatical logic, as applied to our sample sentence, we are really working with a sentence that reads ‘Although both drugs are frequently abused, hydrocortisone is abused more often than oxycodone is abused.’ Good English style, however, urges us to shorten out some of the unnecessarily repeated words as long as the basic parallel between ‘hydrocortisone is abused’ and ‘oxycodone is abused’ remains clear to the reader. This green light for shortening out unnecessary parallel bits is called ‘ellipsis.’ Grammar texts may include complex charts showing which pieces of English sentences can be removed as part of recommended ellipsis. Comparative sentences using ‘than’ are generally included in these charts. If you are working with a sentence like ‘She is more advanced in carpentry skills than I am,’ you must face the stress of deciding whether or not to include the ‘am’ at the end. ‘She is more advanced in carpentry skills than I’ sounds oddly incomplete, whereas ‘She is more advanced in carpentry skills than I am’ sounds slightly redundant. In this case, the second version is preferred, since it makes the parallel between ‘she is advanced in carpentry skills’ and ‘I am [advanced in carpentry skills]’ perfectly clear. Nonetheless, in many parts of the English-speaking world, there would be a strong temptation, especially in speech, to resort to schoolyard bad grammar and say ‘She is more advanced in carpentry skills than me.’ Even I, as a flexible communicator, might say that to certain groups of people, despite my knowledge that, in correct English parallel structure, that wording should mean the absurdity ‘[She is more advanced in] carpentry skills than [she is advanced in] me.’
One thing you can say about the creole alternative, ‘She is more advanced in carpentry skills compared to me,’ is that it offers no choices at all. That may feel comforting to some people. Myself, I appreciate the chance to cast my free, democratic vote for one form of ellipsis or another. At the same time, I admit that dealing with English ellipsis can be stressful. Consider what happens when you try to deal with a theoretical sentence like ‘I walk faster than Amir walks.’ ‘Walk’ and ‘walks’ are nearly redundant (differing only in being first-person singular and third-person singular), and one of them can clearly be reduced out. Can you, then, simply say ‘I walk faster than Amir’? In schoolyard English, this would be normal, but formally, the ‘walk’ in ‘I walk’ is not completely identical to the ‘walks’ in ‘Amir walks.’ Therefore, the latter can’t be removed by ellipsis. Also, if you are very linguistically sensitive, you may find that ‘I walk faster than Amir,’ in written text where there are no clues from a speaker’s vocal stress, seems to leave the logic of the sentence hanging slightly, unfulfilled, as if you were reading a sentence-fragment rather than a full sentence. Even though we intended to say ‘I walk faster than Amir walks,’ someone might think that we had interrupted ourselves part-way through saying ‘I walk faster than Amir runs,’ for example. But if we need to clarify what Amir is doing, as we do in formally written text, then we are back to the problem of needing to use the nearly redundant ‘I walk faster than Amir walks.’ What’s the solution? I think you know perfectly well that this is where do-support comes in for near-redundant verbs in situations of ellipsis: we have to say ‘I walk faster than Amir does.’ This is not at all difficult for people who are familiar with the tricks and dodges of English, but you can see why the newcomer might wince in headache pain and write ‘I walk faster [um, what to do now, so many possibilities, well, it’s a comparison, so] compared to Amir. [Whew!]’
Here’s another creole example from the web: “iPad owners download apps five times more compared to Android tablet owners.” Translating this phrase into English isn’t hard: ‘iPad owners download apps five times more frequently than Android tablet owners do.’ You can see, however, that if the creole-user were to consider writing a sentence based on ‘than’ rather than ‘compared to,’ he or she might come up with ‘iPad owners download apps five times more frequently than Android tablet owners.’ That version has the serious fault that it doesn’t clarify that the Android tablet owners are doing something. In English parallel structure, using the ellipsis technique to remove identical, unnecessarily repeated elements, the sentence could easily be read as ‘iPad owners download apps five times more frequently than [iPad owners download] Android tablet owners,’ rather than as ‘iPad owners download apps five times more frequently than Android tablet owners [download apps].’ The first version is absurd, but that isn’t a strong argument against it. In fact, since it has just one grammatical subject (iPad owners) performing all the actions in the sentence, it is simpler than the second version and therefore comes out on top in the contest to be the formally preferred interpretation of the sentence.
English, as I explained far back in Chapter One, became rigid about word order once it lost its Latin-like inflections. Even though the sentence showing iPad owners downloading Android owners onto their iPads is silly, the word order unavoidably supports that silly meaning. The ‘do’ at the end of my official translation is necessary to establish the Android owners as a parallel group of active subjects – independent ‘do’-ers of the sentence’s action component, downloading.
With that being accepted, we can take a look to see if the Comparison Rotator would improve the sentence. ‘iPad owners download apps five times more frequently than do Android tablet owners.’ In most technical writing, that would work well. The original writer, however, intended the sentence “iPad owners download apps five times more compared to Android tablet owners” as an article title, and there, you’d have a problem with a Rotator. The verbal turnaround involved significantly slows down the pace, and that’s unsuitable for a title. The author may need to settle for ‘iPad owners download five times as many apps as Android tablet owners do.’ Alternatively, he or she can do what all authors need to do annoyingly frequently – rewrite the material completely. My suggested complete rewrite of the title is this: (title) ‘App-happy Apple.’ (subtitle) ‘iPad owners download 5 apps for every one downloaded by an Android owner.’
The basic creole structure seen in ‘more compared to’ can be transplanted to other, related expressions of comparison, as seen in ‘I have more doughnuts in comparison to you,’ and ‘When compared to you, I have more doughnuts.’ These variant ‘comparative compared-to’ expressions remain creole. The first is really ‘I have more doughnuts than you (do/have)’ in creole translation, and the second is, ‘In comparison with you, I have many doughnuts.’ In the schoolyard, that would be ‘Compared to you, I have a lot of doughnuts.’
As the last example shows, sometimes the creolization problem can be solved just by removing the redundant comparison implied by the suffix ‘–er.’ A favourite example I’ve saved to illustrate this point is the smoothly, subtly creolized sentence ‘As compared to mice in treatment A, mice in treatment B were higher in immunoglobulin levels.’ The obvious fix for this one is simply to change it to ‘As compared to mice in treatment A, mice in treatment B were high in immunoglobulin levels.’ Anyone nervous about this could add in a small amount of repetition to reinforce the point: ‘Compared to mice in treatment A, mice in treatment B showed relatively high immunoglobulin levels.’
Creole sentences can become very complicated, and ‘more compared to’ motifs can appear mixed around among many other errors and awkward expressions. Sometimes, the mind truly boggles. In my sample paragraph about the girl athlete, I’ve included a sentence representing the complex uses of ‘more compared to:’ “To this end, she is capable to give a better performance in arm-wrestling compared to both me and also our additional brother, respectively.” As you can see, I’ve dodged some of the complexities of this sentence in my rewrite: “As a result, she is able to outperform both our brother and me in arm-wrestling.” I believe my evasive approach there is legitimate. It would be very challenging to write a phrase-for-phrase, highly parallel correction for that sentence.
I once posted on an online English forum about a particularly spectacular piece of creole I’d found in a widely read scientific bulletin.
Today I saw the "more compared to" sentence that really took the cake, and I'll give it to you in its full glory: "Further, Carey's group found that hibernating squirrels, when compared to rats, have the well-characterized chaperone protein, HSP70, at levels five to ten times higher in a variety of organs."
(The so-called chaperone protein protects the squirrels' internal organs from damage when the animals are resuscitating out of hibernation. ‘HSP70’ is an acronym for ‘heat-shock protein of 70 kilodaltons in weight [see the end of Chapter 1].’ Cells turn on the production of this protein when they are stressed in various ways. A flash of high heat, producing ‘heat shock,’ is just one of the stress conditions that can stimulate its production.)
The writer, according to her byline, is a professional freelance writer from California. The forum is a widely distributed, US-based science newsmagazine called The Scientist. The best faithful rewrite I can do of the sentence while still keeping the squirrels in the limelight (as the first noun in the subordinate clause) is "Further, Carey’s group found that when hibernating squirrels were examined for levels of the well-characterized chaperone protein, HSP70, in their internal organs, several of the organs had this protein at levels five to 10 times as high as those detected in the organs of normal rats." Or, maximally condensed, "Further, Carey’s group found that in hibernating squirrels, a variety of internal organs contained the well-characterized chaperone protein, HSP70, at levels five to 10 times those seen in rat organs." The original writer's sentence sounds distinctly snappier than either of mine, or should I say, distinctly ‘snappier when compared to’ either of mine.
None of the commenters on this post came up with a better solution. One, usernamed ‘Nestor,’said about the original squirrel sentence, “Seriously, I do freelance writing, and I would never use such a construction.” Another, ‘Anonymous,’ commented, eight years later (in 2012), “Eight years on, ‘more, higher, faster,’ etc., 'compared to' seems to have become the standard construction, if radio news broadcasts are anything to go by. I abhor it!”
‘Nestor,’ suggested that “The writer could have perfected the squirrel sentence by putting it in the passive voice.” He then joked, “The sentence would then have been more perfected when compared to sentences in which writers had been advised to avoid redundancies and the passive voice.”
‘The passive voice,’ for anyone not familiar with this term, is the linguistic form in which, for example, one says ‘he was hit by the baseball’ instead of ‘the baseball hit him.’ It features the use of the helper auxiliary ‘to be’ in all tenses, combined with the past participle of the operative verb. The preposition ‘by’ is used to indicate the party carrying out the action that affects the passively experiencing subject. ‘He is being brought in by the police’ is passive for ‘the police are bringing him in.’ ‘He is thoroughly hated by my father’ replaces ‘My father hates him thoroughly.’
Nestor didn’t elaborate on what the perfected squirrel sentence written in the passive voice would look like. Perhaps, though, his response shows the best approach to take to these creole sentences: treat them as English language puzzles that can be solved for fun. His statement about the passive voice was like a clue in one of those solve-it-as-you-read murder mysteries. Do we have what it takes to bring this creole sentence to justice?
Ten years on, I’ve done some more puzzling on the ‘squirrel sentence game’ and have come up with a couple of solutions I like better than my original suggestions.
Also, Carey’s group found that several of the internal organs of hibernating squirrels, when examined for the well-characterized chaperone protein, HSP70, showed the presence of this protein at levels five to 10 times higher than those detected in the organs of normal rats."
Still seems long-winded. Let’s try again.
Also, Carey’s group found that in hibernating squirrels, when internal organs were examined for the well-characterized chaperone protein, HSP70, several contained this protein at levels five to 10 times higher than those detected in the organs of normal rats."
The conventional, repetition-eliminating ellipsis that cuts ‘organs’ out of ‘several [organs] contained this protein’ is somewhat difficult to deal with, I think. Let’s try again, going back to the original sentence for its relatively dramatic structure.
Also, Carey’s group found that hibernating squirrels, when compared to rats, had internal organs that contained five to ten times more HSP70, the well-characterized chaperone protein, than was found in the rat organs.
I like that one. It escapes from creole by matching organs against organs in the ‘than’ comparison, while kicking the charismatic comparison of cute li’l squirrels to rats into the early part of the sentence. Maybe we’ll make that the official solution, unless you can come up with something better.
Meanwhile, having been challenged by Nestor to come up with a ‘perfected’ sentence in the passive voice, I gave that idea a go:
Also, the well-characterized chaperone protein, HSP70, was found by Carey’s group in the internal organs of hibernating squirrels at levels five to 10 times higher than those detected in rat organs studied for comparison.
He’s right; it’s a very efficient solution, low on wordiness and mostly made up of two uninterrupted clauses. It’s also dull, dull, dull, as sentences in the passive voice so often are. Whoever advised Nestor to avoid redundancies and the passive voice gave him excellent advice.
The best advice I can give you, though, is that when you’re having difficulty with a relatively long English sentence, you can improve everything by splitting the sentence up. Let’s try that.
Also, Carey’s group found that the internal organs of hibernating squirrels held an important cell-protecting substance at levels five to ten times higher than those seen in rat controls. This substance was HSP70, a well-characterized chaperone protein.
Works for me.
The English language loves short sentences. If you’re a second-language speaker and are planning to write a sentence longer than 20 words, prepare to make errors that you cannot control. That’s unless you are a literary genius like novelist Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Berdyczów, Poland, currently Berdychiv, Ukraine. He learned English as his third language when he was in his twenties. If you can write like Józef – “The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds … The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver—over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a somber gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur” – then go ahead and write long English sentences.
She presents, with a very large bones structure, making her indeed taller as compared to the average person.
This sentence continues the theme of variations on ‘more compared to,’ but we’re done with that topic. Otherwise, it’s a delightful mix of Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and German sentence structure transposed into English. The mutations of English shown here are not just of interest to scientific editors. Some of the unconventional items, like ‘more compared to,’ are rapidly working their way into first-language English. The usage of ‘presents,’ as seen in ‘she presents with,’ is one of the creole weeds that appear likely to become established in the English garden.
When it appears as I’ve shown it here, ‘presents’ is the hallmark of technical English written by someone whose first language comes from the Iberian Peninsula. It is, of course, a direct translation. You can see examples of the original non-English word in the main article on bacteria in Portuguese wikipedia. This article contains eight instances of bacteria being stated to ‘present’ things. The operative verb is ‘apresentar.’ Here are a couple of selections:
A maioria das bactérias não apresenta reprodução sexuada –
(‘The majority of bacteria don’t reproduce sexually.’ Word-for-word, the sentence says, ‘the majority of the bacteria no present reproduction sexualized’ – note the extra ‘the’ in front of ‘bacteria.’)
...De uma forma geral, os bacilos gram negativos apresentam colônias brilhantes, úmidas ou cremosas; os estafilococos apresentam colônias médias opacas e os estreptococos colônias pequenas e opacas…
(‘In general, the gram-negative bacilli [rod-shaped bacteria not staining purple in the ‘Gram stain’ laboratory test] present shiny, watery or creamy colonies; the Staphylococci present medium-opaque colonies and the Streptococci small and opaque colonies.)
The equivalent Spanish article on bacteria uses the verb ‘presentar’ 29 times with the same meaning.
In general, in English, there are surprisingly few direct ways to say that an organism (or a chemical reaction, or a physical process, or anything else that isn’t a human) has an interesting characteristic that you can see. If I’m looking at a ring-billed gull, the enthusiastic garbage-loving lakeshore bird of southern Ontario, I can say that it ‘has’ a black ring around its bill. I can get fancier and say that it ‘possesses’ the black ring; or I can get very literary and say that it ‘evinces’ the ring. If I want to be dramatic, I can say that it ‘features’ the ring. Most biologists soon become bored with this limited range of options, especially since ‘evinces’ and ‘features’ may strike them as too literary to use. They therefore begin to subtly personify the bird’s appearance, implying that the bird, in an abstracted way, is actively showing off the visible feature. They say that the species ‘shows’ or ‘exhibits’ or ‘displays’ the black ring. The Portuguese verb ‘apresentar’ and its Spanish equivalent ‘presentar’ have the same aim. In English, we use the verb ‘to present’ in a similar fashion, but the only time we use it commonly is to say that someone is presenting a lecture or a seminar. We don’t see the black ring on the bird’s bill as giving us a seminar. With words like ‘exhibit,’ we may depict the black, white and yellow bill as giving us a kind of art show or museum display – but we don’t hear a seminar, so the bill doesn’t ‘present’ itself, as far as we are concerned.
That may be our opinion, but the scientific communities of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America are huge and very good at what they do. They publish many papers, and in them, the ISC usage of ‘to present’ is being introduced with great force as an equivalent to our own ‘to exhibit.’ Second-language English speakers who grew up in other nations – a group that makes up a high proportion of the science and technology graduate students in our own universities – are taking up the same usage. There’s no particular reason for us to resist this trend, but at the moment, from the editor’s perspective, the use of ‘presents’ does tend to be found along with other pieces of creole that are incompatible with English. The sentence I gave above listing bacterial colony types has a minor but troubling structural problem if it’s directly translated into English. Have a look at it, uncluttered, and see if you can see the problem. I’ve seen many such sentences in English-language scientific manuscripts.
In general, the gram-negative bacilli present shiny, watery or creamy colonies; the Staphylococci present medium-opaque colonies and the Streptococci small and opaque colonies.
I’ll come back to that sentence later. In the meantime, let’s return to our sample sentence about the tall girl.
Immediately after the word ‘presents,’ our sentence features (or should I say ‘presents’?) a piece of Russian grammar that is constantly seen in international English. That’s a comma that separates the main subject and verb from the rest of the sentence: “She presents, with …” This ‘Russian comma,’ as I call it, derives in part from a Russian rule that a comma has to be placed to mark off the beginning of a subordinate clause. I learned about that rule, and about this type of comma in general, in an interesting way.
During the time I was writing the introduction for my Ph.D. thesis, I looked through a whole collection of Russian soil microbiology papers from the grim years between 1948 and around 1953. At that time, the politically motivated pseudo-scientist Trofim Dyenyisovyich Lysenko, a favourite of the mass-murdering dictator Joseph Stalin, had to be flattered in the opening paragraphs of most published research papers. The papers each contained an early paragraph stating “Товарищ Лысенко учит, что…” (pronounced: Tovarishch Lysenko ucheet, shto…), ‘Comrade Lysenko teaches, that…,” followed by some opinion of Lysenko’s. Lysenko had the view that genes, as conceived by biologists, were mythical. He stated that plants, like proper socialists, would derive their useful qualities from good influences in the surrounding environment, without having any stubborn internal principles driving them to do things consistent with their individual natures.
You can see the tone of Lysenko’s opinions in a satire I encountered in a Russian website. The authorship is not clear. I’ll print the authentic Russian version first just in case you speak the language, but otherwise, I’ll concentrate on the English version. I’ll retain the Russian punctuation in the English.
Спросила мнения мужа. Он сперва отмахивался и хихикал, что товарищ Лысенко учит, нет никаких генов, все это менделисты-вейсманисты-морганисты продажные выдумали. Когда надоело потешаться, сказал, что гены - это сосуд, а что в него налито - это воспитание. И пошел чай пить...;)
She asked her husband’s opinion. He first waved and giggled, that Comrade Lysenko teaches, that there are no genes, all this was invented by the Mendelist-Weismannist-Morganists to publicize their theories. When he tired of amusing himself, he said, Genes – that’s a vessel, and that which is poured in – that is education. And then he went to tea ...)
Gregor Mendel, a 19th century Silesian-Austrian monk who cross-bred peas, is the most famous pioneering geneticist; Thomas Hunt Morgan was the early 20th century American who established the mighty field of fruit-fly genetics and discovered the internal gene shuffling called crossing-over; and August Weismann was a 19th century German biologist credited with being the first to recognize that inheritance in sexual species lay in the ‘germ line,’ the cells producing eggs and sperm. Only Lysenko could make such scientists sound like an international conspiracy of capitalist propagandists.
His eventual denunciation by botanists was a major early victory in the de-Stalinization of Russia. The end of the messages saying “Товарищ Лысенко учит, что…” was a refreshing sign that, towards the mid-1950s, Russian biologists were becoming free to make genuine scientific interpretations again.
The comma that was placed between ‘teaches’ and ‘that’ in the Lysenko flatteries was very different from anything seen in English. In the ‘Russian course for scientists’ I took in my second year of university, we hadn’t studied comma placement, and I became intrigued by this non-English usage. I’m glad I learned to recognize it. Nowadays, I see it in English more and more often. That’s partly, I think, because the German language also features a comma marking the beginning of a subordinate clause. Yes, these commas are coming at us from all over. “Diesem Bakterium fehlen wesentliche Gene, die eine Bakterie zum selbständigen Leben benötigt,” you may read, meaning, “This bacterium lacks essential genes required for a bacterium to live independently.” The literal translation is, “This bacterium lacks essential genes, that a bacterium in self-supporting life needs.” You can see where the non-English comma fits into the logic of the sentence.
In my ‘tall girl’ example, however, the comma in ‘she presents, with’ doesn’t indicate the start of a subordinate clause. The clause that follows “she presents” is a prepositional clause, starting with the preposition ‘with.’ No matter. There are several places where the ‘Russian comma’ now appears in English, and not all of them directly imitate Russian. They simply indicate an international author’s feeling that a separate clause should be set off by a comma.
A completely different but major Russian source of such commas is the use of a comma as a replacement for ‘is’ and other forms of the copula (see chapter 3 for an introduction to the copula). I’ll show a nice example I found online. The punctuation shown here in both languages is exactly as it appeared on the Wikiquotes website:
Образование — не приготовление к жизни; образование — сама жизнь. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself. John Dewey (Джон Дьюи), 1952
(Pronunciation: Obrazovaniyeh — nye preegotovlyeniyeh keh zheeznee; obrazovaniyeh — sama zheeznih)
This quotation from 20th century American philosopher John Dewey has acquired a ‘Russian comma’ between ‘is’ and ‘not’ in its English back-translation from Russian. The original Russian version of the quote has a long dash where most Indo-European languages would place a form of the verb ‘to be.’ This is conventional in Russian punctuation. You can easily imagine that the Russian person who translated the quotation back into English had a strong feeling that some kind of punctuation should go where the long dash was found in the Russian text. The comma was inserted where the long dash clearly could not go, since English doesn’t allow any remotely similar use of long dashes.
‘Education — not preparation for life; education — itself life’ is what the Russian literally says. You may remember my saying in Chapter 3 that Russian has a ‘zero copula’ – the present tense forms of ‘to be’ are not generally used. The long dash is like a linking joint between two pieces of text that, in English, would be linked by ‘is.’ With no comma present.
Russians at least have a good excuse for using the Russian comma. These days, such commas may be introduced into English text by speakers of any language, including first-language English speakers.
Oh, well. Perhaps the English teachers of these English speakers can console themselves with the thought, “На одного человека, желающего учить, приходится около тридцати, не желающих думать.” Na odnovo chyelovyeka, zhyelayushchyevo oocheet, preekhodeetsya okolo treedtsati, nye zhyelayushcheekh doomat.” Literally, that’s ‘For every person, wishing to teach, there arrive about thirty, not wishing to think.’ Or as the original quotation from British humourists Walter Sellar and Robert Yeatman stated, with no commas, “For every person who wants to teach there are approximately thirty who don't want to learn – much.” The Russian version is pithier and more successful than the English.
The tall-girl sample sentence goes on, after its Russian comma, to make another common mistake. It describes the girl as having a ‘very large bones structure.’ This type of error is most often made by people raised speaking Spanish, Portuguese, French and related Romance languages. They probably know from their English classes that English adjectives (these are words describing nouns; words describing verbs are ‘adverbs’) never change their form, no matter what they describe. ‘Black,’ describing ‘a black goose,’ singular, is the same as ‘black’ describing ‘black geese,’ plural. In French, by contrast, plural black geese are ‘des oies noires’ (literally, ‘some geese blacks,’approximately pronounced ‘days wah nwahr’), while a singular black goose is ‘une oie noire’ (‘a goose black,’ ‘oon wah nwahr’).
Even though the English way of handling adjectives differs from the Romance way, Romance language speakers rarely make the mistake of pluralizing an adjective in English. The item that confuses them is when a noun is being used adjectivally as a ‘noun-adjunct’ to describe another noun. They can see that the first noun is not an adjective, and they are naturally tempted to treat it normally as a noun. That’s what you see in ‘bones structure.’ This expression, however, can only be corrected to ‘bone structure.’ Yes, the tall girl’s skeleton is composed of many individual bones, not just of the mass substance called ‘bone.’ Nonetheless, anything used adjectivally must be in the singular form, and so all those bones become part of a ‘bone structure.’
OK, I admit that, as always in English, there are a few odd exceptions to the general rule that all adjectival elements are singular. In the singularizing of nouns used as adjectives, there is an exception for nouns that are already more-or-less permanently frozen into plural form, as seen with ‘gymnastics scorecard,’ ‘physics journal,’ ‘clothes hamper,’ ‘pants press’ and ‘cattle transport.’ However, any semi-frozen plural nouns that can be converted into adjectival form in some situations are duly converted, so that we get ‘political parties’ and an ‘aeronautical engineer’ rather than ‘politics parties’ and an ‘aeronautics engineer.’ That’s even though people will go to ‘politics class’ and get an ‘aeronautics diploma.’
People who are new to English may legitimately be unprepared for our noun-adjunct system, with its ruthless singularizing of nearly every noun used as an adjective. In parallel situations, Romance languages tend to convert all possible nouns into adjectival form, so that ‘bone structure’ in French is typically ‘structure osseuse,’ literally ‘osseous structure.’ In English, the word ‘osseous’ is legitimate, but would only be used in academic circles in medicine, archaeology, and other disciplines where some people specialize in bones. The French speaker, then, has to learn a whole new system for handling such moments in English, and it’s a system that is by no means the most prominent topic in the English textbook. English speakers can also get away with two-noun expressions like ‘August weather’ that, in French, must be possessive phrases: in this case, ‘la météo d’août,’ ‘the weather of August.’ ‘Vegetable soup,’ an English staple, becomes ‘soupe aux légumes,’ ‘soup with the vegetables,’ or ‘soupe de légumes,’ ‘soup of vegetables.’ Such phrases based on prepositions like ‘of’ and ‘with’ can be challenging to integrate into complex English sentence structures. I found that a significant chunk of my work as an editor of international English was converting long-winded expressions based on prepositional phrases and overly rarefied adjectives (like ‘osseous’) into crisp noun-adjunct phrases.
Anyone who is new to writing English will, I’m sure, find it a liberating moment when they learn how to use our system for adjectival nouns. ‘Party time!’ they may well say, using their newly discovered grammatical form to excellent effect.
Just don’t say ‘party’s time!’ or ‘time of parties!’
To this end, she is capable to give a better performance in arm-wrestling compared to both me and also our additional brother, respectively.
This sentence, apart from containing one more example of ‘more compared to,’ contains two of the most frequently abused expressions in international English, ‘to this end’ and ‘respectively.’ The second one is so badly abused and misunderstood that I generally advised my international authors to try never to use it. I’ll return to these two expressions below.
The sentence also contains an exaggerated version of a problem I noticed repeatedly in international English, the tendency to repeat the same piece of logic several times. In this sentence, the repeated logic is ‘also my brother (could be defeated in arm-wrestling by our sister).’ This is expressed the first time with ‘both’ (my brother and me), the second time with ‘also,’ and the third time with ‘additional.’ I’ve just said here that this triple repeat of the ‘also’ concept is exaggerated, but in fact, when people write complex scientific sentences containing lists or multiple clauses, they may well repeat their logic three or more times. I think the root of the problem lies in their not being sure that the words they used the first time fully conveyed their intended meaning. They add the same thought in different wording in order to be certain. In a complex sentence, the idea may be stated additional times just to be certain that it’s seen to apply to all the parts of the sentence that it’s intended to apply to.
All that the authors who do this really need to know is that English is completely opposed to redundancy. Anyone who’s worried that his or her logic in a given sentence may not be understood needs to work on expressing it well – once.
One piece of logic that is especially likely to be expressed redundantly is the idea that ‘this is possible.’ Another sentence in the ‘tall girl’ paragraph illustrates this. “In a survey of her 4 brothers and sisters, 4 (100%) were shown to agree with the possibility that she may potentially be a likely winner of an Olympics Games medal and/or a World Cup in the future.” In this case, the same logic is repeated four times: ‘the possibility,’ ‘may be,’ ‘potentially’ and ‘likely.’ It’s just amazing how often phrases like this are seen in science and technology. The ever-so-cautious repetition must impress writers as showing the right attitude of modesty about scientific predictions. Such trembling and quivering about predicted outcomes shows us, I suppose, that the writer is not being unscientifically arrogant, and is not telling us what will happen, as if he or she can see the future. That’s an understandable attitude, really, but there’s no need to be redundant about it.
(As one could say in ISC, not in English:) I suggest that there is a possibility that you may look prospectively silly in the case that you will produce such sentences.
The verbal multiplication of a single possibility is one of the most common style errors of native English speakers. Sometimes it may be legitimate. There’s a difference between saying ‘I suspect he may possibly be a thief,’ which is the threefold redundant version of ‘I suspect he’s a thief,’ and saying, ‘I think I just might, just might, maaaaaybe have a new boyfriend.’ The latter sentence is playful, but more importantly, it also mystically shows submission to the angry gods of jinx, just as the subjunctive mood does. To say openly, ‘I think I have a new boyfriend,’ with no extra hedging, would quite possibly cause the universe to take revenge. Or at least, that’s how our minds work.
Whether we’re right or wrong in our viewpoints on reality, our language needs to be able to express our concepts about our situations. If your heart feels that making a squid ink cloud of redundancy about future predictions can confuse the jinx demons, then by all means surround your maybes with possibles and mights. Just don’t do it in a scientific paper.
In between writing the two paragraphs above, I watched the CTV National News for Oct. 18, 2014, and, in passing, captured the sentence “A team of Ontario researchers is developing what may be a potential vaccine for Ebola.”
Now, we know that any material that is being tested for possible good effect as a vaccine is, without any further confirmation needed, already a ‘potential vaccine.’ To call it a ‘potential vaccine’ only says that there are reasonable hopes that the substance will function as a vaccine, not that it has been demonstrated to work. So how is it logical to say that it ‘may’ be a potential vaccine when it clearly already is a potential vaccine? The phrasing can only literally be accurate if the reporter is unsure whether or not any potential vaccine candidate exists. That’s clearly not the case in this story – the potential vaccine is already being shipped out for testing. The sentence, therefore, is creole, or style error. Take your pick.
I would guess that by now you potentially may possibly be able to see my point, or at least sense my blur.
‘To this end’ is phrase with a track record going right back to English religious free-thinker John Wycliffe in the 1380s. The 1913 Oxford English Dictionary records him as saying, in an essay,
Here Cristene men bileven þat Petre and Poul and oþir apostlis token power of Crist, but not but for to edifie þe Chirche. And þus alle prestis þat ben Cristis knyȝtis han power of him to þise ende.
(Here Christian men believe that [early Christian saints] Peter and Paul and other apostles obtained power from Christ, but not but for to edify the church [meaning, of course, ‘but only in order to build up the church’]. And thus all priests that are Christ’s knights [servants] have power from him to this end.)
Interestingly, the 1913 dictionary comments “Now somewhat archaic or rhetorical; the ordinary phrase is ‘in order (that or to).’”
This phrase is archaic no longer. It has made a major comeback in science and tech writing as one of numerous ways to vaguely wave a hand at unresolved connections between pieces of logic. Its real meaning is ‘toward the accomplishment of this goal,’ but as the sample sentence shows, it is often used otherwise. In the sample sentence, it is being used to say something that might be more correctly expressed, in the driest possible technical prose, as ‘As a consequence…’ or ‘In keeping with this….’ In livelier writing, still with the same sentence, one could say, ‘Predictably, then, …’ or ‘Not surprisingly…’ or ‘This powerful build allows her …’ Clearly, though, ‘to this end’ doesn’t apply, since the tall girl’s physical capabilities don’t derive from planning or the setting of goals.
You’ll notice that in the alternative phrases I’ve suggested, I’ve done some some frank linking of cause to effect. ‘As a consequence’ and ‘predictably’ both suggest confidently that the tall girl’s body type is the cause or the precondition of her superior arm wrestling powers. If you don’t mind me talking about a problem that, as far as I know, is unique to scientific writing, I will tell you why I didn’t put any such straightforward cause-linking phrases into my sample ISC text. One of the great paradoxes of scientific writing today is that many authors who are outside the uppermost scientific elites consistently shrink from making strong statements about causality. Yet, the primary mission of science is supposed to be providing understanding of what causes things to happen in nature. Identifying and naming causes is what we get paid for. Nonetheless, many writers in science will seemingly use any verbal dodge to escape making a direct cause-and-effect statement.
The majority of these cause-evaders, and also the worst offenders, are students. Scientific projects are usually conducted with grant money won by the professional scientist, but are physically carried out and primarily written up by trainees. The trainees have a strong tendency, in their writing, to defer to higher powers. They show more humility than would be seen in an imperial Chinese scholar bumping his head on the floor in front of the Emperor. They imitate the scientific writing format as slavishly as they can, cite previous researchers as if they were setting out incense for minor divinities, and, especially, do their best to humbly veil any statement implying that ‘little old me’ has connected any of the universe’s grand causes to any of its grand effects. It’s as if daring to say ‘A appears to cause B’ were like showing up in the lab wearing a feather boa and a hat full of tropical fruit. Charles Dickens’ orphan boy Oliver Twist, famously asking for his second bowl of gruel at the workhouse – “Please, sir, I want some more” – was never so humble as one of these students, too frightened to beseech the scientific powers-that-be for permission to use the word ‘causes,’ as in, ‘A causes B.’
It’s inspiring that students are so eager to proceed into the world of causes and effects with humility and caution about their observations. I wouldn’t ask them to become the football hooligans of data interpretation. I do, though, recommend that they try to write with as much clarity as they can, despite their feeling that their station on the academic totem pole is low.
The most frequently used, humble substitute for ‘A causes B’ is ‘A is associated with B.’ The latter phrase is a constant in middle-echelon science, especially among authors primarily writing in ISC. It is one of the vaguest phrases ever cotton-battened together by the human mind. With its word-roots implying a social occasion, it has a legitimate use to describe items clustered near each other in space (‘the cattle egret flocks are constantly associated with herds of cattle’), or, in the abstract, multiple effects connected to a common cause (‘Symptoms associated with hay fever include runny nose, itchy eyes, and sneezing’). It is also, however, a notorious cause of vagueness when it is abused to describe single cause-and-effect connections, or correlated independent events sharing a common causal factor (such as wolves howling at the moon in Siberia at the same time fish are coming to the water surface to mate in the moonlight in Thailand) or completely coincidental events that happen to come together in a way that suggests they might be connected in some way. Many authors also misuse it to replace prepositions that connect one thing to another, such as ‘in’ and ‘on.’ In our ISC sample paragraph, you’ll see “Furthermore, she has in the past years also presented a high performance in association with school work.” Here, ‘in association with’ simply means ‘in:’ “Furthermore, she has in the past years also presented a high performance in her school work.” (We’ll ignore the sentence’s other problems for now.) In our second sample sentence featuring ‘association,’ we can similarly turn a vague phrase into a definite one by replacing ‘associated to’ with ‘in.’ “Thus, it is concluded that she has a very high ability associated to sports.” --> “Thus, it is concluded that she has a very high ability in sports.” The phrase can also be rewritten as a description: “Thus, it is concluded that she has outstanding sporting ability.” (I couldn’t say that she has ‘a very high sporting ability’ because that could be taken to suggest that she does best after smoking marijuana.)
Prepositions – for example, on, in, under, through, at, of, by – are a constant problem in second-language writing, since every language organizes them differently. Also, the underlying logic of how the more abstract ones like ‘of’ and ‘by’ are used may be impossible to penetrate. A perceived ‘association’ is an abstraction, and therefore it runs into the basic uncertainty about how to represent abstract items as if they were arranged in space and time. In the second ‘in association’ sentence in the sample paragraph, our imaginary ISC author makes the very common mistake of saying ‘associated to’ instead of the conventional ‘associated with.’ This turns out to be another Iberian contribution to ISC. If you look at the Spanish language wikipedia article on viruses, you’ll see wording like ‘Los virus más importantes asociados con cánceres humanos son papillomavirus…’ – the most important viruses associated with human cancers are papillomavirus …’ – mixed with wording like ‘Su uso ha dado lugar a una dramática disminución de la morbilidad (enfermedad) y mortalidad (muerte) asociada a infecciones virales como poliomyelitis…’ – Their use [i.e., the use of vaccines] has produced a dramatic diminution in morbidity (sickness) and mortality (death) associated to viral infections like poliomyelitis….’
My Cuban-Canadian molecular biology colleague Yaima Arocha Rosete assures me that ‘asociada con’ (associated with) and ‘asociada a’ (associated to) are completely interchangeable in Spanish. In English, we are not so flexible: we insist on ‘associated with.’ ‘Associated to’ is strictly creole. The Spanish article on ‘virus’ has five instances of ‘asociada con’ and three of ‘asociada a.’ Spanish-speaking authors are playing Russian roulette with multiple chambers loaded when they translate their ideas about associations directly into English.
Now, coming back to the Spanish passages I quoted and looking at them editorially – I mean, come on! Can we not say by now that papillomavirus causes human cancer rather than merely being ‘associated with’ it? Are we vaccinating thousands of young people merely on the basis of an ambiguous ‘association?’ Clearly not. Likewise, would it not be reasonable to say that sickness and death are caused by viral infections like polio? Well. Let’s not be hard on this hard-working volunteer Wikipedia author – perhaps ‘associated with’ has more credibility in Spanish than it has in English. All I can say is that it doesn’t cross over well into our language except in situations where it’s the most accurate expression available.
Further investigation of the Spanish article on viruses shows that it employs the verb ‘causar’ in the sense of causing disease 48 times. The sentence immediately following the papillomavirus sentence says “El más reciente descubrimiento de un virus que causa cáncer es el poliomavirus” – ‘The most recent discovery of a virus that causes cancer is poliomavirus.’ The article also uses the verb ‘provocar’ – to provoke – ten times to describe disease causation. One occasionally sees this usage translated into ISC English. In English, however, ‘to provoke’ suggests deliberately causing irritation or picking a fight, and is only used to describe interactions with humans or animals. The sentence after the one about poliomavirus is: “Los virus de la hepatitis pueden causar una infección crónica que provoca cáncer de hígado” – ‘The hepatitis viruses can cause a chronic infection that ‘provokes’ liver cancer.’ Clearly this doesn’t suggest, as it would in English, that the liver cancer is being goaded to stand up and punch the chronic infection. In any case, any good writer would support the author’s decision to avoid using ‘cause’ twice in a row. We English speakers might say that the hepatitis viruses ‘can bring about a chronic infection that causes liver cancer’ or ‘can cause a chronic infection that leads to liver cancer.’
The overall picture of the wording in the virus article is that Spanish authors legitimately enjoy a variety of choices – ‘causes,’ ‘provokes,’ ‘associates with,’ ‘associates to’ – and we can safely leave them to their own good judgment. In English, however, we must ‘provoke’ these fine authors to make the necessary changes in their writing. Using ‘to cause’ in preference to vague substitutes is usually an excellent strategy.
Besides ‘associated to,’ there is one other prepositional problem in our creole sentence, seen in the clause ‘she is capable to give a better performance…’ Here, as often happens with prepositions, we see English mixing its insistence on logical word order with an equally firm insistence on completely arbitrary choices. The clause must be corrected to ‘she is capable of giving a better performance…’ The arbitrary reason is that ‘capable’ doesn’t partner with the preposition ‘to’ as part of an infinitive verb form like ‘to give.’ It only partners with ‘of’ and a present participle, as in, ‘of giving.’ How is the second-language speaker going to predict this? If ‘capable’ took off its ‘cap’ and appeared bare-headed as ‘able,’ the opposite would be true: ‘she is able of giving a better performance’ would be forbidden, while ‘she is able to give a better performance’ would be just fine. Alas, this sort of thing can only be memorized, or learned by repeated exposure.
Prepositions are simply troublemakers that way. They just like to be in your face, without so much as a by your leave. We English speakers can always console ourselves about our preposition troubles by looking over the fence to see how much worse things are for the neighbours. In Russian, for example, every time you learn a new preposition, you have to learn what set of case endings it partners with, and there are some odd matches. The word-endings of the ‘instrumental case’ have to be attached to any nouns following the prepositions за (za, ‘behind’), между (mezhdu, ‘between’), над (nad, ‘over’), перед (pered, ‘in front of’), под (pod, ‘under’), or c (s, ‘with’). On the other hand, if you want to use в (v, ‘in’) на (na, ‘on’) or о (o, ‘about’), you usually need to use a completely different set of case endings that indicate the ‘prepositional’ case. The prepositional case is mostly just used with its short list of prepositions, but the instrumental has a completely separate, major function: it is normally tacked on to the ends of words to mean ‘by means of’ or ‘using,’ as in ‘Иван пишет карандашом – ‘Ivan pishyet karandashom’ ‘Ivan writes pencil-om,’ where ‘pencil-om’ means ‘using a pencil’. There’s a slender logical connection between the regular and the prepositional use of the instrumental in that the concept ‘by means of’ seems somehow related to the preposition ‘with,’ as seen in the ordinary English phrasing ‘Ivan writes with a pencil.’ But that doesn’t explain how ‘over’ and ‘under’ got attached to the instrumental case. You just have to memorize lists of these things and hope you can pass the exam. The accusative and dative cases also attach themselves to certain prepositions. Students of English, as usual, get an easy break: we can at least say, ‘in the suitcase,’ ‘about the suitcase,’ ‘over the suitcase’ and ‘with the suitcase’ while leaving ‘the suitcase’ exactly as it is. This makes it a relatively light suitcase, whereas Russian grammar is heavy baggage.
Now, still looking at the same creole sentence, let’s move on to a topic that confronts all English speakers, namely, the abuse of ‘respectively.’ This term is closely related to another term, ‘respective.’ Strunk and White say simply, about both expressions, ‘These words may usually be omitted with advantage.’ In other words, when writing, forget you ever heard about these terms, and live happily ever after. This is among the best pieces of advice S & W ever gave, but like most good advice, it has gone almost completely ignored in the real world. Science and technology writers have been especially energetic in burying this advice under a mountain of ‘respectively’s, and they have had plenty of help from other writers. Papers written in ISC always contain ‘respectively.’ Technical writing involves a lot of comparisons and lists, and authors clearly hope ‘respectively’ will help them with these things.
The main problem with ‘respectively,’ apart from its being unnecessary, is that it is only useable in English in a highly structured format. It works almost exclusively to make links between exactly two items mentioned at the end of a sentence and exactly two subjects, mentioned earlier in the sentence, that are connected to those items. ‘As pet owners, Geneviève and Elsa have a crested gecko and a tabby cat, respectively.’ As S & W point out, you could as easily say ‘Geneviève, as a pet owner, has a crested gecko while Elsa has a tabby cat.’ Or variations on that theme. There’s no special reason to bump Gen and Elsa up to the front of the sentence and then force the reader to stitch connections laboriously between them and their pets. What’s attractive about a parallelism where the main clue to what’s going on, ‘respectively,’ is belatedly tacked on right at the end of the sentence?
My use of the word ‘laboriously,’ two sentences back, reflects the general feeling among native English speakers that reading ‘respectively’ expressions is hard work. This viewpoint generally keeps us from accepting ‘respectively’ phrases that have more than two items in them. ISC speakers are very adventurous in trying to vary the format of ‘respectively’ statements, and often try to make them apply to three or more items. English speakers put their foot down at that point. No one wants to slow down their reading for an intelligence test about connecting A, B, and C with A1, B1 and C1. In simple cases, it may seem easy enough, as in one sample I’ve recently collected: “In total, 22, 18 and 7 cases of tinea capitis, tinea corporis and tinea faciei were revealed, respectively.” (Tinea capitis is fungal ringworm infection of the scalp, while tinea faciei is ringworm of the face and tinea corporis is ringworm of the trunk, arms or legs.) This kind of sentence is, however, the ‘thin edge of the wedge.’ If it is allowed, it will encourage writers to form ever more complex sentences based on multiple-part ‘respectively’ constructions. Therefore, any English editor who is paying attention will change such a phrase to, for example, ‘In total, there were 22 cases of tinea capitis, 18 of tinea corporis and 7 of tinea faciei.’
‘Respective’, like ‘respectively,’ is usually easy to eliminate. If you say, ‘George, Ruthie and Kaitlyn went back to their respective cars,’ it’s not much different from saying ‘George, Ruthie and Kaitlyn went back to their cars.’ Yes, the second sentence doesn’t explicitly say that each individual had a separate car. English speaking people, however, would understand that if there was a different arrangement, something different would be said – perhaps, in the simplest form, ‘George, Ruthie and Kaitlyn went back to the cars.’ That phrasing implies that the number of cars doesn’t necessarily match the number of people.
Some writers seem to use ‘respective’ out of sheer nervousness. Here’s an example I found that I’ve condensed to remove some technical detail.
Clades IV and VI include genera that are associated with basal rot and canker diseases of their respective plant hosts.
The basic meaning of this is that two broad groups of genetically related fungal species, two ‘clades,’ contain smaller groups, called genera, that are involved in some way with two different kinds of diseases in various plants. (‘Genus,’ plural ‘genera,’ is Latin for a ‘kind’ of creature. A good example is the genus Rattus, which includes 64 rat species ranging from the domestic brown and black rats to exotica like the Molaccan prehensile-tailed rat of Indonesia.) The first disease is rot of the base of the stem and the second is canker, the causing of blisters in the stem that break through the bark. The sentence says that the fungi ‘are associated with’ the diseases; by now, you know that this is probably a vague way of saying that they cause the diseases. Beyond that, things are not so clear.
This sentence is a good illustration of the problems of creole, because the author’s exact intended meaning can’t be discerned. He may have been playing with the format of ‘respectively’ sentences and may have intended to produce a rewording of “Genera in clades IV and VI are associated with basal rot and canker diseases of their plant hosts, respectively.” In that case, we’d be learning that clade IV fungi cause basal rot, while clade VI fungi cause canker. On the other hand, the author may just have been saying that each of the fungi in both clades causes a disease on a particular ‘respective’ host plant that it has uniquely evolved to infect. In that case, there could be basal rot and canker fungi in both groups. I had to research this question by looking at the data in other papers, and when I did, I saw that clade IV contained some fungi causing basal rot of grapevines, while clade VI contained some fungi causing cankers in diverse plants, but also included some rotters of plant roots. Whether the rotting of roots might sometimes qualify as a ‘basal rot’ is not clear. Individual species within the root rotter group, especially, often infected a very wide range of plants.
My tentative conclusion was that the author wasn’t trying to match each of the two disease types with just one of the clades, nor was he implying that each genus in the clades infected only one plant host. The word ‘respective’ here, again, appears to be completely unnecessary. The sentence could easily be edited to “Clades IV and VI include genera that cause basal rot and canker diseases in various plant hosts.” Apparently ‘respective’ was only there to reassure readers that every single species in these groups didn’t infect every plant species in existence. Most biologists would already expect that to be so.
Even after giving that last example, I still worry that, while I’m clearly enthusiastic about passing along Strunk and White’s wisdom that ‘respective’ and ‘respectively’ are avoidable, I may be failing to convince some people who write technical prose. They may be thinking, “Summerbell’s ideas are fine for writing about items from simple, day-to-day life, but when I write my complicated technical material, I need to use ‘respectively.’” Are there situations where complicated technical language makes it preferable to use ‘respectively’? I would argue that there are not. To explore this idea, I’ve gone back to the same paper that I got the ringworm sentence from, and plucked out the most complicated, technical-looking ‘respectively’ sentence of the six in the paper. Here it is:
Of the 19 typable microsatellite markers developed, we used the most polymorphic loci, Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13, revealing four and five alleles within the M. canis set of strains, respectively.
You see what I mean about scary sentences – and this is a fairly short one at only 29 words. But, let’s be brave and do some style work with it. First of all, to make editing easier, here’s an explanation of what it means. Nineteen different ‘DNA fingerprinting’ techniques have been looked at that might be used to distinguish different infectious strains of the ‘cat ringworm fungus,’ Microsporum canis. This fungus is often transmitted from cats, especially semi-wild street cats, to humans. It causes an aggravating scalp infection or a mild but annoying skin infection; both kinds of infection are most frequently seen in children. The authors decided that two out of their 19 fingerprinting techniques were the best to use for identifying strains, since one technique could distinguish four different genetic types and the other could distinguish five. The remaining fingerprinting procedures all distinguished fewer types. ‘Polymorphic’ means ‘having many forms,’ and ‘alleles’ are ‘different forms of the same gene.’ For example, humans have an eye colour gene that is ‘polymorphic,’ and this gene comes in a form for blue eyes as well as a form for brown eyes. The blue and brown forms are ‘alleles,’ a word that literally means ‘alternates’ or ‘others.’ There are more eye colour alleles, such as those responsible for my ‘hazel’ eyes, but we needn’t get into that here.
The sentence is long and complex enough that my first impulse was to split it in two during the process of ‘disrespecting’ it, that is, removing the ‘respectively.’ Here’s attempt number one:
We used the most polymorphic of the 19 typable microsatellite markers we developed. One of these, Mc(GT)17, revealed four alleles within our M. canis strain collection, while the other, Mc(GT)13, revealed five.
To my eye, that’s much more readable than the original sentence. It also eliminates a minor sentence construction error that marred the original. (The participle ‘revealing’ was used incorrectly – we’ll come back to this.) It is, however, 32 words long in contrast to the 29 of the original, so the latter could still be defended as using up less valuable print space. Let’s try again, then:
We developed 19 typable microsatellite markers in our M. canis strains but focused on two revealing multiple polymorphic alleles. Mc(GT)17 distinguished four alleles while Mc(GT)13 distinguished five.
That brings us all the way down to 27 words, but it cheats slightly: it omits any explicit mention of the idea that the two chosen markers were the ones that revealed the most different alleles. What if we put this idea back in?
We developed 19 typable microsatellite markers in our M. canis strains but focused on the two revealing the highest number of polymorphic alleles. Mc(GT)17 distinguished four alleles while Mc(GT)13 distinguished five.
Fine, and still readable, but now we’re back up to 31 words. That’s because the sentence structure forced us to use ‘the highest number of’ rather than ‘the most.’ If we’d said ‘focused on the two revealing the most polymorphic alleles,’ we’d have ended up with a strange ambiguity or double-meaning centring on the exact meaning of ‘most.’ The concept of ‘the highest number of polymorphic alleles’ would have competed with the concept of ‘the polymorphic alleles that were by nature the most polymorphic.’ Now, isn’t that a headache? This scientific writing business can be a challenge. You can see, though, that if readers are going to be asked to go through material that is this complex, they should be spared any experience of being led astray by unclear phrasing.
If we decide that the concept of ‘the highest number of alleles’ is too obvious to need a direct statement, and if we use extreme ellipsis, we can actually reduce the original sentence to 24 terse words:
We developed 19 typable microsatellite markers in our M. canis strains and chose two distinguishing multiple polymorphic alleles, Mc(GT)17 distinguishing four and Mc(GT)13 five.
For my taste, however, the 32-word, two-sentence version is optimal. It’s highly understandable and, as far as I can tell, free of awkward moments. Even our always impoverished journals can afford to add three extra words here and there for clarity’s sake.
You can see from the many alternative versions I’ve churned out that ‘respectively’ is completely unnecessary. In any case, it tends to give the text a dull and convoluted tone. This dullness evaporates when long ‘respectively’ sentences are deftly ‘disrespected’ and split up. Even the most technically heavy sentences can soar if this kind of surgery is done on them.
Before leaving the topic of ‘respectively,’ I’ll briefly mention two more expressions that are used awkwardly in technical text to make reference to pairs of things. One of these, surprisingly, is the simple word ‘both.’ Many second-language speakers don’t realize that ‘both’ implies considerable togetherness or overlap. They take no notice of the difference between ‘both pilots boarded the plane at the same time’ and ‘the two pilots boarded separate planes.’ ‘Both students went to Technical University Delft, but the two had different professors.’ When items in a hypothetical pair do different things, they cannot form a ‘both’ in a well written description. ‘The two’ is the common expression that we use to point at two related items doing different things. The addition of ‘respective(ly)’ to the sentence doesn’t change this situation. ‘Both pilots boarded their respective planes’ is understandable, but deeply disagreeable on a logical level because it embeds an internal contradiction.
The other problematical expression involving pairs is ‘the latter.’ This phrase strictly means, ‘the second member of a group of two items,’ and has no flexibility to mean anything else. If you are trying to indicate the third of three items, or the fourth of four, you’re pointing at ‘the last’ item, not ‘the latter.’
You can see these duality problems in action in the following snippet:
Creole: Neocosmospora regularis includes strains previously assigned to the special forms phaseoli and pisi. Both special forms are currently confined to N. phaseoli and N. pisi, respectively. The two latter species and N. regularis all produce at least two types of aerial conidia….
English: Neocosmospora regularis includes strains previously assigned to the special forms phaseoli and pisi. These two special forms are currently restricted to isolates of N. phaseoli and N. pisi. The last two species and N. regularis all produce at least two types of aerial conidia….
Improved English: Neocosmospora regularis includes strains previously assigned to the special forms phaseoli and pisi. Inclusion in these special forms is currently restricted to isolates of N. phaseoli and N. pisi. All three species produce at least two types of aerial conidia….
A ‘special form’ (‘forma specialis’) was an old name for a disease-causing fungal type that was specialized to invade one kind of crop plant. Originally, scientists thought that these action-defined pathogen groups might map one-to-one with genetically defined groups, like species, but they later discovered that some ‘special forms’ contained members of more than one closely related species. In the situation mentioned above, the ‘special form’ phaseoli invading bean plants (genus Phaseolus) was mostly made up of the species now called Neocosmospora phaseoli, but also included some isolates of N. regularis. Now that we know this, anyone using the ‘special form’ category phaseoli restricts the concept to isolates of N. phaseoli. A parallel story holds true for the isolates invading peas (Pisum). Even though these stories are parallel, they send their actors to distinct destinations; thus, the author’s logic in stating that “both special forms are restricted to species A and B, respectively” turns out to be completely nonsensical in English. His subsequent attempt to turn the last two out of a group of three species into “the two latter species” was reminiscent of the scene in a slapstick movie where the comedian, having already tripped on a ladder and fallen flat on his face, is just struggling to get up when the paint can falls from the air onto his head. And this was an author whose English was generally excellent. Don’t let it happen to you.
I’m now going to come back to the minor construction problem I mentioned I’d found in the original ‘polymorphic alleles’ sentence. It represents one of the main themes that pop up in creole and in awkwardly written native English: that is, misuse of participles.
There’s a standard-issue abuse of participles that afflicts many native English speakers when they sit down to write. You can see it in the sample sentence ‘Going to the store, a lot of snow fell on me.’ People often say this sort of thing, sometimes because they change their mind in mid-sentence about what they are trying to say. The sentence doesn’t make sense when you look at it logically. ‘Going to the store’ is four-word description of something a person was doing. It’s a complicated adjective, a descriptive phrase, intended to be attached to a human being. Who is the human who is going to the store, then? ‘Me,’ is the answer, in this sentence. Whoever is calling him- or herself ‘me’ is ‘going to the store.’ The sentence, however, begins with this descriptive, adjectival phrase – ‘going to the store’ – followed by another adjectival phrase indicating a quantity – ‘a lot of’ – followed by a noun – ‘snow.’ ‘Snow’ is then followed by a verb that indicates an action clearly carried out by the snow, ‘fell.’ ‘Snow,’ as the first noun in the sentence that isn’t part of a phrase describing something else, and as the noun that coordinates with the main verb in the sentence, is the sentence’s only possible grammatical subject. ‘Me’ finally appears at the tail end of the sentence as a grammatical object that has been swallowed up inside a prepositional phrase, ‘on me.’ The descriptive phrases on the left-hand side of the verb should belong to the subject, ‘snow.’ Therefore, the sentence logically says that ‘a lot of snow’ was ‘going to the store’ when it ‘fell on me.’
Oops.
What ‘me’ meant to say is, ‘Going to the store, I had a lot of snow falling on me,’ or something like that. ‘Going to the store, I found that a lot of snow was falling on me’ would be another valid version. In these rewrites, the adjectival phrase ‘going to the store’ is logically well attached to ‘I,’ who is standing proud as the subject of the sentence. This sentence could be taken as a slightly abbreviated version of ‘While going to the store, I had a lot of snow falling on me.’ But let’s leave it as it is for now. The adjectival phrase containing ‘going,’ in this version, can come before or after the subject of the sentence. That is, you can say either, ‘Going to the store, I had a lot of snow falling on me,’ or ‘I, going to the store, had a lot of snow falling on me.’ The second version sounds slightly awkward, but it’s unmistakeably grammatically OK. On the other hand, if you try the reversal trick with the incorrectly constructed sentence, you get, ‘A lot of snow, going to the store, fell on me.’ No no no. Clearly, that doesn’t work.
Sometimes, I think, people imagine that the participle has already has already introduced the subject of the sentence, since it is a verbal form (‘going’, for example, derived from the verb ‘to go’) and it refers to the actions of the person who was intended to be the grammatical subject. In the case of our sample sentence, ‘Going to the store, a lot of snow fell on me,’ you may wonder if the writer felt as if he or she had said, in effect, ‘(As I was) going to the store, a lot of snow fell on me’ – which would be a slightly inelegant but grammatically acceptable sentence. The participle may fool the writer of this sentence by giving him or her a feeling that he or she has a presence at the beginning of the sentence.
People will also write things like ‘On my way to the store, a lot of snow fell on me.’ This is just as linguistically illogical as the version involving the participle, but again, the possessive pronoun – in this case, the ‘my’ – may give the feeling that the person referred to has been introduced as a grammatical subject. Rotate the adjectival phrase here, and you can see that ‘A lot of snow, on my way to the store, fell on me’ has obvious problems. The literal reading – a lot of snow that had somehow joined me in heading to the store then fell on me – is so absurd that the mind automatically tries to interpret the sentence in other ways. That automatic rejection of absurdity and the mental jump to something sensible may also help to fool people into thinking the sentence is acceptable. In that case, you get a strong piece of ‘you-know-what-I-mean English’ that is nonetheless confused and ungrammatical.
At this point, you might be thinking that this matter is not very complicated, and no reasonably clear-thinking writer would ever make this kind of mistake. Not true! High-level professional writers make such errors all the time. Look at a magnificent sample I was lucky enough to collect from my favorite source of awkward professional English, the CTV National News. (I’m not trying to pick on my favorite news program, by the way; I’m using them to point out that even respectable writers can make the mistakes I’m talking about, and thus you needn’t feel bad if you’ve done it yourself.) On Oct. 10, 2014, a story said, “Guy Turcotte was acquitted at his first trial for killing his two children. He was found not criminally responsible. Now free on bail and awaiting a second trial, the prosecution wants him back behind bars.”
Let’s do the reversal trick on that last sentence. You’re way ahead of me. ‘The prosecution, now free on bail and awaiting a second trial, wants him back behind bars.’ Hahaha. These errors are often funny. This wrong placement of a descriptive phrase containing a participle puts the people who were trying to jail the murderer, the prosecutors, at risk of going to jail. I’m sure the mad killer would have found this idea very satisfying. It is not, however, a true representation of the story.
I suspect that CTV didn’t get a single complaint about this error. There used to be special people called ‘grammar curmudgeons’ who would write stern, offended letters to media outlets whenever reporters or newscasters made a grammatical mistake. These days, I’m sure these pencil-chewing, straggly-haired media monitors are completely overwhelmed, and are probably simply gazing at the ceilings of their offices, thinking, “Their (sic) but for the grace of God go I.” My view, though, is that even when we are surrounded by English errors as if by a swarm of bees, we can still go forward bravely and extract the honey of good writing.
Let’s take in a few more goodies from the evening news. Various kinds of misplaced descriptive phrases are involved.
‘Diagnosed with Ebola, Thomas Eric Duncan’s family says his kidneys are failing.’ (Oct. 6, 2014). The sentence says the family has Ebola. ‘Thomas Eric Duncan’s family, diagnosed with Ebola, says his kidneys are failing.’ Rewrite: ‘Diagnosed with Ebola, Thomas Eric Duncan now has failing kidneys, his family says.’
‘Listed in stable condition under quarantine, her dog Bentley shows no symptoms’ (Oct. 13). The sentence says the dog with no symptoms has been held in quarantine. In fact, the dog’s owner was quarantined; the dog was not. Reversal: ‘Her dog Bentley, listed in stable condition under quarantine, shows no symptoms.’ Rewrite: ‘She is listed in stable condition under quarantine, while her dog, Bentley, shows no symptoms.’
‘Her husband criticizes the government there for only giving her 30 minutes of training before treating two Ebola patients.’ (Oct. 13). The sentence says the government treated two Ebola patients, but gave someone else 30 minutes of training before it did so. Reversal: ‘Her husband criticizes the government there, before treating two Ebola patients, for only giving her 30 minutes of training.’ This sentence has a bad participle error in any rearrangement. More on this below. Rewrite: ‘Her husband criticizes the government there for only giving her 30 minutes of training before she was assigned to treat two Ebola patients.’
‘Even if approved, environmental groups vow to fight it.’ The sentence says that environmental groups may or not be approved, but they will nonetheless fight against something. (Oct. 30). The ‘something’ in question is the Canada East pipeline proposal. In reality, the pipeline was the item that was up for approval, not the activist groups. ‘Environmental groups, even if approved, vow to fight it.’ Wrong. And the rewrite is so simple: ‘Even if it’s approved, environmental groups vow to fight it.’
I loved this one. ‘Cheap to produce and highly addictive, the country is the source of 95% of the meth consumed on the continent.’ This one says that ‘the country,’ the Czech Republic, is cheap to produce and highly addictive. (Nov. 16). The country is highly addictive – Prague is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, the food is excellent, and prices in the shops are attractive – but with all that amazing stonework and statuary, it couldn’t have been cheap to produce! The news article was trying, of course, to say the crystal meth produced there was inexpensively made and highly addictive. Rewrite: ‘Cheap to produce and highly addictive, the meth produced in the country makes up 95% of the supply consumed on the continent.’
Finally, a classic from the internet: ‘As a child, my dad always brought us to the zoo.’ The father somehow managed to take his kids to the zoo even when he was a child himself. ‘My dad, as a child, always brought us to the zoo.’ You can do the rewrite as a mid-term exam for this chapter. Good, you got 100%, I’m sure.
You may be interested to know that Randolph Quirk and friends, in their A Grammar of Contemporary English, might not bother even to mark your exam. They follow a modern style of being non-judgmental and descriptive about grammar. They don’t want to be the nasty schoolteacher telling people what to do, the ‘prescriptive grammarian.’ In their section on the “‘unattached’ or ‘unrelated’ participle,” they say that “in scientific literature, the use of ‘unattached participles’ is such a convenient solecism (booboo, that is) as to be almost accepted as an institution.” They give their stamp of resigned acceptance to the following example: “When treating patients with language retardation and deviation of language development, the therapy will consist, in part, of discussions of the patient’s problems with parents and teachers, with subsequent language teaching being carried out by them.”
Oh boy. Are we sure we want these particular experts to train students with ‘language retardation’?
After all, all that’s needed to correct the ‘solecism’ is to start the sentence with ‘In the treatment of patients…” – a change that is hardly inconvenient. In any case, Quirk et al. don’t comment on the other creolisms that can be seen in the sentence. For example, there’s the ambiguous placement of ‘with parents and teachers’– the phrase could be absurdly but grammatically correctly read to mean that the students have problems with parents and teachers. Then there’s the awkward, passive ending ‘carried out by them,’ a phrase strongly suggestive of second-language English. For connoisseurs, there’s the subtly illogical attachment of ‘with subsequent language teaching being carried out by them’ as part of what ‘the therapy consists’ of. We won’t get into that gnarly matter here. Finally, there’s the over-ambitious word length, a hallmark of text written in ISC. So why not say this instead? – “In the treatment of patients with language retardation and deviation of language development, part of the therapy will consist of holding discussions with parents and teachers about the patient’s problems. These discussions will enable participants to carry out subsequent language training.” Or, to do a complete rewrite that brings back the one-sentence concept, “In the treatment of patients with delayed or deviating language development, part of the therapy will consist of discussions enabling parents and teachers to understand the patient’s problems and carry out subsequent language instruction.”
I prefer to go on thinking that science need not be written up in muddled language.
With that being said, I think we’re ready to come back to the participle in the original ‘polymorphic’ sentence. I’ve placed it in bold-face type below. I’m going to use it to illustrate some of the most important principles of English writing style, so please hang in there with me, even though the sentence itself is something of a jungle. It has features that can be used to illustrate some interesting points.
Of the 19 typable microsatellite markers developed, we used the most polymorphic loci, Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13, revealing four and five alleles within the M. canis set of strains, respectively.
The participle here sits in a complicated situation. The authors clearly intend to use it to start a descriptive phrase connected to the word ‘loci,’ as in ‘we used two loci, revealing four and five alleles, respectively.’
The best way to make this kind of move in standard English would not be to use a participle. It would be to use a ‘which’ clause, as in ‘we used the most polymorphic loci, Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13, which revealed four and five alleles…respectively.’ The reasons why the ‘which’ structure is preferable to the participle may not be obvious to people who didn’t grow up speaking English. Here’s where we reach a very fundamental matter.
The relatively rigid structure of written English is highly dependent on organizing phrases around grammatical subjects. The overall subject of a sentence is a very strong coordinator of phrases. It can often ‘cling on’ to phrases in syntax even when these phrases are separated from it by other phrases. The same super-magnetic power is also found in the grammatical subjects of clauses within sentences. (A clause is a sub-section of sentence that has its own subject and predicate. A predicate consists of a verb form plus an object or a descriptive expression, e.g., ‘goes home,’ or ‘is drunk’ or ‘should be taken to see a psychiatrist immediately.’).
For example, I can say, with reasonably good style, ‘There was a gopher by the side of the road that must have been run over hours ago.’ (A gopher is a very common rodent that lives in holes in the farmland soil of the Canadian province I was born in, Alberta. It likes to walk to the slightly raised centre of roadways and stand upright to get a better view of the surrounding prairie, whereupon it is hit by a car and tossed to the roadside.) My gopher sentence can’t be read to say that the road itself ‘must have been run over hours ago,’ even though the wording says ‘the road that must have been run over hours ago.’ The reason is that the grammatical subject of the relevant clause, ‘gopher,’ has enough magnetic power in English grammar to cling firmly onto the adjectival clause ‘that must have been run over hours ago,’ even though the clinging force has to pass right through the earlier adjectival phrase, ‘by the side of the road.’
This magnetic power of the grammatical subject governs how native English speakers are likely to read our ‘polymorphic’ sentence. They automatically expect that participial ‘-ing’ phrases found in the sentence, after the subject has appeared, will probably coordinate with the subject. The automatic expectation in this sentence is that ‘revealing four or five alleles’ will coordinate with the word ‘we,’ the grammatical subject, not with the word ‘loci.’ Thus, as the English speaker reads the sentence over, his or her mind starts to connect the normal interpretation, then realizes it doesn’t make sense, and then feels obliged to jump to ‘loci’ and reinterpret the wording. That’s awkward.
The illogical meaning that the sentence would have if it were in conventional English grammatical form can be illustrated by inserting the word ‘thereby’ or ‘thus’ in front of ‘four or five alleles.’
Of the 19 typable microsatellite markers developed, we used the most polymorphic loci, Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13, (thereby) revealing four and five alleles within the M. canis set of strains, respectively
You could reword this without the participle as ‘we used the most polymorphic loci, Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13, and revealed four and five alleles within the M. canis set of strains, respectively’
That doesn’t make sense, since ‘we’ didn’t reveal the alleles directly. The loci did that – albeit indirectly, via gene fingerprinting reactions used to detect them. That is to say, these loci, in tests of multiple fungus strains, ‘revealed’ the presence of four or five alternative gene forms in the same way as our ring-billed seagull, mentioned above, ‘displayed’ the black ring around its bill. ‘Revealed’ is yet another metaphorical figure of speech suggesting that natural objects show off the characters that we can detect. If we looked literally at what ‘our’ actions – the researchers’ actions – revealed in “the M. canis set of strains,” we would see not only the four-plus-five alternative gene forms for the two loci mentioned, but also all the alleles found at the remaining 17 loci that weren’t selected for further use. The authors’ sentence is clearly, or at least detectably, aimed at what the two chosen loci revealed, not at what ‘we’ as experimenters revealed.
Here’s a simpler sample sentence showing what English speakers would expect to see in sentences that have participial phrases similar to the one used in the ‘polymorphic’ sentence.
We successfully used the new drug posaconazole with these patients, bringing about complete cure in four of five cases within 30 days.
You can see that ‘bringing,’ the participle, doesn’t attach to ‘patients,’ the noun in front of it. It attaches to ‘we.’ (It does this indirectly – see below.) You could reword the sentence as:
We successfully used the new drug posaconazole with these patients, and (we) brought about complete cure in four of five cases within 30 days.
Here are two similar, non-scientific sentences from the website grammaring.com . They are listed as participial phrases showing ‘an action that is the result of another action.’
Moments later a bomb exploded, leaving three people dead and twelve others injured.
When I entered they all looked at me, making me feel uncomfortable.
To reword without the participle:
Moments later a bomb exploded, and it left three people dead and twelve others injured.
When I entered they all looked at me, and that made me feel uncomfortable.
The phrases with the participle, like ‘making me feel uncomfortable,’ are unusual descriptive phrases. They can’t be tacked on directly to the subjects of the sentences. We can’t do the usual reversal trick with adjectival phrases and say, ‘Moments later, a bomb, leaving three people dead and twelve others wounded, exploded.’ With ordinary participial clauses, reversal is easily done: ‘The cat sat happily on the windowsill, basking in the sun.’ --> ‘The cat, basking in the sun, sat happily on the windowsill.’ The special participial phrases announcing the results of a previous action attach themselves to the entire preceding sentence, not just to the subject. The bomb has to explode before it can be announced as ‘leaving three people dead;’ the death count does not describe the bomb itself. Nonetheless, the phrases involved relate directly to the subject’s action. Let’s look back at the sentence
We successfully used the new drug posaconazole with these patients, bringing about complete cure in four of five cases within 30 days,
The grammatical subject of the sentence is ‘we.’ The descriptive participial phrase ‘bringing about complete cure in four of five cases’ is definitely a result of something ‘we’ did, which is to have used the new drug. It most certainly does not attach to ‘patients,’ the noun coming directly before ‘bringing.’ The patients could not be credited with ‘bringing about (their own) complete cure in four of five cases.’
Now to go back to the monster sentence. (Just joking.)
Of the 19 typable microsatellite markers developed, we used the most polymorphic loci, Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13, revealing four and five alleles within the M. canis set of strains, respectively
You can see here that the phrase starting with ‘revealing’ looks as if it should be a participial ‘phrase of result.’ It should be announcing a result of something ‘we’ did. Instead, the author clearly intends it to attach to ‘loci.’ That’s much like trying to attach the ‘bringing about complete cure’ phrase in the ‘new drug’ sentence to the word ‘patients.’ It shouldn’t happen.
Don’t’ be confused by the fact that the noun ‘loci,’ in the monster sentence, has a ‘phrase in apposition’ following it. That’s the phrase in bold-face here: ‘we used the most polymorphic loci, Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13, revealing…’ A ‘phrase in apposition’ follows a noun or a phrase and contains an alternate description of what that noun or phrase refers to. In this sentence, the gene regions described by the phrase ‘the most polymorphic loci’ are, when examined, the gene regions called ‘Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13.’ The insertion of such a reworded, alternate description doesn’t change the sentence’s overall grammar. We could put a ‘phrase in apposition’ in front of any of the ‘participles of result’ we’ve looked at without changing the status of the phrases that followed. ‘We successfully used the new drug posaconazole with these patients, three with sinus tract infection and two with ear canal infection, bringing about complete cure in four of five cases within 30 days.” It’s still the same basic sentence structure with some extra detail inserted. Let’s do the ‘phrase in apposition’ trick one more time: ‘When I entered they all looked at me, their new class president, making me feel uncomfortable.’ The student may not be comfortable, but the sentence is.
The appositional phrase, then, didn’t help the author of the monster sentence to attach the four and five alleles to the loci that revealed them. What this author really needed, to accomplish what he was trying to do, was a way to cleanly and definitely cut the force-field linking the subject, ‘we’ to the descriptive phrase containing ‘four and five alleles, respectively.’ He needed something that could re-attach the descriptive phrase to the main grammatical object of the sentence, ‘loci.’
As I mentioned above, using a ‘which’ clause can often accomplish that goal. A descriptive clause that is set off by a comma and started with ‘which’ has a fairly strong tendency to break the connection to a distant subject. Let’s go back to the ‘gopher’ sentence, ‘There was a gopher by the side of the road that must have been run over hours ago.’ Compare:
There was a gopher by the side of the road, which was busy with traffic.
This is an awkward sentence, but you can see that the descriptive phrase ‘which was busy with traffic’ has been disconnected from the gopher. The reader has no temptation to read that a gopher was busy with traffic. The descriptive clause ‘which was busy with traffic’ wobbles between attaching itself logically to ‘side’ or to ‘road,’ even though ‘road’ is the only meaning that makes sense. If you dissect the phrase ‘by the side of the road,’ you see a prepositional phrase headed by ‘by,’ with another prepositional phrase set inside it, headed by ‘of.’ ‘Side’, as the noun that sits uppermost in the logical stack of prepositional phrases, is first in line to be the attachment point for succeeding descriptive clauses. If, however, we give the word ‘road’ some emphasis, for example by giving the road a name, then the descriptive clause breaks away completely from ‘side’ and shifts happily to attach to ‘road.’
There was a gopher by the side of Barnsdale Road, which was busy with traffic.
Descriptive clauses beginning with ‘which,’ then, tend relatively strongly to attach to the nouns immediately preceding them. As you can see with the original gopher sentence, ‘There was a gopher by the side of the road that must have been run over hours ago,’ the same is not true of clauses beginning with ‘that.’ Clauses beginning with ‘that’ are similar to participial clauses in having a distinct tendency to attach to the main subject of the sentence whenever this is reasonably possible. Here’s an example showing the distant subject linking firmly to a participial clause:
‘There was a gopher by the side of the road, looking as if it had been run over hours ago.’
In many grammar texts, the difference between subordinate clauses beginning with ‘that’ and those beginning with ‘comma + which’ is said to be a matter of ‘restrictive clauses’ vs. ‘non-restrictive clauses.’ A restrictive clause narrows down the definition of something that is being talked about. ‘This was the horse that escaped from the barn last night.’ There may be many horses, a broad group, but only one escaped from the barn last night. The clause based on ‘that’ narrows the sentence down to focus on that single horse.
Typically, ‘that,’ in English subordinate clauses, is the word used to start restrictive clauses. ‘Which’ is generally used for non-restrictive subordinate clauses. Non-restrictive clauses don’t narrow a topic down; instead, they tack on a chunk of extra information. ‘This is my horse, which won a championship two years ago.’ While the information placed after ‘that’ in a restrictive clause tends to be critical to the significance of the sentence, the information following ‘comma + which’ could often be preceded by ‘by the way.’ ‘This is my horse, which, by the way, won a championship two years ago.’
The distinction between ‘that’ in restrictive clauses and ‘which’ in non-restrictive clauses isn’t completely black-and-white. In older English, most notably in the King James Bible, ‘which’ was used in both restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. Here’s an example of a restrictive ‘which’ clause: “But he answered and said, Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up.” (Matthew 15:13). A modern English version of that would be ‘Every plant that my heavenly father has not planted will be uprooted.’ Note the lack of commas. A quote from a Purdue University website on grammar, owl.english.purdue.edu, explains this absence of commas – see below. The quoted passage addresses the situation seen in participial phrases, but it also applies in principle to subordinate clauses starting with ‘that’ and ‘which,’ as well as those starting with ‘who.’
Note that if the participial phrase is essential to the meaning of the sentence, no commas should be used:
The student earning the highest grade point average will receive a special award.
The guy wearing the chicken costume is my cousin. (Possible rewording: The guy who is wearing the chicken costume is my cousin.)
The use of ‘which’ instead of ‘that’ in restrictive clauses can still be found in British English. There is an example in the Quirk et al. grammar book I have lying open right beside me: “There are, however, various types (of sentences) which may be unambiguously labelled supplementive.” I won’t try to explain that sentence, but you can see it has a restrictive ‘which’ in it, parallel to the ‘that’ in ‘There are various types of sentences that may be spoken by woodpeckers in cartoons.’ Even the experts, then, can randomly exchange ‘which’ for ‘that’ when they want to. The reverse is not true: ‘that’ cannot be substituted for ‘which.’ You can’t say, ‘This is my boomerang, that is painted blue’ when you mean ‘This is my boomerang, which is painted blue.’
Another thing you need to know about the restrictive vs. non-restrictive concept is that it can apply to participial phrases. To borrow some sample participial phrases from the website quickanddirtytips.com, “She yelled at me, making me cry” is non-restrictive (‘She yelled at me, which, by the way, made me cry’) while “She is the lady making me cry” is restrictive (The main significance of that lady right now is that she is the person making me cry). As usual, non-restrictive clauses are for interesting extra thoughts; restrictive clauses are for the vital defining features of the thought being expressed.
You can see from the preceding examples that a restrictive clause would be predicted to have a high affinity for the sentence subject. Its number one task, commonly, is to narrow down the information about the subject and point a finger at exactly why that subject has become a topic of interest. By the same token, a non-restrictive clause, as a tacked-on extra piece of information, can easily be linked to a nearby noun. Non-restrictive ‘comma + which’ clauses are thus very likely to attach to the noun immediately preceding them. This isn’t, however, an absolute rule, as you can see in a series of sentences about horses, starting with:
He gave his son a horse, which was brown.
Here’s the typical situation, where the tacked-on, non-restrictive clause ‘which was brown’ clearly attaches to ‘horse,’ the noun immediately preceding it. It is quite disconnected from the sentence subject ‘he,’ as well as the indirect object, ‘son.’ ‘He gave his son a horse, which, by the way, was brown.’
He gave his son a horse, which caught me by surprise.
Here you have a special case: a clause expressing a result of an action. ‘He’ gave his son a horse and the result was that ‘I’ was caught by surprise. In such a case, the usual glue that would glue the ‘which’ onto the adjacent ‘horse’ comes unstuck, and the attachment of the clause goes back to ‘he’ and his actions. ‘He gave his son a horse and thus he caught me by surprise.’ You could look at the original sentence as a short form of ‘He gave his son a horse, an action that caught me by surprise.’ There could be a participial version of the same thought: ‘He gave his son a horse, catching me by surprise.’
A device that is even stronger than ‘comma + which’ for cutting a descriptive phrase off from the main grammatical subject is to use a semicolon and start a new clause with a pronoun or a noun as the subject.
He gave his son a horse; it was brown.
That device would have worked just fine for the author of ‘the monster sentence.’
Of the 19 typable microsatellite markers developed, we used the most polymorphic loci, Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13; these loci revealed four and five alleles within the M. canis set of strains, respectively
The semicolon trick still doesn’t completely eliminate the magnetic attraction of the main subject in a clause or phrase indicating a result:
He gave his son a horse; it caught me by surprise.
This version is a weak, ambiguous sentence where we’re not sure if the ‘it’ that caused surprise was ‘his’ act of giving, or the horse itself. But a tweak can be done to clearly attach the surprise to ‘him’ and his giving:
He gave his son a horse; this caught me by surprise.
Once you’ve inserted a semicolon, you’re 98% of the way to having made two separate sentences, which is often the best idea in any case.
He gave his son a horse. It was brown.
There, ‘it’ can only refer to the horse. But:
He gave his son a horse. It caught me by surprise.
This is, again, ambiguous – the magnetism of the subject ‘he’ is still pulling strongly, even extending into the next sentence, but we’re not sure if it has connected to the thing that ‘caught me by surprise.’ But, again, a simple tweak can clarify the matter:
He gave his son a horse. This caught me by surprise.
Here, the magneto-pull of the subject of the first sentence is still working at nearly full strength. This is generally true when the next sentence begins with ‘this’ or ‘that’ as its subject, unless a new subject is clearly inserted, as with horse, below.
He gave his son a horse. This horse caught me by surprise. (It wasn’t a racehorse as I’d expected, but rather a huge Clydesdale draught horse.)
Even though I’ve been emphasizing the most common type of case where the grammatical subject is coordinating subsequent phrases, there are cases in complex sentences where the magnetic powers may transfer over to later nouns. In one of the problem sentences from the CTV News, you can see a case where the grammatical object (in bold-face) was clearly being described by the descriptive phrases that followed it.
‘Her husband criticizes the government there for only giving her 30 minutes of training before treating two Ebola patients.’
Here, technically, the whole phrase ‘for only giving her 30 minutes of training before treating two Ebola patients’ could be seen as a long adverbial description attached to the verb ‘criticizes.’ The content of the phrase, however, clearly hooks itself to ‘the government’ as soon as the verb ‘to give’ comes along: “the government (gave) her only 30 minutes of training before treating two Ebola patients.” Once the descriptive phrases have started coordinating around ‘the government,’ there is no way that a participial phrase like ‘treating two Ebola patients’ can become attached to the nurse identified as ‘her.’ ‘The government’ has a lot of potential coordinating power as the main object of the sentence, while ‘her’ is in a very lowly position as an indirect object of a prepositional descriptive clause, ‘for only giving her 30 minutes of training.’ That’s why the sentence, in grammar, gives the absurd impression that the government is treating Ebola patients. The nurse has to be introduced as a new subject of a clause – in this case, a prepositional clause starting with the preposition ‘before’ – before she can successfully take over the treatment of the patients.
‘Her husband criticizes the government there for only giving her 30 minutes of training before she was assigned to treat two Ebola patients.’
We’ll just do one more variation on this theme of the relationship of grammatical subjects and participial descriptive phrases. Have a look at this lightly creolized sentence:
Some species of Tilachlidium have been known to produce important antibiotics and novel compounds which are cytotoxic to leukemia cells, highlighting their potential exploitation in medical applications.
The sentence shows an attempt to add a participial phrase of result onto the end of the sentence in the correct way. The problem is, though, that the first part of the sentence is too complex to allow this to be done cleanly. There is a principal clause that includes a subject, ‘species,’ a verbal expression ‘have been known to produce,’ and a direct object, ‘antibiotics.’ Then the author lists a second, parallel direct object connected by an ‘and,’ conjunction, namely, ‘compounds.’ The second object then becomes the coordinator of a subordinate clause in which it is followed by another verb form, ‘are,’ a descriptive complement, ‘cytotoxic,’ and a prepositional phrase, ‘to leukemia cells.’ By the time we get to ‘highlighting,’ we have read through a subject, an object, another object that has become a secondary subject, and another prominent noun, ‘cells.’ The word ‘highlighting’ is so obviously unrelated to any of the nouns we’ve read that we can see it must announce an evaluation or an overall result. It is followed, however, by ‘their,’ and the attachment of this word is deeply uncertain. Study of the sentence shows that the author intends ‘their’ to refer all the way back to the principal subject, ‘species,’ in the phrase ‘some species of Tilachlidium.’ ‘Their,’ however, is separated from ‘species’ by so many other elements that a reader reading at normal reading speed is essentially forced to try linking it with all later possibilities first: ‘cells,’ ‘compounds,’ ‘antibiotics’ and then, finally, ‘species.’ The sentence is a boot-sucking swamp of alternate possibilities that need to be examined and rejected.
A possible remedy, if one naively wishes to keep this sentence in one piece, is to get rid of ‘their’ and to insert a subject into the participial clause to clarify what that clause refers to.
Some species of Tilachlidium have been shown to produce important antibiotics, as well as novel compounds that are cytotoxic to leukemia cells, discoveries highlighting the potential for exploitation of these fungi in medical applications.
As I mentioned above, though, such lengthy and difficult sentences are themselves a sign of ISC. I have formulated an unspoken general law that ISC writers appear to believe in: it says, ‘as many thoughts as possible related to a given topic should be strung together in the same sentence.’ I don’t know if this rule derives from any particular non-English language, or if it simply stems from nervousness about logical connections in English. ISC writers, for whatever reason, appear to feel that writing short sentences will destroy their logic, breaking connections among the items they are writing about. They are especially paranoid if the string of thoughts relates to a single reference article they are citing in the text. Therefore, they strongly tend to write sentences that go on, and on, and on, and on, going on beyond going on until they can’t go on any more, unless there is still some remaining nervousness about whether they should go on still further, in which case the authors proceed to go on at additional length, and continue to do so until all remaining possibility of addition has been exhausted, or nearly so, as far as they can tell. These authors, I would say, greatly underestimate the power of English grammatical subjects to hold thoughts together from one sentence to another. Here’s a two-sentence rewrite of the Tilachlidium sentence, slightly beautified.
Some species of Tilachlidium have been shown to produce important antibiotics, as well as novel compounds that are cytotoxic to leukemia cells. Such discoveries highlight the potential value of these fungi in medical applications.
In this version, there is no difficulty connecting ‘these fungi’ in the second sentence to ‘species of Tilachlidium,’ the grammatical subject of the first sentence. The intervening period and the initiation of a new sentence have not in any way weakened the link between ‘species’ and ‘these,’ the backwards-pointing ‘determiner’ used in the phrase, ‘these fungi.’
That two-sentence solution eliminates the participial part of the sentence. We can live without it in this case and many others – but ISC writers would not be the first people to think so. They have a great love of participial clauses and phrases. I’ll say more about that romance in a few paragraphs. For now, I’ll simply summarize by saying that anyone using these phrases has to be aware of their strong loyalty to the main grammatical subject of the sentences they are placed in, or to later nouns that have become the main focus of description.
Before I go further, I need to point out that English has a separate category of participial phrases that, by nature, are completely disconnected from the main grammatical subjects of the sentences they reside in. These phrases are called ‘disjuncts.’ Usually they consist of side-comments on what the main part of the sentence is going to say, or has said. Here’s an example: ‘Speaking of unexpected events, my nephew called last night.’ In this kind of sentence, there’s no expectation at all that the nephew, the grammatical subject of the sentence, will have been ‘speaking of unexpected events.’ This is not a misplaced participial phrase at all. The ‘disjunct’ format is a completely distinct mechanism that allows a second level of logic to comment on the main logic of the sentence. Here’s another example: ‘Strictly speaking, he wasn’t entirely qualified for the job.’ Again, there is no implication that ‘he,’ the subject, is speaking strictly. An outside commenter is obviously doing the strict speaking.
Not all disjuncts involve participles. Quirk et al. give examples like: ‘In short, she is mad but happy’ and ‘If I may say so, that dress doesn’t suit you.’ (The disjunct phrases are in italics.) My point in raising this ‘disjunct’ topic is simply to prevent you, my reader, from being puzzled when you come across odd participial phrases that seem to have no affinity whatever for the main grammatical subjects of the sentences they appear in. They don’t contradict what I’ve been saying.
Now, to come back to the love affair between ISC writers and the participial phrase, let’s review a few examples, including some we’ve seen before. I’ll add my suggested rewrites where you haven’t seen them before.
Her husband criticizes the government there for only giving her 30 minutes of training before treating two Ebola patients.
Of the 19 typable microsatellite markers developed, we used the most polymorphic loci, Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13, revealing four and five alleles within the M. canis set of strains, respectively.
Some species of Tilachlidium have been known to produce important antibiotics and novel compounds which are cytotoxic to leukemia cells, highlighting their potential exploitation in medical applications.
They are distinguished by the formation of lateral phialidic pegs, which are not commonly found in Fusarium, and producing 1–2-septate macroconidia.
(Rewrite: They are distinguished by the formation of lateral phialidic pegs, which are not commonly found in Fusarium, and by the production of 1–2-septate macroconidia. It would also be OK, though not as good, to say ‘and by producing 1–2-septate macroconidia.’)
Clade 10 includes genera having fusarium-like asexual morphs generally associated with other fungal hosts or as entomogenous fungi.
(Rewrite: Clade 10 includes genera with fusarium-like asexual morphs. These fungi are mostly pathogens of insects or of other fungi.)
Now compare a completely non-scientific example. My partner and I employ a cleaner, a woman who comes to our house for a few hours every Monday. She is an Azorean, speaking Portuguese as a first language, who has lived in Canada for over 30 years but has learned English only on the job. She wanted to tell me that she’d put a package of paper towel rolls that had been placed in a corner of the living room into the basement, a more appropriate place for it. Her phrasing was, “The paper towel staying here, I put over there.” She pointed at the two locations in turn. The meaning was, of course, ‘the paper towel that was here, I put over there.’
Can you see large, painted sea canoes in your imagination when you hear that phrasing? I can.
The present participle is becoming a mamook.
Just as the speakers of Middle English began to use the present participle for anything having a continuous aspect, so that ‘He goeth to the church’ became ‘He is going to the church,’ so, now, the present participle is being used by international speakers as a ‘default phrase’ to signify all sorts of actions that show an ongoing component. The rule of ISC seems to be, ‘if you’re not sure exactly which English expression to use, and the action you’re describing has a long-lasting or continuing element, use the present participle.’ What worked for medieval and Renaissance English speakers is back working again for the international speakers who are sub-creolizing English today. So far, no distinct alternative logic has emerged to rule how the new uses of present participles should be made regular. As you have seen, though, the ‘continuous process’ motif of the ISC present participle has become so well accepted that it passes nearly unnoticed on the national news of a major English-speaking nation.
Her husband criticizes the government there for only giving her 30 minutes of training before (the relatively long-lasting process of treating) two Ebola patients (went on).
It goes over well in published science.
Of the 19 typable microsatellite markers developed, we used the most polymorphic loci, Mc(GT)17 and Mc(GT)13, (which, as we used them, were ongoingly found to be revealing) four and five alleles within (our) M. canis set of strains, respectively.
And it’s perfectly understandable at home.
“The paper towel (that for an unknown period of time was staying) here, I put over there.”
There is a germ of logical consistency there, a feeling of continuation or of things standing still, that might lead to the development of a grammar someday. Perhaps it will happen sooner than we think. In the meantime, we have the fun of seeing a mamooking process in progress – perhaps to succeed in transforming English, or perhaps to be mowed back down by prescriptive grammar. ‘We will see in time, being the final judge of all linguistic questions of right and wrong.’ That sentence may be grammatically correct someday.
She is a stronger person with abilities similar to an all-star wrestler, and this is proven already in a number of contests, arranged by the physical education department of the SVTG (n=15).
This sentence from our ISC ‘tall girl’ passage starts off with another emblem of technical creole, the item I call a ‘naked comparative.’ In less scandalous sources, it tends to be called a ‘null comparative.’ “She is a stronger person,” is the phrase I’m talking about. Stronger than what? Stronger than who? (or ‘stronger than whom?’ if you want to be formal).
Mary McCaskill, in the NASA handbook, is blunt about such phrasing. “Unless the standard of comparison is clear, comparisons are meaningless,” she says sternly. She then gives an excellent example of ISC in engineering-speak: “At the higher angles of attack, flow separation is extensive.” With a karate call of ‘hai!’ she then chops off an ‘-er,’ knocks out a ‘the,’ and sets this sentence into correct form: “At high angles of attack, flow separation is extensive.”
I agree with her black-belt approach. After all, what are ‘the high-er angles?’ If you’re going to deal in vague things, why introduce extra-vague things that are vaguer than your original vague things? A phrase like ‘at high angles’ is itself open to interpretation, since it doesn’t state how high you need to angle upwards to reach an angle that can be called ‘high’. Nothing is gained by using a comparative to give you a more complex, vague concept that needs to be dealt with.
(You may be wondering now why my last sentence wasn’t itself a ‘naked comparative.’ There was a ‘more’ there that wasn’t coupled with any succeeding ‘than.’ The answer to your perceptive question is that it’s OK to use a comparative when the standard of comparison has been made clear in a previous sentence or clause. Here’s a simplified example.
His cousin owned twelve apartments in Mayfair. She owned even more apartments in Kensington.
That contrast is just fine; it’s a fully elaborated comparison showing both items that are being compared. You could consider the second sentence to be a short version, with ellipsis, of “She owned even more apartments than that in Kensington.” The italicized bit can be subtracted because its content is already fully implied. The fully extended sentence, with no ellipsis at all, would be ‘She owned even more apartments in Kensington than she owned in Mayfair.’ Using extreme ellipsis, you could contract the two-sentence passage still further to: “His cousin owned twelve apartments in Mayfair. She owned even more in Kensington.” In speech, where you could say ‘even more’ with special emphasis as ‘èvén mòre,’ this would be the normal approach.
Now, back to my sentence that talks about the ‘more complex, vague concept.’ Let’s abbreviate my wording to make the comparison obvious:
The phrase ‘at high angles’ is itself open to interpretation... Nothing is gained by using a comparative to give you a more complex, vague concept that needs to be dealt with.
Even in this rewrite, you still have to live with the idea that, in a properly formed comparison, the ‘phrase’ mentioned in sentence 1 can be compared directly with the ‘concept’ mentioned in sentence 2. Since the phrase ‘at high angles’ clearly relates to a concept – a geometric concept – the passage’s direct contrast of ‘phrase’ with ‘concept’ seems understandable. I’m using this example to show that English isn’t rigid and overrun by dictatorial grammar or style laws. There’s lots of flexibility about comparisons, as long as you keep your logic clear.)
Wikipedia points out that naked comparatives are most frequently seen in advertising – a field where clear logic is not always the top priority. One of the most successful advertising campaigns of my youth was the Avis car rental firm’s campaign featuring the phrase, ‘We try harder,’ short for ‘We’re number two. We try harder.’ At the time, Avis advertisers were not legally allowed to come out directly and say, in proper comparative style, ‘We try harder than Hertz, the number one car rental agency.’ The campaign therefore produced naked-comparative buttons you could pin on your shirt saying ‘We try harder’ in red Avis typography. It was a worldwide campaign, and the buttons were produced in multiple languages. I’m sure you can guess that I had to collect all the languages. I had an Avis button in Welsh that I wore proudly to my Boy Scout camps, featuring an inscrutable phrase full of consonants (‘Ymdrechwn yn galetach’ – ‘We strive harder’).
Imagine the dismay of grammarians to see a worldwide campaign promoting an error in English writing style to the far corners of the Earth. Even worse, the campaign was also trying to produce parallel naked-comparative phrasing in every other major language of worldwide commerce – not to mention Latin (‘Fortius conamur’) and Navajo (‘Táá yedigo ádeit’i’). This campaign led to some odd constructions like ‘we do still more our best’ on the most common Dutch button (‘Wij doen nòg meer ons best’) and ‘we do more to satisfy you’ on the French (Nous faisons plus pour vous satisfaire).
Perhaps the world will never be the same after the success of the ‘we try harder’ campaign. The popularity of naked comparatives in technical writing may even owe some of its popularity to the car rental business. In response to this fashion, we fans of written logic can only resolve to ‘do still more our best.’
Naked comparatives are perfect as advertising slogans. “Our burgers are juicier” makes no exact promise, and doesn’t send you to any selected competing burger to give it a juiciness comparison test. If the competition comes out with a burger that is so juicy it requires its weight in accompanying napkins, the original advertisers can still say that their burgers are juicier than every other sensible burger. ‘We didn’t say they were the juiciest,’ they may note. ‘Our burgers are juicier’ almost sounds like a superlative – ‘our burgers are juicier than any other burgers’ – but it isn’t one. The phrase still leaves room for another dripping, gushing burger to come out at the top of the juicy list, while ‘our burgers’ are merely juicier than the runny runners-up.
Now, why a naked comparison construction would be used by anyone writing something more precise, like a scientific or technical document, is harder to understand. Haha, that’s a joke. In fact, my helpful word-processing software has just underlined it as a grammatically incorrect joke. Even machines understand these matters. And so should we, then, right? We don’t want to end up concluding that ‘computers are higher in intelligence.’
There. That’s settled. But wait – not so fast. Where’s the obnoxious English ‘exception to the rules’ that we always need to make? In this case, to begin with, there are a few fixed expressions like ‘higher education’ and ‘the younger generation’ where naked comparatives have become firmly accepted in daily language. A bigger exception is seen in the word ‘further,’ originally the comparative of ‘far.’ It has developed a new life as an adjective meaning ‘additional’ – ‘further work is necessary’ – and as an adverbial logical abstraction – ‘and further, your laundry is all over the couch.’ Using ‘further,’ you can even combine two comparatives together as ‘furthermore,’ a word that has no equivalent among other comparatives – ‘and biggermore, you’re eating yet another piece of pie.’ Perhaps such phrasing would be useful, but it doesn’t exist. We’ll come back to ‘furthermore’ shortly.
I should note that ‘moreover’ is a conjunctive adverb that, like ‘furthermore,’ is based on a naked comparative.
We should now move on to the next problem in our current ‘tall girl’ sentence. Let’s take another look at its first clause.
She is a stronger person with abilities similar to an all-star wrestler…
‘Abilities similar to an all-star wrestler,’ it says. Can we accept that there’s an ‘ability’ that is ‘similar to’ a wrestler? That must be like a ‘capacity’ that’s similar to a boxer, or a ‘talent’ that looks, feels and smells like a janitor. I don’t need to stretch the point – this phrasing is illogical. I don’t doubt that the creole speaker who wrote the ‘tall girl’ paragraph (my ISC alter-ego) intended to say ‘She is a relatively strong person with abilities similar to those of an all-star wrestler.’ He or she made a mistake, however, in thinking that good old English ellipsis could be used to chop an object of comparison right out of the sentence.
A comparison contrasts two or more items, and, in English, these items must in some way be lined up in parallel so that their contrasts can be clearly seen. The tall girl, we’re told, has abilities ‘similar to’ the (parallel) abilities of an all-star wrestler. To avoid verbal repetition, the abilities of the wrestler can be indicated with a demonstrative pronoun – ‘those’ – but they must be visible in the sentence.
Here, the last major theme of this chapter begins to emerge: parallelism. It’s where the chickens of English mamooking come home to roost. In linear, parallel rows.
Languages like Latin, with their case, gender and number endings labelling the parts of speech, are like tribal armies. ‘Subjects, you hold red banners; direct objects, take the blue; you ablatives, whatever you are, take the green banners.’ If you think of sentences as being battles against an enemy called ‘confusion,’ a Latin sentence was like a scene from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The dwarves showed up with their beards and axes, the hobbits with their borrowed swords and furry feet, the Entish trees with their deadly branches creaking, and so on. These parts of speech were dedicated to a common cause and they all knew what to do with themselves. They only needed to be given a basic plan and a rousing blast on the Roman buccina horn, and they assembled to produce an orderly force no matter where they were deployed.
English, on the other hand, is much more like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The troops have lost most of their distinguishing marks and desperately need leadership to pull them together.
Here’s Tolstoy’s naïve fifteen-year-old hero, Petya Rostov, riding away from Napoleon’s invading French army and towards the friendly Russian and Austrian allies at the Battle of Austerlitz.
Suddenly, he heard musket fire quite close in front of him and behind our troops, where he could never have expected the enemy to be.
"What can it be?" he thought. "The enemy in the rear of our army? Impossible!" And suddenly he was seized by a panic of fear for himself and for the issue of the whole battle. …
"What does it mean? What is it? Whom are they firing at? Who is firing?" Rostov kept asking as he came up to Russian and Austrian soldiers running in confused crowds across his path.
"The devil knows! They've killed everybody! It's all over now!" he was told in Russian, German, and Czech by the crowd of fugitives who understood what was happening as little as he did.
"Kill the Germans!" shouted one.
"May the devil take them—the traitors!"
"Zum Henker diese Russen!" muttered a German. ("Hang these Russians!")
Several wounded men passed along the road, and words of abuse, screams, and groans mingled in a general hubbub, then the firing died down. Rostov learned later that Russian and Austrian soldiers had been firing at one another.
Now, here is a sentence that, to an editor, represents the same kind of utterly confused battle scene:
Diagnostic delay could be shortened with heightened diagnostic acumen whilst outcome improved with adequate dosage and earlier administration of antibiotics, removal of central lines, more effective correction of risk factors e.g. neutropenia, rationalization of antibiotic use and intensive care.
Did we just see ‘intensive care’ being called a ‘risk factor’ there? Were we being advised to ‘rationalize’ it? In all the smoke, it’s hard to tell. To bring order to the allied forces of logic and English, seen shooting at one another in this quotation, we need more than just a strong officer. We also need a chain of command. We need subordinate officers who can hear the commands of the general and bring order to their own parts of the sentence. The completely disordered foot-soldiers, the words, need to be lined up in proper ranks, so that they can convey logic effectively.
The general, in an English sentence, is the main grammatical subject. If the sentence has any subordinate clauses in it – sub-sections coordinating around separate subjects of their own – then the subjects of the clauses serve as high-ranking colonels reporting to the general. The key to English sentence order, though, is in one of the lower ranks of command – the sergeants. I’ll say more about them in a moment.
Firstly, though, I’ll give you a few tips about how to find the subjects of English sentences and clauses. Subjects, classically, are always nouns (words that answer the question “what is this?”) or other parts of speech that function as nouns. An example of one of the ‘other parts of speech’ that can substitute for a noun is the ‘gerund.’ Gerunds are noun-like words based on verbs; they are said to ‘name the action of the verb.’ They look identical to present participles, and, just like present participles, they always end in ‘-ing.’ Here’s a typical example of a gerund in action: ‘Baking is my favourite activity.’ There, ‘baking’ is the subject of the sentence. Turn the sentence around as ‘My favourite activity is baking,’ and the grammatical subject becomes the abstract noun ‘activity.’ ‘Baking,’ in the second case, serves as the ‘object complement.’ It is still essentially acting as a noun, even in that role.
On the other hand, look at the sentence, ‘Baking cookies from a new recipe every day, I soon became a master cookie chef.’ There, the word ‘baking’ is acting not as a noun, but rather as the head of an adjectival descriptive clause depicting what ‘I’ am doing. The subject of the whole sentence, as you’ve probably guessed, is ‘I.’ A major reason ‘baking’ isn’t qualified to be the subject there is that words serving as adjectives or adverbs can’t be sentence subjects. In such a case, an ‘-ing’ word serving as a descriptor, rather than as a noun, is considered to be a participle rather than a gerund. That may seem complicated, but one soon develops a feeling for it.
Pronouns like ‘I’ and ‘you’ may also serve as sentence subjects, but not when they are in the form of direct objects (‘me,’ ‘them’). ‘Possessive determiners’ (‘my,’ ‘your’) can’t be sentence subjects, but possessive pronouns (‘mine,’ ‘yours’) can. (‘Mine is the best poodle in the dog show’).
A few odd, relatively complex parts of speech that can serve as sentence subjects in special cases are:
- ‘full “that” clauses’ (‘That he had gone to China was the key to his success’),
- freestanding relative clauses (‘Whatever I said to you while drunk was not meant to be taken seriously’), and
- quotations, real or imaginary (‘“I am smarter than you are”’seemed to be the constant theme of his conversation.’).
In simple sentences, the subject is often the first noun you see (‘A wild turkey flew at my motorcycle’). In more complex sentences, you may need to search for it. It is often found at the head of a clause that looks ‘straightforward,’ that is, one that doesn’t start with something like an adverb, a conjunction, a participle or a preposition. These sorts of items tend to reveal clauses that are serving as descriptive subclauses of more important clauses.
Here, below, is an example where I deliberately put a smokescreen of nouns and subclauses into a descriptive passage that comes before the main subject.
While driving my car through the rain that pummelled over the road and the nearby trailer park, I watched the surrounding fields nervously for signs of approaching tornadoes.
Here, ‘I’ is the ranking general, the main subject of the sentence. The first word in the sentence, ‘while,’ is a conjunction. It tips you off that the clause it begins probably serves as a descriptor of the main subject. Indeed, the sentence could be awkwardly rearranged as “I, while driving my car through the rain that pummelled over the road and the nearby trailer park, watched the surrounding fields nervously….” One item you can see inside the ‘while’ clause is a subclause coordinating with a subject of its own, ‘the rain that pummelled over the road and the nearby trailer park.’ As a colonel overseeing its small company of troops, the noun rain coordinates what you might call ‘a two-part parallel structure’: “rain that pummelled over the road’ and ‘[rain that pummelled over] the nearby trailer park.” That’s a significant responsibility in English text.
In commanding its subclause troops, however, this colonel doesn’t need to act alone. It has the assistance of a sergeant, the preposition ‘over.’ This preposition further coordinates the parallel status of the places where rain fell. The ‘rain’ subclause would not seem awkward if it were rewritten as ‘the rain that pummelled over the road and over the nearby trailer park.’ In my sentence as I wrote it, though, the parallel structure that lines up the rain pummelling over the road with the rain pummelling over the nearby trailer park is so clear that the second ‘over’ can be omitted. Prepositions like ‘over’ (or ‘in,’ ‘by,’ ‘on,’ etc.) often serve as sergeants coordinating parallel structures like this.
A stylistically risky sentence taken from earlier in this book gives a good example of two things I’ve been talking about here, the generalship of the main subject, and the discipline exerted by prepositions as sergeants.
In Cantonese, the spoken conversational language is kept out of print (except in dramatic scripts) and out of official use, a situation that stresses the idea that it is merely a local dialect.
First, give yourself an exam here. What is the main grammatical subject of this sentence? It isn’t ‘Cantonese,’ the first noun that appears (‘Cantonese,’ though originally derived as a descriptive adjective, is serving as a proper noun here). “In Cantonese” is a prepositional descriptive clause, headed by the preposition ‘in.’ That clause, even though it comes first in the sentence, is a low-ranking subordinate of the main subject. The overall sentence subject, then, is the word ‘language,’ or, in the viewpoint of some linguists, the whole phrase ‘the spoken conversational language.’ This general is well served by a sergeant, the preposition ‘out,’ who appears in two places to coordinate the verb ‘kept’ with two phrases, ‘out of print’ and ‘out of official use.’
The sentence’s bracketed phrase about dramatic scripts is an interruption that makes repeating the preposition a good stylistic idea. If the phrase in brackets were gone, we could consider saying ‘the spoken conversational language is kept out of print and official use, a situation that...’ With the interruption in place, however, we’re definitely better off seeing the sergeant explicitly standing there, at attention, to link ‘of official use’ to ‘kept out.’ Meanwhile, the main subject’s high level of authority as a general is shown by its ability to grab and hold the word ‘it’ in the clause ‘it is merely a local dialect’ as an undisputed pronoun reference back to itself. The link there is clear, even though two lower ranking subjects, ‘situation’ and ‘idea,’ have been inserted between ‘language’ and ‘it.’ That’s power.
Sergeants in parallel structures may be promoted from the ranks of many different types of words, parts of words, and whole phrases. The important thing is that each element of a parallel structure must be kept in order by the same sergeant. Some types of sergeants have to make a personal appearance in each element of the parallel structure, but others, like prepositions, can sometimes be hidden by ellipsis.
As the Purdue University ‘Owl’ (Online Writing Lab) website points out, gerunds that are not serving as the subject of the sentence can be promoted as sergeants of parallelism. The coordinating officer here is shown in boldface type.
The boy was good at catching, pitching and batting.
Infinitives can also be promoted to Parallel Sergeant.
He was happy to know her, to see her, and to be accepted into her presence.
Unlike gerunds, they can often relax and partly disappear into ellipsis if the writer wishes.
He was happy to know her, see her, and be accepted into her presence.
It’s a major style error in English to confuse the sergeant you’re using with another officer. Each unit commander demands respect and doesn’t want another officer around giving conflicting orders.
On Saturdays, he especially liked playing soccer, go-karting, and to go to the skate park with his friends.
The example sentence above is a shouting match between two sergeants, Sgt. Gerund and Sgt. Infinitive. The English language is not built to withstand the stress of having two commanders competing for the same little unit of parallel, marching troops. The words, the troops, have to line up in their parallel columns following the lead of just one logical commander. Here’s a thoroughly lined-up version:
On Saturdays, he especially liked playing soccer, going go-karting, and going skateboarding with his friends at the skate park.
The adverbial ending ‘-ly’ is powerful enough to serve as a parallelism sergeant.
I think you dance beautifully, passionately and, if I may say so, mesmerizingly.
As I mentioned above, any preposition can also run a parallel squad.
The hungry falcon hunted for its prey, zooming over the houses, over the parks and over the nearby river.
The Purdue website offers an excellent example of a writer who tried to set up a fight between the judgmental Sgt. Adverb and the highly restraining Sgt. In of the prepositional unit.
The production manager was asked to write his report quickly, accurately, and in a detailed manner.
The website authors then show the corrected sentence in which Adverb regains full command.
The production manager was asked to write his report quickly, accurately, and thoroughly.
If Sgt. In were detailed to take over the sentence, she would feel powerful enough to use ellipsis:
The production manager was asked to write his report in a rapid, accurate, and detailed manner. (… in a rapid [manner, in an] accurate [manner, and in a] detailed manner).
Working with the military can be demanding. Even when the sergeants involved in parallel structures have successfully established sole command, they may still complain that uncooperative writers have denied them the parallel columns of troops they need. Here’s an example from the Purdue website where the conjunction ‘because,’ while trying to accomplish an ellipsis, couldn’t do so because the writer had issued him the wrong pronoun in one of the three parallel columns involved. Column one and two in this example both rely on ‘he,’ while the out-of-uniform corporal stuck at the head of column three is a ‘his.’ Also, columns one and two feature past-tense action verbs ending in -ed, ‘waited’ and ‘completed,’ while column three has a past-tense copula, ‘was.’
The teacher said that he was a poor student because he waited until the last minute to study for the exam, completed his lab problems in a careless manner, and his motivation was low.
Analytically,
The teacher said that he was a poor student because he waited until the last minute to study for the exam, [because he] completed his lab problems in a careless manner, and [because] his motivation was low.
Swearwords!! (Choose three or four of your own favourites and yell them here.) You can’t run a bloody army that way!! Correction needed, on the double!!
Here’s the website’s correction.
The teacher said that he was a poor student because he waited until the last minute to study for the exam, completed his lab problems in a careless manner, and lacked motivation.
That’s an ellipsis of “The teacher said that he was a poor student because he waited until the last minute to study for the exam, [because he] completed his lab problems in a careless manner, and [because he] lacked motivation.”
With a proper ‘he’ corporal serving in each of the three columns of words, the orderliness was so strong that two of the corporals could take a tea break.
‘Lacked’ isn’t an action verb, so, to a diligent English editor, the official Purdue rewrite still seems slightly ‘off.’ The rewrite also leaves unsolved the logical problem that the student’s first two faults, ‘waiting too long’ and ‘completing assignments carelessly,’ are probably logical subsets of the third fault, ‘lacking motivation.’ So there is a ‘set logic’ problem here that we could try to solve along with the structural English problems. Below, I’ve inserted the phrase ‘in general’ to indicate ‘there’s a superior-ranking set coming here.’
The teacher said that he was a poor student because he waited until the last minute to study for the exam, completed his lab problems in a careless manner, and, in general, allowed his motivation to lapse.
Now there, we accuse the poor student of deliberately letting his motivation go, whereas in reality, he may not have been focused enough to do that. It’s hard to find a real action word that fits the idea we’re putting across in part 3 of our parallel structure. Perhaps the best solution, then, is to use a fake action – the biologist’s trick of depicting observable features as actions (as we saw with the seagulls whose beaks ‘displayed’ a black ring):
The teacher said that he was a poor student because he waited until the last minute to study for the exam, completed his lab problems in a careless manner, and, in general, demonstrated poor motivation.
There, I think, our English troops have lined up with logic to form an impressive military line that will properly scare the student into smartening up.
If the sergeant, ‘because,’ is sent in physically to supervise the head of each column in the poorly written original sentence, something that crudely functions as a parallel structure emerges:
The teacher said that he was a poor student because he waited until the last minute to study for the exam, because he completed his lab problems in a careless manner, and because his motivation was low.
You can see how wordy, awkward and stilted that is. You don’t want to go there. Let your commanders be efficient. Parallelize your logical columns.
The more complicated sentences are, the more likely writers are to ignore parallelism, or to give up on it because it seems too difficult to use.
The professor advised her students that they should work at least six days a week, they should take only half-hour meal breaks, and also not to be distracted by emotional issues.
Here is a structure where the conjunction ‘that,’ serving as sergeant, has been given the prestigious task of ordering three columns that are each to be inspected by Colonel ‘They,’ the subject of three subclauses. The appearance of such an important senior officer must be taken with utmost seriousness. Col. They, in fact, will be personally served in each clause by a modal auxiliary, Lt. ‘Should.’ Imagine the embarrassment, then, when the sentence appears in print and one column has lost not only its connection to Col. They and Lt. Should, but also, is being overseen by an out-of-uniform infinitive, ‘to be.’ People have been thrown into the brig for days for lesser offences.
Correction!
The professor advised her students that they should work at least six days a week, take only half-hour meal breaks, and never let themselves be distracted by emotional issues.
With efficiency humming properly, both the Colonel and the Lieutenant need only appear once. Their other coordinating activities can work behind the scenes.
Finally, here’s an example where the grammatical ‘voice’ of a passage can have a coordinating role in a parallel structure.
During my camping weekend, I canoed from Lake Scugog to Sturgeon Lake, fished in the Scugog River, and, incidentally, was bitten by many mosquitoes.
The role of coordinating sergeant in this sentence is played by the active past tense, which is clearly seen in canoed and fished, but is definitely not present in ‘was bitten.’ ‘Was bitten’ is in the passive voice. That’s like finding out, in the midst of your military drill, that all the soldiers in one of your columns have fainted on the parade grounds. Not good. Putting ‘incidentally’ into the sentence as an attempt to block the view doesn’t hide the disaster. Let’s wake that third column up.
During my camping weekend, I canoed from Lake Scugog to Sturgeon Lake, fished in the Scugog River, and, incidentally, fed many mosquitoes their happy meal of the day.
Eliminating the passive voice often forces you to write something vivid.
My solution may seem wrong if you think about the range of people who might write this sentence. Perhaps the writer is a 12-year-old writing home to his parents. How likely is he to get so colourfully literary as to say he fed mosquitoes? If he wanted to write a good sentence and still be a shy teen, he could easily use a handy English trick
During my camping weekend, I canoed from Lake Scugog to Sturgeon Lake, fished in the Scugog River – and got bitten by many mosquitoes.
The expression ‘got bitten’ is too slangy for formal text, but you can see why it exists. It turns a boring, passive scenario – I was bitten by mosquitoes – into a personal action drama where the speaker ‘gets’ (takes possession of) his experience – I got bitten by mosquitoes. I ‘got eaten alive,’ as Canadians often say when they go up north. As with the pseudo-active structure ‘demonstrated poor motivation’ in the previous sentence we looked at, ‘got bitten by mosquitoes’ fakes a personal action in a way that helps an author who wants to write reasonably lively sentences, even in emails to his parents.
With some biting of the fingernails, I think we may now be ready to look at what happens to parallel structure in the world of ISC. Our introduction to this topic is found in the next two sentences of the ‘Tall Girl’ paragraph.
She has won contests in Europe, North America, and outstandingly performed in the game of football. Furthermore, she has in the past years also presented a high performance in association with school work, and remained pleasant in personal characters being very kind to: family members, (boy-) friends, pet animals e.g. dogs, sports officials and teachers.
The first sentence is a shouting match. To begin with, there are two phrases coordinating directly with the main subject, ‘she:’ ‘has won contests…’ and ‘[has] outstandingly performed…’ There are also two place-names coordinating with ‘won contests in,’ ‘Europe’ and ‘North America.’ These two coordinations are not getting along together well at all.
In the parallel structure involving the main subject ‘she,’ the second coordinating phrase, starting with ‘[has] outstandingly,’ is fairly distant from the subject. Let’s be cautious and take away the veil of ellipsis from ‘has,’ putting it back into its second coordinating position.
She has won contests in Europe, North America, and has outstandingly performed in the game of football.
Suddenly, you have a sentence that even our creole-speaking author could surely see was having trouble. That crazy author (me) has tried to fuse two different lists into one list, an effort that didn’t work at all. Why did he or she do this? My theory, derived from studying hundreds of similar examples, is that, in most cases, the author is trying desperately not to repeat the word ‘and.’ He or she is convinced that to do so is a forbidden kind of repetition. In Anglo-reality, however, the simplest correction of the sentence’s parallel structure features two closely situated ‘and’s.
She has won contests in Europe and North America, and has outstandingly performed in the game of football.
I always tell struggling authors my number one rule of parallel structure: “every logically separate list that appears within a sentence deserves to have an ‘and’ of its own.” Sometimes, mind you, the phrase ‘as well as’ can be used as a secondary ‘and,’ for the sake of variety. Occasionally, ‘while’ can also take over this role. ‘George and Henry can take the bag of groceries and the case of beer, as well as a flashlight and a fishing rod, while you can take the boombox.’
Now, back to our main sentence. If you put the adverb ‘outstandingly’ in its preferred English position behind ‘performed,’ and change the logically redundant ‘game of football’ (we don’t need to be told football is a game) to ‘football matches’ then you have my suggested correction:
She has won competitions in Europe and North America, and has also performed outstandingly in football matches.
In the correction of the full paragraph this sentence comes from, I put in a logical link to the previous sentence: “She has won such competitions…” I don’t think we need to discuss that addition in detail. It just helps with the flow and the logical integration of the paragraph.
I will remark momentarily on why English speakers prefer ‘performed outstandingly’ to ‘outstandingly performed’ in our sentence. We simply have the custom of putting adverbs after verbs (‘he did well’ rather than ‘he well did’), just as we tend to put adjectives before nouns (‘a slippery fish’ rather than ‘a fish slippery’). This isn’t a universal rule, just a general preference. One consistent exception seems to occur in statements where we are making final summary judgments (adverbs in italics, verbs in bold): ‘the steps in the engine repair were all done properly, and in the end, the whole repair job was very well done. I’ve used the same verb twice just to show that the nature of the verb isn’t an influence on this process. Another exception is where a verb is immediately followed by the object of its action, as in, ‘she rapidly performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.’ There, logic squeezes the adverb out of its place after the verb and places it before the verb. ‘She performed rapidly mouth-to-mouth resuscitation’ is a formal error, and ‘She performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation rapidly’ means something else – it means she did the mouth-to-mouth in a way that used speedy movements. Which seems bizarre, and possibly kinky.
In Germanic languages, single adverbs become sandwiched between helper auxiliary verbs and main verbs: ‘De afwas was snel gedaan’ – ‘The dishwashing was quickly finished.’ The alternative ‘De afwas was gedaan snel,’ ‘the dishwashing was finished quickly,’ is forbidden. You can see why a Dutch speaker might write ‘has outstandingly performed’ rather than ‘has performed outstandingly.’ Similarly, Russian and some other Slavic languages usually put the adverb first: ‘Павел быстро поел,’ ‘Pavel bystro poyel,’ Pavel rapidly ate, rather than the usual English ‘Pavel ate rapidly.’ There are plenty of second-language English speakers today who will be tempted to put adverbs where they shouldn’t go.
Having dealt with that side-trip, we can now go to the next sample sentence:
Furthermore, she has in the past years also presented a high performance in association with school work, and remained pleasant in personal characters being very kind to: family members, (boy-) friends, pet animals e.g. dogs, sports officials and teachers.
Hahaha, oh boy. There’s a bit of everything in there, isn’t there? Would you ever see a sentence like this in real life?
I know, you’ve already seen this one.
Diagnostic delay could be shortened with heightened diagnostic acumen whilst outcome improved with adequate dosage and earlier administration of antibiotics, removal of central lines, more effective correction of risk factors e.g. neutropenia, rationalization of antibiotic use and intensive care.
but how about a shorter, friendlier version of the same architecture:
Prolonged hospitalization, pregnancy, diabetes, young or old age, usage of birth control pills and burns also increase the risk of infection.
Wait, usage of burns increases the risk of infection? Hm, while we’re thinking about that problem, let’s have a little light reading:
Hundreds of morphological (including thousands of macro- and microscopic images), physiological, sequences and other molecular characters are freely accessible for each record, as well as additional textual, bibliographic (with almost 10000 references connected to the strains and the species records), geographic and taxonomic information.
Blink.
Or as they say on the internet, ‘facepalm!’
Here, we’re in the most lawless frontier of English writing, where thousands upon thousands of hectares of dense verbal brushland make penetration by civilized travellers all but impossible.
This cowboy country is called ‘the Wild, Wild List.’
Many people, poking into such material, risk being bitten by rattlesnakes of panic – “it’s too hard, I can’t read this!” They may blame their snakebite on the technical subject matter. But really, the technical stuff is not at fault, apart from a couple of unfamiliar words like ‘neutropenia’ (= severe shortage of the ‘neutrophil’ white blood cells that eradicate common viruses and microorganisms from our blood). These sentences could be boring to some people, but they ought not to be difficult.
The people who write such sentences are, as I’ve stressed, all good English students. You can have a normal and relaxed English conversation with them. Their educational background, however, simply didn’t get around to telling them that structuring was needed in well-written English lists. They think of the list as a lawless land, an anarchy, a place where you can’t get arrested no matter what you do.
Sometimes, such a writer will let the reader know for sure that he or she is heading into the Wild Wild List by adding in a pair of border posts in the form of a colon (:). That’s what happens in our Tall Girl sample sentence.
Furthermore, she has in the past years also presented a high performance in association with school work, and remained pleasant in personal characters being very kind to: family members, (boy-) friends, pet animals e.g. dogs, sports officials and teachers.
Before we press on, however, with the list at the end of this sentence, let’s quickly apply some corrections for some of the sentence’s other problems. These are problems we’ve already discussed above: the creole use of ‘presented’and ‘in association with,’ and the reliance on poorly placed participles to give a sense of continuation, as seen here with ‘being.’ (The sentence you just read, by the way, illustrates a relatively complex list where the rules of parallelism were applied. The twin colonels here were two nouns based on actions, ‘the use’ and ‘the reliance.’ The preposition ‘of’ served as sergeant under ‘Col. Action Noun’ to coordinate the phrases “use of ‘presented’” and “[use of] ‘in association with.’”).
The section of the sentence that’s taken out of italics below has been corrected, that is, stylistically improved.
Furthermore, she has in the past years also done very well in her school work, and has remained a pleasant individual, noted for her kindness to: family members, (boy-) friends, pet animals e.g. dogs, sports officials and teachers.
Now. It may seem fussy of me to say so, but the colon that begins this list is not English. When colons are used in English to start lists (just one of several uses of colons), they don’t appear abruptly in the middle of clauses. They usually follow a complete, ‘independent’ clause. That clause often informs you that a list is coming.
On a typical Saskatchewan slough, you can see some of the following common duck species: mallards, redheads, widgeons, pintails, shovelers, ruddy ducks, blue-winged teal and canvasbacks.
The clue there that says ‘list coming’ is the phrase ‘of the following.’
A signboard written for tourists at the duck slough may say
Welcome to Lindsley Slough. Here are some duck species you may see: mallards, redheads, widgeons, pintails, shovelers, ruddy ducks, blue-winged teal and canvasbacks.
The ‘list coming’ announcement on the sign is ‘here are.’ Sometimes lists are not quite so obviously marked, but you can still see the idea, in the introductory clause, that a set is being announced that will be broken down into its component parts after the colon.
The dog ate almost everything I’d set out for the party: the brie, the sausages, the smoked salmon, the crackers, and even the broccoli and dip.
I have four screwdriver types: Robertson, Philips, flat-head and Torx.
If a list naturally arrives in the middle of a clause, the sentence simply flows continuously into the list, with no colon.
… noted for her kindness to family members, (boy-) friends, pet animals e.g. dogs, sports officials and teachers.
So that’s one bit of cleanup done. Now, what about that “(boy-)friends”? It’s a clever way to suggest “her friends, possibly including her boyfriend,” but it’s not an English construction. Not yet, at any rate. This is a peculiarly Germanic bit of ellipsis that is possibly making its way into English via ISC. The reason that it’s deeply alien to our language is that it doesn’t use parentheses (rounded brackets) for one of the two tasks we usually assign them.
Generally, in English, parentheses are used for two things: digressions and definitions. The concept of ‘definitions’ may include translations, including translations from text into numbers and percentages, as in ‘I shook hands with 317 out of 400 students (79.3%).’ In European languages, by contrast, parentheses tend to be used to add details into a sentence.
A digression (and I hope that’s not too fancy a word for you) is a thought that’s somewhat off-topic from the main thrust of the sentence. You can see that I added one into the previous sentence, in parentheses – “and I hope that’s not too fancy a word for you.” As for parenthetical phrases that are used to add definitions (statements of what words and phrases mean), you can see one of those in this sentence. What native English speakers (Australians, Canadians, Americans, Britons, New Zealanders, etc.) who understand good written style seldom do is to use a parenthetical phrase to inject details, as I just did in this sentence. Details, if possible, are either integrated into the main sentence or given a sentence of their own.
Native English speakers who understand good written style, whether they come from Australia, Canada, the U.S, Britain, New Zealand or elsewhere, seldom use parenthetical phrases for details
What native English speakers who understand good written style seldom do is to use parenthetical phrases for details. This avoidance is seen in Australia, Canada, the U.S, Britain, New Zealand and elsewhere.
The ISC penchant for putting details into parentheses sometimes leads to bits of Wild Wild List inserted into the middle of sentences
Building materials (wall paper, scrapings, plaster) and samples taken from indoor environments (swab samples, cello tape samples) were received from museums, archives, private dwellings and schools.
You can see that ‘scrapings’ is listed here as a ‘building material’ (who builds a building out of ‘scrapings’?) and that the word ‘samples’ is repeated three times, twice within the same parenthetical, in an awkward attempt at parallelism. Let’s get things out into the main text where they can coordinate with each other regularly. Rewrite:
We received swabs and cellophane tape lifts from indoor surfaces, as well as bulk material samples such as wall scrapings, plaster fragments and pieces of wallpaper. Senders included museums, archives, private dwellings and schools.
Another consistent ISC tendency that seems slightly odd to the native English speaker is the placement of a sentence’s most important or dramatic details into parentheses. English speakers are trained to write sentences that give important elements a prominent place in the main text.
I’ve borrowed an authentic sentence here from a draft manuscript. You don’t need to understand everything the sentence says, but notice that the names of two groups of organisms said to be “important human pathogens” are in parentheses.
All 11 genera were shown to form monophyletic clades and will form the basis for new studies, as some of these (e.g. Paraacremonium and Xenoacremonium) represent important human pathogens.
Much of the importance of studying these organisms lies in their ability to make people sick. The authors are hoping to leverage that factor into money for further research. The names of the important disease villains, then, should be in the main text. To English speakers who understand it, the sentence has the ‘feel’ of a statement like, “Canada was invaded by two countries today (the U.S., Russia) and is now appealing for aid.” Let’s put the spotlight on the important actors:
All eleven genera were shown to form monophyletic clades. New studies will be needed on these groups, especially since some of them, including Paraacremonium and Xenoacremonium, contain important human pathogens.
Perhaps, even in drama-intolerant scientific text, we could get away with:
All eleven genera were shown to form monophyletic clades. Further studies will be needed on all these groups, especially Paraacremonium and Xenoacremonium, which contain important human pathogens.
So, coming back to the Tall Girl sentence and its “(boy-)friends,” let’s bring the young woman’s possibly important boyfriend out into the main text of the sentence by expanding this phrase to “friends including her boyfriend.”
If we do that, however, we run into the number-one problem of parallelism. Let’s take a look.
….noted for her kindness to family members, friends including her boyfriend, pet animals e.g. dogs, sports officials and teachers.
A participle like ‘including’ is one of the parts of speech that tends to serve as a sergeant in parallel structures. What’s to stop the word ‘including’ from commanding not just ‘her boyfriend,’ but also later phrases like ‘pet animals’? ‘Friends including her boyfriend, pet animals’ … wait a second! Pet friends? Then we run into ‘e.g.,’ and the parallel structure falls apart. We have to backtrack, mentally saying ‘oh, I guess that wasn’t meant to be parallel’ – which is awkward.
In fact, this sentence as it was originally written already contains the same problem, since the expression ‘e.g.’ – the Latin ‘exempli gratia,’ meaning ‘for example’ – is itself a strong parallel-sergeant. The sentence appears to say that the pet animals the tall girl is kind to include dogs, sports officials and teachers. To a practised English speaker, the sentence seems to contain an ellipsis for ‘kindness to … pet animals, for example, dogs, [for example,] sports officials and [for example,] teachers. Then we have to use our set logic to realize that a sports official isn’t a type of pet animal, other than in Disney movies, and so the apparently parallel list can’t have been parallel.
How, then, can we keep all these stray sergeants from taking command and trying to order the list around in ways that the writer never intended? We can either neutralize those random officers, or settle for confusing ‘you-know-what-I-mean English’ that forces readers to read everything over three times. The usual and best solution is to move the stray sergeants to the end of the sentence, where they can’t try to command anyone, and arrange them so that they are not in conflict with each other.
… noted for her kindness to family members, sports officials, teachers, friends including her boyfriend, and pet animals such as dogs.
You can see an interesting thing here. Technically, in this rewrite, Sgt. Including should still be able to capture ‘pet animals,’ in order to make a parallel structure saying ‘friends including her boyfriend and pet animals.’ Why doesn’t it? I think that the established rhythm of the list is ultimately what disconnects ‘pet animals’ from Sgt. Including’s grip. The girl is noted for kindness to double-bounce, double-bounce, bounce, bouncey-bounce and pet animals such as dogs. Now that isn’t grammar at all – that’s pure style. You saw something similar in the passage from Leo Tolstoy, above.
Several wounded men passed along the road, and words of abuse, screams, and groans mingled in a general hubbub, then the firing died down.
Sgt. Of, standing there exposed to gunfire in the phrase ‘words of abuse,’ doesn’t make any attempt to connect a bad list that would say ‘words of screams’ and ‘words of groans.’ It’s not just that those connections would be illogical. When we read ‘words of abuse,’ ‘abuse’ is a strong word and it tends to pop out at us in emphasis. That emphasis alone tends to connect it to the next strong drama word, ‘screams,’ and then to ‘groans.’ The list, then, effectively becomes ‘abuse, screams and groans’ to us, leaving Sgt. Of hiding in a ditch that no one is paying attention to.
Now that we know we have to bring order to our parallelism sergeants, let’s go back and quickly fix up our ‘facepalm’ sentences.
Prolonged hospitalization, pregnancy, diabetes, young or old age, usage of birth control pills and burns also increase the risk of infection.
The problem in that list, clearly, is Sgt. Of, who is trying to command not just ‘birth control pills,’ but also, ‘burns.’ The sergeant is trying to line up the parallel phrase ‘usage of burns.’ Let’s simplify her duties.
Prolonged hospitalization, pregnancy, diabetes, burns, very young or old age, and use of birth control pills are also factors that can increase the risk of infection.
Using our ‘put the unemployed sergeants at the end of the list’ trick, we can keep that commanding officer under control. Let’s not stop there, though. To have such a long list as a multi-part sentence subject is awkward, so just to clean up the style one more step, let’s put the whole list at the end.
Additional factors that can increase the risk of infection include prolonged hospitalization, pregnancy, diabetes, burns, very young or old age, and use of birth control pills.
Now, we can go on to another sentence where, as one of several sources of disorder in the ranks, Sgt. E.G. is overstepping her authority.
Diagnostic delay could be shortened with heightened diagnostic acumen whilst outcome improved with adequate dosage and earlier administration of antibiotics, removal of central lines, more effective correction of risk factors e.g. neutropenia, rationalization of antibiotic use and intensive care.
The author, employing Sgt. E.G., accidentally sets up the parallelism “risk factors, for example, neutropenia, for example, rationalization of antibiotic use, and, for example, intensive care.” This doesn’t make sense, and it clearly wasn’t intended, but it is there. Even worse, the sub-list “rationalization of antibiotic use and intensive care” includes a Sgt. Of who has no idea whether he’s been called to active duty or not. Are we supposed to be rationalizing intensive care, here, or is ‘intensive care’ a completely separate list element from ‘rationalization of antibiotic use’?
With an army this confused on our side, Napoleon could just walk in and take over.
It gets worse. In the early part of the sentence, there is a full-fledged Modal Lieutenant, Lt. Could-Be, whom the authors are expecting to rule two long columns of troops. The way they have written the sentence, though, this commander is completely invisible to the second column of troops. ‘Diagnostic delay could be shortened with heightened diagnostic acumen while outcome [could be] improved with adequate dosage …” Ellipsis can’t be used here: the second ‘could be’ has to be added in. The reason is, in part, that without it, ‘outcome improved with adequate dosage’ looks like a statement about something that actually happened. It looks like a past-tense construction, but that’s not what the authors had in mind.
At this point, I’m going to cut to the chase and fix up this sentence. Part of the fixing will be to split it in two, but the parallel between the two ‘could-be’s will be left in place.
Diagnostic delay could be shortened if appropriate training were done to establish heightened diagnostic acumen. At the same time, outcomes could be improved if sufficient attention were paid to prompt administration of antibiotics at adequate dosage levels, timely removal of central lines, rationalization of antibiotic use, targeted use of intensive care, and effective management of host risk factors such as neutropenia.
This was major surgery. To begin with, two naked comparatives were dealt with, one by changing it to a normal adjective, ‘prompt,’ and one by getting rid of it as junk. They can be seen in bold italics below in the pasted-in original sentence. The archaic British ‘whilst’ was replaced with ‘while.’ I decided that the authors probably intended to say the parallel phrase ‘rationalization of … intensive care,’ but since that phrase, seen by itself, barely makes sense, I changed it to the most similar, meaningful expression, ‘targeted use of intensive care.’ I kept the many ‘of’s in the list from becoming sergeants by putting them all into parallel bounces, one after the other: “prompt administration of antibiotics at adequate dosage levels, timely removal of central lines, rationalization of antibiotic use, targeted use of intensive care, and effective management of host risk factors.” Each ‘of’ there follows a noun that’s usually described by a prior adjective: “prompt administration, timely removal, rationalization, targeted use, effective management.” This heavy-footed, regular marching rhythm kept the stray prepositional phrase ‘at adequate dosage levels’ from getting out of line. Sgt. E.G. was moved to the end, out of trouble, and changed to the more English Sgt Such-as. Finally, there was the matter of dealing with the two instances of ‘with,’ seen in regular boldface below.
Diagnostic delay could be shortened with heightened diagnostic acumen whilst outcome improved with adequate dosage and earlier administration of antibiotics, removal of central lines, more effective correction of risk factors e.g. neutropenia, rationalization of antibiotic use and intensive care.
These instances of ‘with’ are good pieces of ‘you know what I mean English.’ Let’s look at a simplified sentence based on the same structural idea.
With the right tools, I could build a suspension bridge.
That is grammatically correct English. It is not, however, an example of a style that should be widely used. The basic structure here consists of two hypothetical items being lined up together: ‘if’ I were given the right tools, ‘then’ I could build a suspension bridge. The problem here is that ‘with’ is just an ordinary preposition, and it doesn’t communicate the hypothetical aspect of the situation well. Most English speakers would probably prefer to say something that explicitly brings out the ‘iffyness’ of the situation.
If I had the right tools, I could build a suspension bridge.
Given the right tools, I could build a suspension bridge
If someone gave me the right tools, I could build a suspension bridge
If I could get the right tools, I could build a suspension bridge
Were I to have the right tools, I could build a suspension bridge.
Let’s say I had the right tools – then I could build a suspension bridge.
‘With,’ in the medical sentence, is simply too flat and too low on information content to do the work it was intended to do. It was intended to say ‘(if we were) with,’ or, in better English, ‘if changes were made to give us…’ but it barely succeeds, and therefore looks foreign. Moreover, it passes up the chance to state what changes could be made to give us the desired outcomes. My rewrite, therefore, goes all out and suggests a training program. Admittedly, I cheated and used my medical knowledge here, not just my English knowledge. ‘Heightened diagnostic acumen’ – improved awareness by doctors that particular diseases should be looked for – doesn’t just happen. Someone has to do some training or publicizing. When such things need to be said, it’s better to say them, rather than to hide them under a flat hypothetical gravestone like ‘with.’
Parallelism among hypothetical and conditional phrases is just as important as parallelism in lists. In our sample sentence, the modal word ‘could’ put us into hypothetical mode, and that forced us to deal with the resulting ‘if’ – ‘We could do that if we had what we needed.’
Now, like the final, grand fireworks display at the end of the national holiday, we’ll come back to this sentence.
Hundreds of morphological (including thousands of macro- and microscopic images), physiological, sequences and other molecular characters are freely accessible for each record, as well as additional textual, bibliographic (with almost 10000 references connected to the strains and the species records), geographic and taxonomic information.
Hm, I hear explosions here, but maybe they’re not fireworks after all. This sentence is a casualty. I think we have a real war going on here. So, like a Russian surgeon at the battle of Austerlitz, looking at a messy artillery wound, we first of all need to remove the shell fragments. That would be the two parenthetical lists of inserted details. Then there’s a severed artery in the first parallelism:
Hundreds of morphological [characters], [hundreds of] physiological [characters], [hundreds of] sequences [characters] and [hundreds of] other molecular characters…
“Hundreds of sequences characters” is bleeding badly. We know that the author was trying to say
Hundreds of morphological [characters], [hundreds of] physiological [characters], [AND] [hundreds of] sequences and other molecular characters…
but, like a soldier who didn’t have a hand free to hold a bandage on his wound, the struggling author found that there was no place he could insert the needed extra ‘and’ into his original construction. If he’d tried, he would have had
Hundreds of morphological, physiological, and sequences and other molecular characters are freely accessible…
which is clearly senseless.
So painful were the sentence’s wounds, by this point, that the author completely lost track of whether the individual species records in his database held thousands of items, or whether the database as a whole held these thousands of things. I have looked at the online database myself, and I can tell you that each individual strain and species record doesn’t hold thousands of photos. There are perhaps one to a dozen photos per individual record. Knowing that, then, we can perform the surgery, and save this wounded soldier – if we obey the MOST CRITICAL RULE of English style. That rule? I’m sure you remember it. DON’T TRY TO WRITE LONG, COMPLICATED SENTENCES UNLESS YOU’RE JOSEPH CONRAD. And let’s add one key addition to that: DON’T THINK YOU CAN BREAK THIS RULE WHEN YOUR SENTENCES CONTAIN LISTS.
A less forceful rule that I used consistently here was to put lists at the ends of sentences rather than at the beginnings.
Each record includes an extensive description of morphological characters, documented by macroscopic and microscopic images. The database as a whole contains thousands of these images. Also, each record provides free access to physiological and molecular data, including sequences, and contains documents, bibliographic citations, geographic information, and taxonomic information. Collectively, the records for species and individual strains include almost 10,000 bibliographic references.
My eight-year-old neighbor Quinn, who amazed me one day by reading out the fungal species name Schizoblastosporion starkeyi-henricii as if it was as easy as ‘mama,’ would have no difficulty understanding this mini-paragraph. The original sentence, I hope, would have made him say ‘huh?’
In case you’re worried, I know I could have said “…contains documents, bibliographic citations, and geographic and taxonomic information.” Ellipsis is always optional, though, and I made my choice. It isn’t a sin to repeat ‘information,’ and, if you decide to use ellipsis to remove that repetition, it isn’t a sin to repeat ‘and.’ Freedom – isn’t it wonderful?
Believe it or not, we’re now almost finished the ‘tall girl’ sentence we started out with. We’ve now corrected everything except the italicized bit:
Furthermore, she has in the past years also done very well in her school work, and has remained a pleasant individual, noted for her kindness to family members, sports officials, teachers, friends including her boyfriend, and pet animals such as dogs.
“Furthermore,” in ISC, is like one of those species that is unremarkable in its original homeland, but when it gets introduced into Australia, it takes over and becomes a pest. The cane toad, for example. Like that vast, tough, ravenous toad, ‘furthermore’ is a word that was originally designed to make a very loud croak. The basic idea of ‘furthermore’ was that if you were telling someone in your family everything they had done wrong lately, you would use this format: You did this. You did that. Then you did that. And you did that other thing as well. Also, you did this thing. In addition, you did THAT thing. MOREOVER, you did THIS thing. AND FURTHERMORE, if all that weren’t enough, you did THAAAAAT thing.
In its original conception, then, ‘furthermore’ was designed only to be used when you were throwing someone out of the house.
One of the comical aspects of ISC is that ‘furthermore’ is everywhere. ‘Moreover’ is relatively common, as well, but ‘furthermore’ is one of the basics of ISC. If you are making an English breakfast and only have authentic Australian aboriginal ingredients, then your breakfast sausages may be replaced by witchity grubs, a type of large beetle larva. ‘Furthermore,’ in scientific English, is a witchity grub acting as a sausage. The real English sausage that we would jolly well use in the same places is usually ‘also.’ For variety, it may be ‘in addition.’
In my ‘official’ correction of the ‘furthermore’ in the tall girl sentence, I did something slightly different. The sentence was basically a list, and the one immediately ahead of it was also a list. The first list had a specific topic, ‘her sports accomplishments.’ The second was a general list of ‘her other positive features.’ I therefore added in a phrase distinguishing the second list from the first. ‘Apart from,’ in that phrase, is another way of saying ‘also’ – it conveys the idea of ‘also but different.’ The information content in the phrase is much higher than in the bloated croak, ‘furthermore.’
She has won such competitions in Europe and North America, and has also performed outstandingly in football matches. Apart from these accomplishments, she has done very well in her school work in recent years, and has remained a pleasant individual, noted for her kindness to family members, sports officials, teachers, friends including her boyfriend, and pet animals such as dogs.
You’ll see there that I changed the original phase ‘in the past years also’ (the ‘also’ is 100% redundant with ‘furthermore’) to ‘in recent years.’ The phrases ‘in the past years’ and ‘in the last years’, and variations, are very common in ISC. I’m not sure where ‘in the past years’ comes from, but I know the origin of ‘in the last years.’ It’s a direct translation of the correct Dutch ‘in de laatste jaren’ or its equivalent in other Germanic languages. This really means something more like ‘in the latest years’ than ‘in the last years’ (which in English means ‘in the final years’) but has moved forcefully into European English in phrases like ‘in the last years I could get more money for my research,’ meaning, ‘in recent years, I’ve been able to get more money for my research.’
Creole gets around, and the following sentence came from Brazil:
In our laboratory, during the last years, this simplified procedure has been very useful in immunodiagnosis.
Don’t worry, the world is not going to end while this laboratory is doing immunodiagnosis.
There are a few other Europeanisms that you’ll start seeing over and over in international English once I mention them to you.
- The Germanic ‘since.’ You may remember that I told you that I originally learned office and technical Dutch by watching Star Trek episodes with Dutch subtitles. The Dutch was never a direct translation of the English. Dutch, bless it, is a language that makes you rewire your thinking process from top to bottom. The subtitle that made my jaw drop the furthest arrived in an episode where Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Starship Voyager had been enslaved on an alien planet, and had there acquired something she could never previously allow herself – a boyfriend. Eventually, she had the chance to escape slavery, and there was a battle with the slavers. Janeway’s boyfriend tried to intervene on her side, but he lacked the advantage of her Star Trek technologies. “Don’t get involved!” she warned him, fearing for his life.
“I’ve been involved since the day we met!” he retorted, as he gallantly pitched in.
The Dutch subtitle for “I’ve been involved since the day we met!” was “Ik doe al mee sinds ik je ken!” Literal translation: “I do already with since I you know.”
Speaking of alternative worlds.
You can see a few Dutch features in that phrase that we’ve discussed before, like the SOV subclause (I you know). There’s also an odd thing called a separable verb, featuring the verb ‘meedoen’ ‘to with-do,’ splitting up in declarations as ‘I do with.’ We saw one of those before with the Dutch for online log-ins, structured as ‘I log in,’ ‘I logged in,’ ‘I am now inlogged.’ Historically, this bit of grammar gave rise to the peculiarly Northeastern U.S. family travel expression, “Are you going to come with?” meaning, “Are you going to come along?” That’s a direct inheritance from New Amsterdam (later called New York) and the Pennsylvania Deitsch, misleadingly known to English speakers as the Pennsylvania Dutch or Pennsylvania Deutsch.
Nothing that we’ve seen about Dutch so far, however, prepares us for a ‘since’ that goes with a present-tense verb.
Here’s a quote from a Russian interviewed for the New York Times on Jun 7, 2015. The Times is famous as a guardian of good English, but perhaps the translator was German or Dutch.
“The myth that the Internet is controlled by the opposition is very, very old,” says Leonid Volkov, a liberal politician and campaign manager to Alexei Navalny. “It’s not true since at least three years.”
Let’s de-creolize that, if we can be so bland: “That hasn’t been true since at least three years ago.” In English, not only is there a past-tense verb, but there’s also an ‘ago’ just to nail this phrase into history.
We’ll be seeing a lot of the Germanic ‘since’ in upcoming years, or should I say, ‘in the next years.’
- The Germanic ‘already’
“I do already with since I you know” contains one more feature that’s become common in ISC, the Germanic ‘already.’
Here’s a sample I lifted from my previous workplace: “The first computerized CBS List of Cultures already appeared in 1978.”
That is very correct Dutch grammar for the word ‘al,’ which is a more powerful and general marker of previousness than the rather limited English ‘already.’ In English translation, though, it often disappears. Here, it’s more-or-less redundant of ‘first’ - “The first computerized CBS List of Cultures appeared in 1978” – unless you really want to stress how ground-breaking the institute was with the timing of its computerization. In that case, you’d need to say “The first computerized CBS List of Cultures had already appeared as early as 1978.” As you can see, it’s easier to put in a subtle plug for the institute’s foresight in Dutch than it is in English.
No wonder it’s a Dutch institute. The ability to generate good publicity always helps.
- The Germanic ‘also.’
When I was an editor, I could always surprise my writers by telling them that the word ‘also,’ in English, is almost completely confined to referring to something that was mentioned in the same sentence or the immediately preceding sentence.
My whole family went fishing with me. Also, my cousin Jeremy joined us on the trip.
I thought about life, death and philosophy, and also, at random moments, about bingo.
The item that is being added with ‘also’ is usually rather strongly parallel to the original items on the list. In the fishing sentence above, if Jeremy came from a very different starting point, he might lose his ‘also.’
My whole family went fishing with me. Halfway through the trip, my cousin Jeremy came in from Edmonton and joined us.
An ‘also’ could be added before ‘halfway,’ in that passage, but it would have a slangy feeling to it. Appending this very different origin for Jeremy with an ‘also’ would seem slightly illogical, and therefore conversationally loose and casual.
In Germanic languages, an ‘also’ can be used in many different places to suggest that a new development has emerged that has some connection to things that have been seen or done before.
Here’s a quote from an English-language website about a piece of radar equipment being developed by a hobbyist in Germany. The passage begins by having us look at radar signal pulses on a video screen.
Shown is an already less sharp feedback pulse.
Please compare the other pulses shown in the project. It is clear that also the blip shown at the control screen is having a different shape. The two back-to-back pulses are being adjusted against each other by means of the 'distance' control which has to be set at '500 km'.
This aspect is also having interesting implications. As is described in the webpage for this project, I encountered also a problem in respect to the operating voltage of the control screen.
If translated directly into German, this passage would probably be stylistically flawless.
Here’s a passage that combines an ‘already’ and an ‘also.’
I went two times to the project already, the workman are building very hard on the place for the watertank, the house of Sammy and Lucy and the hostel for the kids. The kids are so cool! Especially when they saw my camera, they all wanted to pose and they were pushing each other away so they were in front of the camera. I am not sure I also can post some pictures, because the internet here is very, very slow.
This ‘also’ would be deeply illogical in English, because there is no visible list onto which it is being directly added. In Dutch, however, it’s orthodox. It means, ‘since I’m telling you this whole story in print on an electronic medium, maybe I can also electronically post some pictures.’ In English, the first part of that logic has to be explicitly stated; in Dutch, it can simply hang in the air, unstated, and still be referred to with ‘also.’
One more, from a Dutch soccer football fan. ‘Water-carrier,’ by the way, is good English football slang for “a football player who is regarded as hard-working and competent but not a star.”
Don't expect too much of him. All other good players are out of shape and too much water-carriers don't play (like Nigel de Jong). The national press also begins to make some worrying previews. As we in Holland say: "the knifes are sharpened".
Canadian English: Don’t expect too much from him. All the other good players are out of shape and too many water-carriers are not playing, such as Nigel de Jong. Already, the national press is beginning to make some ominous predictions. As we say in Holland, “the knives are being sharpened.”
Note my takedown of the parenthetical with injected details – the one about Nigel de Jong.
- Numerals in text
When you look at a passage like the one below, you realize that the Dutch student who published it on the internet it will soon learn not to make the spelling and grammatical errors it includes (italics). Even her university professors, however, probably wouldn’t notice her European parenthetical. The Russian comma after ‘thing’ might be missed as well, at least in the science faculties.
Another thing, what I'm not completely sure about. I heared that Japanese students aren't that good with English. And that while we in Holland learn 4 different languages. (German, French, English and Dutch.) Most of us speak English fluent.
There’s another subtle creolism in that passage. If you compare the second-to-last sentence of the Tall Girl paragraph, you’ll see my own example.
In a survey of her 4 brothers and sisters, 4 (100%) were shown to agree with the possibility that she may potentially be a likely winner of an Olympics Games medal and/or a World Cup in the future.
For unknown reasons, ISC writers are very likely to put numerals into their text, even when only small numbers are involved. Predominant English style uses the full words for numbers up to ten, at least. Many newspapers and book editors even insist on full words for numbers up to twenty. Once you get to 21, as in the American states that don’t let teenagers drink alcohol, then you can riotously indulge in numeral use.
Believe it or not, the “4 (100%)” you see there is yet another creolism. For reasons that may be purely arbitrary, most people raised in English language educational systems find it silly to convert trivial fractions, such as 4/4, 2/3, or ¼, into percentages in text. Not so in international text, where one commonly sees fractions like ‘four out of four’ and ‘one out of three’ written in numerals and then immediately re-rendered in parentheses as (100%) and (33.3%). (Actually, many ISC authors have a great love of levels of preciseness that go beyond what statisticians call the ’sig figs,’ the significant figures or digits, so you might well see 33.33%).
ISC’s extreme caution about numbers does not extend to acronyms. Here we can bring back a Tall Girl sentence we’ve looked at previously.
She is a stronger person with abilities similar to an all-star wrestler, and this is proven already in a number of contests, arranged by the physical education department of the SVTG (n=15).
One always wonders how specific, unverbalized global trends manage to spread as effectively as they do. Authors worldwide, upon adopting the use of ISC, suddenly act as if readers know all the acronyms they use. Most will not argue vigorously if an editor asks them to define the acronyms, but a few will become distinctly offended. I believe that some ISC users adopt acronyms as additional foreign words, and feel that providing dictionary services for these words falls outside their job descriptions.
The sentence above, besides containing the mysterious SVTG, also contains yet another type of trivial numerical insertion, the (n = a very small number) format. An entry of ‘(n = 15)’ means ‘the sample size equals fifteen of whatever is being tested or counted.’ My rewrite removes this unnecessary parenthetical-of-detail, and places the number in the text. It also inserts a parenthetical-of-definition for the acronym SVTG.
She is a particularly strong person with abilities similar to those of an all-star wrestler; this has already been demonstrated in fifteen different wrestling competitions organized by the physical education department of her school, the School for Very Tall Girls (SVTG).
It is a genuine part of writing native-style English to place small numbers as words in the text whenever this can reasonably be done. As for acronyms, in biology, we usually say that the only acronyms that don’t need to be defined when they first appear in the text are DNA, RNA and AIDS. Many molecular biology journals have added in PCR, for the polymerase chain reaction used to multiply DNA in samples. Other fields also have very short lists of acronyms that are allowed to be treated as words. English may be a ‘borrowing language,’ but it takes a hard line on acronym immigration.
While we have that SVTG sentence in front of us, let’s diverge to one other small matter it shows.
… and this is proven already in a number of contests….
As you can see from the strangely placed ‘already,’ this is a Franco-Germanic creolism. It includes the use of ‘to be’ as a helper verb in the ‘present perfect’ tense for verbs showing ‘changes of state’ – in this case, a change of state from unproven to proven. You can see that ‘this is proven’ appears where English, nowadays, would say ‘this has been proven.’ You may remember my mentioning that early modern English used such constructions; the example I gave was “I am come into my garden,” from the Song of Solomon.
When you examine the statement, though, doesn’t ‘this has been proven’ seem to be an unusually strong statement? In English, we expect ‘proof’ to be ironclad, perhaps even logically unavoidable. A girl who has won fifteen competitions has shown skill, but has she really proven anything, other than that she is capable of winning? Native English technical writers strongly tend to say ‘data have shown’ or ‘our experiments have demonstrated,’ but if you show them the same statements with the word ‘proven’ in them, they will wonder if you claim to possess godly powers and are trying to read their minds with your mental radar. We accept that mathematicians can do proofs regularly, and that some mathematical physics equations can yield proofs; we even concede that judges and prosecutors can say that they convict criminals based on proof, at least until our DNA studies show they’re wrong. But for anyone else to say they’ve ‘proven’ something seems psychotic.
ISC speakers, however, blithely and routinely submit manuscripts where they claim to have proven things. They simply prefer this word to ‘shown’ or ‘demonstrated.’ The basis of this preference may lie in Romance language words like the French ‘prouver’ that combine the ideas of proof, demonstration, and experimentation. In scientific texts in other languages, though, I don’t see much evidence of this. Spanish speakers tend to say ‘demostrado’ – ‘demonstrated.’ French, Dutch and German authors tend to use words officially translated in English as ‘ascertained:’ constaté, geconstateerd, vastgestelld, festgestellt. The word ‘ascertained’ itself, in English, is all but excluded from scientific writing: maybe it seems overly literary, or maybe it comes too close to suggesting proof. ISC writers certainly do not use it. Perhaps there are awkward dictionaries or apps out there translating the ‘ascertained’ words from other languages as ‘proven.’
As ‘proof’ that the world is a strange place, contrast the rush to say ‘proven’ with the violent allergy to saying ‘caused,’ as I’ve discussed above.
ISC: Pneumonia by species of Aspergillus and other deep mold infections were also reported with increased frequency.
English: Pneumonia caused by species of Aspergillus was one of several deep mold infections reported to occur with increased frequency
(Did you notice that Sgt. By and especially Sgt. Of had to be placed off-duty in the rewrite? We couldn’t allow ‘pneumonia by other deep mold infections’ or ‘species of other deep mold infections’ to lurk in the text as false parallels that would need to be considered and rejected.)
- The non-English ‘Or’ and ‘And’
If you ever worry about the human species being able to find agreement and harmony amongst its members, you may find the next topic disturbing.
Many people out there don’t have the same concepts of ‘and’ and ‘or’ as you have. Differing uses of these conjunctions show up in ISC writings regularly.
From a music fan site:
ISC: How would you describe your band and your music to a random metalhead within 50 words, without using the words mediaeval, folk, party and peacock feathers?
Canadian English: How would you describe your band and your music to a random metalhead in fifty words or fewer, without using the expressions ‘medieval,’ ‘folk,’ ‘party’ or ‘peacock feathers’?
The German author of the ISC was trying to say that none of the four terms should be used in the brief description. He thus felt compelled to link them together with ‘and.’ I suspect he was worried that if he said ‘or,’ that would mean that the band could produce a description that had up to three, but not four, of the forbidden expressions. It sounds strange, but he actually has a valid reason for this.
Here’s another example, this time from science.
ISC: No IL-2 and IL-6 mRNA production was identified.
English: No production of IL-2 or IL-6 mRNA was identified.
Expanded version: No messenger RNA coding for production of the immunological signalling molecules interleukin-2 or interleukin-6 was identified.
The author again wished to specify that two ‘IL’ items were linked together in not being produced. To stress their unity in not being there, he or she linked them with ‘and.’
Here’s the root of the problem. There are actually two concepts of ‘or’ in logic. Mathematical logic, the kind that’s used in programming computers, can be written with symbols, and the logic for computer functions must have separate symbols for the two different types of ‘or.’ One ‘or’ is called ‘inclusive-or;’ it means ‘at least one of the two.’ It has the symbol V for the Latin ‘vel,’ meaning ‘or.’ The other is called exclusive-or, given the symbol ‘xor’ or ‘J,’ and it means ‘one of the two but not both.’
Let’s suppose there’s an elderly woman who needs some help walking her dog, and two twin boys next door who are willing to help. One of them comes to arrange the matter, and she says, “Lovely – you or your brother come over any time and take Zoë for a walk.”
Does that mean that only one brother at a time can take the dog out? Not in English. Even if the woman had said, “either you or your brother come over any time,” that would still imply permission for both to come at once.
If she had said, “Lovely – you and your brother come over any time and take Zoë for a walk,” that would strongly seem to suggest that the two twins were only welcome, or only expected, if they arrived together.
If she were intimidated by seeing both twins at once, and wanted to make sure that only one at a time came by, she could say “Lovely – either you or else your brother come over any time and take Zoë for a walk.” Or perhaps, if she were trying not to be rude, she could say, with emphasis, ‘either you OR your brother come over any time… There are various ways of making English ‘or’s exclusive. “Lovely – you come over, or have your brother come over, and take Zoë for a walk any time.”
If the woman were an elderly computer, she would have it easy if she wanted to say ‘one boy at a time only.” She could simply say “Lovely – you xor your brother come over any time and take Zoë for a walk.” With normal English, being clear about exclusiveness takes special effort.
Our ISC writers, above, were vaguely worried that English ‘or’ was ‘xor.’ The sentences they composed weren’t compatible with a true ‘xor,’ but they were still worried about ‘or’ cutting out some options, so they chose ‘and’ instead.
I think they may have thought of ‘or’ as implying ‘one of.’ Consider the sentence:
Ahmad has severe allergies; he must not be given peanuts or hazelnuts.
To the native English speaker, this statement completely excludes both kinds of nuts in Ahmad’s diet. But I think our ISC writers would have hesitated, and then wondered if the speaker couldn’t be interpreted as having said that Ahmed was allergic to one of the two kinds of nuts, but no one knew for certain which one. To be sure, then, that both kinds of nuts were equally excluded, and that both were looked upon essentially as the same hazard, these writers would have said “he must not be given peanuts and hazelnuts.” To the native English speaker, however, this would imply that there was a special problem involved in giving Ahmad both kinds of nuts together.
The surest sign that someone doesn’t understand the English ‘or’ is seen when he or she uses ‘and/or.’
In a survey of her 4 brothers and sisters, 4 (100%) were shown to agree with the possibility that she may potentially be a likely winner of an Olympics Games medal and/or a World Cup in the future.
The meaning of ‘and/or,’ in English, is identical to the normal ‘or.’ “Lovely – you or your brother come over any time and take Zoë for a walk” is the same as “Lovely – you and/or your brother come over any time and take Zoë for a walk.” That’s why neighbourly senior citizens in English speaking countries are essentially never heard to say ‘and/or.’ Zoë’s owner would agree with my Tall Girl correction:
In a survey of her four brothers and sisters, all agreed that she might very well be a future winner of an Olympic Games medal or a World Cup.
It’s such good news! The tall girl can win Olympic gold, plus her share of the World Cup, without ever changing her ‘or’ to an ‘and/or.’ An ISC writer who was on her side, however, would have a strong urge to make sure she could qualify for both awards by giving her an ‘and/or’ to work with.
Creole speakers will use ‘and/or’ even when it’s completely illogical.
Studies have indicated that between 40 and 65% of patients have IgE antibodies, positive skin prick tests, and/or positive atopy patch test reactions to extract from this organism.
Think about that. Let’s simplify it.
Studies have indicated that between 40 and 65% of children say ‘I want a dog,’ ‘awww, so cute’ and/or ‘can I pat her?’ when they see Zoë.
Well, the numbers that were used to calculate the percentage could only come from counting the number of kids who said any one of the three phrases. There was no way that the calculation, as given, could reflect the number who said two or more of the phrases. Therefore, the numbers are purely based on ‘or,’ not on ‘and/or.’ ‘And/or’ doesn’t make sense at all. But authors are so nervous about implying ‘xor’ that they opt for ‘and/or’ regardless.
We’ve now covered all the style problems I embedded into the Tall Girl paragraph. You might be amazed that one little piece of text can contain so many editing issues. It is to lol. Try editing 200 manuscripts over four years that are written much like that paragraph – plus 200 more that are at least partly written in standard English. Having gone through that experience, I can only describe it as great fun. So many puzzles to solve. If you’re lucky, you too can go on to do some English editing for our marvellous worldwide diversity of writers – if you haven’t done so already.
Wherever this knowledge takes you, I hope that you’ll feel like a Tall Girl, and/or a Tall Boy, in your understanding of English style.
Here are some style fix-ups to test yourself with. These examples were all captured in the wild, but have been simplified to make them easier to deal with. If you can fix them well, excellent. Answers below. If you can say what was wrong with them, double-excellent.
- In general, the gram-negative bacilli present shiny, watery or creamy colonies; the Staphylococci present medium-opaque colonies and the Streptococci small and opaque colonies.
- I only know the band since the CD that came out in 2000. But the band already exists since 1988. Was I an ostrich that's putting its head in the sand, or were you in the first years only active on a local level?
- Rash type 1 and rash type 2 caused by human-associated fungi can be transmitted by contaminated clothing, bedding, towels etc., and should be washed and disinfected before being used by other people.
A fun sentence. Wash those rashes before other people use them.
- Drawings provided in the original literature showed clumps of spores breaking through bark of woody or the outer rind of herbaceous host plants.
The bark of Woody? Woody who? Woody Woodpecker?
Finally, one from a paper I was a co-author on, though I hasten to assure you that this draft wording didn’t make it into print:
- The patient had treated himself with penile injections using pre-filled syringes provided by the same impotence clinic, that he kept in his car.
Advice to careful drivers: never keep an impotence clinic in your car.
The phrase ‘the same impotence clinic’ legitimately refers back to a clinic that was the source of other problems mentioned in the same paper.
Suggested rewrites:
- In general, the gram-negative bacilli produce shiny, watery or creamy colonies, while Staphylococci produce medium-opaque colonies and Streptococci produce small and opaque colonies. --> (further improved) --> In general, colonies of gram-negative bacilli are shiny, watery or creamy, while those of the Staphylococci are medium-opaque and those of the Streptococci are small and opaque.
- I’ve only known about the band since I heard the CD that came out in 2000. But the band had already existed since 1988. Was I an ostrich with its head in the sand, or were you active only on a local level during the first few years?
- Rash type 1 and rash type 2, caused by human-associated fungi, can be transmitted by contaminated clothing, bedding, towels, etc. Items of this nature should be washed and disinfected before being used by other people. --> (further improved) --> Rash type 1 and rash type 2, caused by human-associated fungi, can be transmitted by porous personal items like clothing, bedding and towels. Potentially contaminated materials should be washed and disinfected before being used by other people.
- Drawings provided in the original literature showed clumps of spores breaking through the bark of woody host plants and the outer rind of herbaceous hosts.
Note the change from ‘or’ to ‘and.’
- The patient had given himself penile injections using pre-filled syringes provided by the same impotence clinic. He had been keeping the syringes in his car.
Explanations:
- The authors’ decision to use ellipsis to remove the Iberian verb ‘presents’ in the third of three parallel clauses was understandable, since the repetition was becoming boring. Unfortunately, in English, it seems illogical for authors to avoid ellipsis in one part of a parallel structure, and then randomly begin to use it in another part. It’s difficult, in any case, to ellipse verbs out completely, especially when complicated phrases are involved, since the result looks chopped-up and disjointed: “In general, the gram-negative bacilli produce shiny, watery or creamy colonies, the Staphylococci medium-opaque colonies and the Streptococci small and opaque colonies.” Too much logic seems to have been removed from that sentence for it to work properly. On the other hand, the verb can be smoothly removed if its influence is still indicated by a preposition: “In general, the gram-negative bacilli are represented by shiny, watery or creamy colonies, the Staphylococci by medium-opaque colonies and the Streptococci by small and opaque colonies.” Sending sergeants out on parade brings order. Such conventional approaches, at a deep level, represent English speakers’ intuitions about the number of reminders the reader will need in order to grasp logical parallels vividly as they fly by at optimal speed. That’s why parallelism is a matter of style, rather than a matter of grammar. It seeks to please your mind.
- The original passage has two German ‘since’s’ in it that are busy combining with present-tense verbs. In English, that’s not logical, at least not in reference to past events. ‘Was I an ostrich that is putting its head in the sand’ embeds a syntax error mixing past and present tenses. Even birds living inside clichés take the past tense if the event they are described in occurs in the past. In this case, though, we can use ‘with’ to shorten the sentence, removing ‘that.’ Germanic expressions like ‘in the first years’ and ‘in the last years’ are not found in English; they are usually replaced with Latin-derived phrases like ‘originally,’ ‘recently,’ ‘in the initial years,’ ‘in recent years.’ When expressions like ‘in the first years’ do occur, they are always combined with ‘of’ and a specific indicator of the phenomenon they apply to, such as ‘in the first years of our band’s career’ or ‘in the last years of her life.’
- The original writer either accidentally left out a chunk of text while word-processing, or got lost somewhere in the Wild Wild List and couldn’t re-find the subject of the sentence. ISC authors will often try to use ellipsis to shorten out words that, from a logical standpoint, can’t be removed. This example may feature a case of over-ambitious ellipsis, as seen in number 4, below. The sentence, in any case, is cleanly broken into a ‘part one’ and a ‘part two’ by the ‘and’ that comes after the list, and the clause making up part 2 simply needs to be given a subject. ‘These items’ or ‘these articles’ or ‘such articles’ would do fine. My phrase in the low-energy rewrite, ‘items of this nature,’ requires some inference (‘What nature?), but I think the cloth-based constitution of all the items in the sentence’s list is obvious enough to support this strategy. In the higher-energy rewrite, I took pains to completely unlink the grammatical subject of the second sentence, ‘materials,’ from any indicators like ‘this’ that might seem to refer back to the subject of the first sentence, ‘rash type 1 and rash type 2.’
Readers who remember my comments about ‘which’ clauses may perceive that sentence 3 could be salvaged by a very low-energy rewrite using a ‘which.’ “Rash type 1 and rash type 2 caused by human-associated fungi can be transmitted by contaminated materials like clothing, bedding, and towels, which should be washed and disinfected before being used by other people.” This sentence is boringly long-winded but has no structural problems. The ‘etc.’ in the original sentence had to be removed because it would have been illogical if positioned before the ‘which.’
- This is an interesting one, because the author’s parallel structure is very precise, and yet the reader gets completely lost. That’s because this author has ellipsed out the first of the two parallel ‘plants’ that he or she needs to refer to, giving the reader no clue as to where the parallel structure divides into its two parallel phrases. The reader gets a long, wordy descriptive that can only be resolved by reading to the very end and working backward. The whole point of good style is to avoid that moment of ‘Huh? I have to backtrack here and figure this out.’ In fact, ellipsis is possible in this descriptive, but the ‘plants’ need to be mentioned in the first parallel column so that we know what it and the second column are talking about. Parallelisms can’t just be mechanical. They are crafted by an active consciousness that is trying to keep the reader flowing along at a good pace, understanding everything along the way.
- I admit I saved this one mostly because it’s funny. No one wants to accidentally write something this funny, but if it happens, we might as well enjoy it in a friendly and supportive way. It’s all part of making English your friend. The author had simply tried to chain two descriptive clauses to the word ‘syringes’: ‘provided by the same impotence clinic’ and ‘that he kept in his car.’ What he or she lost sight of was that ‘syringes provided by the same impotence clinic’ was an entire clause with subject and object, and this completely interrupted the connection between the syringes and ‘that he kept in his car.’ ‘Clinic,’ meanwhile, was in position to take over as the subject of the next subordinate clause, and so ‘clinic that he kept in his car’ was born. Sometimes, you just have to recognize that the sentence structure you’re working with is so complex that you will need to make two sentences. It’s not that you can’t make single sentences from many of these complex first drafts; here’s one for the current sentence:
The patient had self-administered penile injections using pre-filled syringes that he obtained from the same impotence clinic and kept in his car.
This sentence is rather terse, however, and it loses the drama of ‘he had been keeping the syringes in his car.’ That phrase, to the microbiologist, slides across the page like a snake and raises itself up to evoke the horror-movie scenario of a warm, dusty environment with plenty of vibrations to stir liquids up. Our hairs stand on end. It’s a description of the worst possible incubator to keep something in that was supposed to be sterile. And when you find out that this patient had a contaminating fungus growing in those syringes that went up through his blood and grew on his heart valves, killing him, then you know that the drama was appropriate. Even scientists have to have ways of quietly screaming in print.
You’ve now read a lot about English style. Much more could be said, but you know the basics, and it’s time to move to something completely different.
“Thus, it is concluded that you now should have a very high ability associated to English’s style.”
You should now be equipped to do outstandingly well with English style.
Everyone in the SVAWE will be proud of you.
“What?”
Oh, the ‘School for Very Adept Writers of English.’
Thanks for reminding me to define that.
Chapter 5 --> https://justpaste.it/1vsk1