TLC's Weekly Tip

"It is not enough to observe, experiment, theorize, calculate and communicate; we must also argue, criticize, debate, expound, summarize, and otherwise transform the information that we have obtained individually into reliable, well established, public knowledge."
- John Ziman (1969): "Information, Communication, Knowledge." Nature 224 (5217): 324

Ten Terrific Grammatic and Stylistic Tips 

For thirty-seven years we complained, even ranted, about how poorly the students in our English classes wrote.  In the past few years, while we've turned our attention from student to faculty development, our complaints about the orthographically, stylistically, and grammatically challenged have maintained the same decibel level, though our ire has found a new source, faculty.  In fact, having just finished editing faculty-submitted essays for the fifth book in our "It Works for Me" series, we’re tired from taking so much time to revise the work of professionals. Most of the essays were solidly written, but some had us wanting to paraphrase what Casey Stengel once said about his Mets team: "Can anybody here play this game?" 

Like a game, grammar has rules, rules which used to be more hard and fast but are now mostly generally agreed-upon standards of usage.  If we could boil all these rules down to one commandment, it would be, "Thou shall not confuse thy reader" or, to put it more succinctly, "Be clear."  Truthfully, the major problem with most breakdowns in traditional rules is they put unintentional demands on the reader—i.e., hmmm, what does the writer really mean to say?—and in so doing provide more distractions than cellphones do inside Cinema Twelve.

Strongly related to grammar is style, and even the best of writers' style can be strengthened by a few hints.  Certainly most faculty members have a grammar check program on their computers, and most faculty members use the programs, but most grammar checkers are neither foolproof nor designed to catch all errors.  As we became painfully aware when proofreading this essay, making grammatical and stylistic errors is (or is it "are"?) easy, and even Homer nodded.  Therefore, in the interests of more effective writing, scholarly and otherwise, we offer this concise Decalogue of Grammatical Decorum.

1. Practice agreement between subjects and verbs as well as pronouns and antecedents.  We realize a great grammatical and gender debate rages on whether to write "A student should make up his mind," "A student should make up his/her mind," or "A student should make up their mind."  Our solution is practical; avoid the problem by recasting the entire sentence in the plural:  "Students should make up their minds."  Perhaps the biggest offender to the agreement principle is the collective noun.  Mark this sentence: "The pile of notes on the scientist's desk is proof research lives."  The true subject, "pile," is singular, so the sentence is correct.
2. Avoid beginning sentences with passive constructions "It is," "There is," and "There are."  Grammatically such sentences are correct, but they lack punch.  Instead of "There are lots of reasons to check your most recent sources first," learn to start with the true subject: "Lots of reasons exist to check your most recent sources first."
3. Shun the bare demonstratives "this" and "that."  The most likely culprit for the demonstrative problem is speech.  In daily parlance we make statements to our colleagues such as "This is the best book on the subject I have ever read" and dramatically point to the actual book.  When writing, we have no pointer unless we make it a point to follow "this" with a noun.
4. Learn which relative pronoun (which, that, who, whom, whose) to use.  In general, "which" is used in a subordinate clause following a comma ("Many researchers use Google, which makes a good point of departure, but rarely do researchers rely on Google to find all the information they need"), and "that" ("Google is a site that is employed by many researchers") is used in clauses that function as adjectives.  "That" is used for animals and objects ("Google is a site that I like") while "who" and "whom" are used for people ("Marie Curie is a scientist who provides a good role model for researchers").  Note in the last example how "who" has a clear antecedent.  Employ "who" with the verb "to be" (Who is the best critic on Hamlet?”); "whom" works as the object of a preposition ("The professor with whom I worked on the experiment was a superb mentor") and as an object in a subordinate clause ("The department had one superstar whom everyone respected").
5. Try not to employ "you" in writing.  Again, we utilize "you" in our everyday speech quite often because we can point to the referent with our finger and even our eyes.  In writing, "you" is permitted if it clearly refers to a specified audience.  "You might find the MLA style not too user-friendly" is certainly appropriate for a reader in the humanities.  However, the indefinite "you" confuses readers, who wonder to whom this pronoun refers ("It is the kind of situation you see in the lab every day").
6. Eschew redundancies that are repetitious.  Most writers recognize the obvious redundancies such as "true fact" and "déjà vu all over again," but other commonly heard phrases also ring the redundancy bell.  Instead of "the reason why," substitute "the reason that," and for "is because" use "is that" ("The reason that I could pay for grad school is that my Microsoft stock kept rising").
7. Eliminate dangling and misplaced modifiers.  In the sentence "Wanting to be a successful researcher, the scientific method was something to which I subscribed," is it possible for the scientific method to desire anything?  Place the modifier close to the thing it modifies, and make certain it modifies only that thing.  "At the prestigious conference coffee was served to conferees in china cups" sounds more like a description of a wild ride at Disney World than praise for an excellent teaching and learning conference.
8. If you learn but one new grammar rule, make it FABONSY.  Do you know whether to use a comma in this sentence after the "and": "The novice researcher needs to develop the acquaintance of a campus librarian and make friends with the best style book in the discipline"?  The answer is "No," but do you know why?  Memorize the made-up word FABONSY; this mnemonic acronym refers to the seven coordinating conjunctions necessitating a comma when joining two main clauses—For, And, But, Or, Nor, So (meaning "Therefore"), Yet.  The sentence in question does not have two main clauses, just a compound verb separated by "and," so no comma is needed.
9. The adverbs "when" and "where" don’t follow the verb "to be."  Readers seeing "is" in a sentence correctly expect the verb to be followed by an adjective or a noun, not an adverb.
10. Abstain from ambiguous pronoun references.  "Try to explain to a grad student how important finding the most recent source and a more-intensive-than-Google search are.  It is not an easy thing to do."   Does the "It" refer to the source, the search, or a process involving both?