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An Underground Guide to Literacy Even in Termpapers (II)

Gerunds & High Anxiety Prose

High Anxiety Prose is what people write who are self-consciously trying to be especially formal. Graduate students' grant applications are often written in HAP. In such prose, one "obtains" rather than "gets" things, "engages" rather than "hires" assistants, "resides" rather than "lives" in a house, "commences" rather than "begins" the research, and the like. Passives abound in HAP, where "it is here proposed" and "it is thought by some" are preferred to "I suggest" and "some think."

HAP is intended to suggest subliminally that the writer (who has doubts about being sufficiently educated and competent) is very educated and competent, and is also taking the task at hand very seriously. When it is bad enough to intrude on the reader's attention, HAP mostly suggests high anxiety, and perhaps an intention to deceive. Being formal without being silly is a challenge, to which HAP is not a very good answer. (Actually, being human without being silly is rather a challenge, but never mind that now.)

One characteristic of HAP is overuse of the gerund. An English gerund is a verb form ending in -ing that is used as a noun:

"Eating is a fine thing to do unless you are served ants."
As a verb form, a gerund can still have an object, even though it works as a noun:
"Eating ants is not a fine thing to do."
But since, however verbal, it is nevertheless also a noun, its object can also appear as a prepositional phrase rather than a garden-variety object:
"The eating of ants is incompatible with good digestion."
In about 80% of all such structures found in termpapers, research proposals, and dissertations, it is better to leave out "the" and "of" and say "eating ants" rather than "the eating of ants." Note how that marked omissions improve the flow of the following examples.
Footnote on ant eating: Among the early historic Navajo, the formic-acid belly ache caused by eating ants was apparently relieved by a decoction made of cliff fendlerbush, according to a Park Service sign at Navajo National Monument. The sign doesn't say why people were eating ants in the first place, but a knowledgeable ranger explained that it appears to have been an occupational hazard of eating grubs. See what remarkable trivia you learn reading irascible web pages about termpaper prose (or Park Service signs)?.
Caution: Not all gerunds in this form involve an object. "The crowing of roosters" and "the eating of roosters" have very different structures lying behind them. The result is that "the eating of roosters" can be rewritten as "eating roosters" (so long as it is the roosters who are to be eaten!) with no significant change of meaning. On the other hand "crowing roosters" are roosters, but "the crowing of roosters" is the sound. It is not easy to make hard and fast stylistic rules that are also simple!

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Outrunning One's Vocabulary: More High Anxiety Prose

Another aspect of High Anxiety Prose is the tendency to use find-sounding words that one would not use in speech. Some of these produce find-sounding effects. Others subvert the high tone of your paper by producing unexpected comic results. (Indeed the character of Mrs. Malaprop in a classic play called "The Rivals" enshrined forever the term "malapropism" for words misused and acidentally meaning something different from what the speaker seems to think.)

Here are some charmingly silly examples, mostly from old papers and exams:

It can of course happen that people use the wrong word simply through carelessness, when they in fact know better. This happens even in published pieces:
George, 73, who did not want his last name used, has been found a room in the Sara Frances Hometel downtown. He is the benefactor of a Senior Community Centers' program that helps the homeless find shelter and other assistance. --San Diego Union-Tribune [For beneficiary.]

Taiwan welcomed the Dalai Lama with the warm hospitalization for which the island is famous. --The China Post [For hospitality.]

[Vertebrate digits were] produced by unequal proliferation of the posterior part of an ancestral appendix. --Nature (375,678) [Presumably for "appendage"]
(A colleague sent this example to me with the comment, "The authors cannot tell their elbows from the lower ends of their guts.")

Unfortunately, many readers assume the error is not a matter of sloppiness but of actual ignorance or stupidity. Notice how the following newspaper item uses exact quotes to make fun of the California supreme court:

In 1976, the state Supreme Court [decided] in Crawford vs. Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles that "school boards in California bear a constitutional obligation to take reasonably feasible steps to alleviate school desegregation regardless of its cause."

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17.1. Idiom Errors A special case of outrunning one's vocabulary is to use words in phrases that are unidiomatic. At least in student writing, idiom errors are surprisingly common even among native speakers.

(It is theoretically interesting to consider how native speakers can make errors of idiom, especially in the case of common expressions. But then it is also theoretically interesting to consider how spelling errors come about, given that most of the printed material we see is correctly spelled. Clearly the brain is not producing written English on the basis of models it has seen, but by using generative principles that are still poorly understood.)

Here are some examples:

17.2. Non-Existent Words Some high-anxiety prose includes words apparently intended to be high-sounding, but which do not actually exist in English: 17.3. Mixed Metaphors Another special case of outrunning one's vocabulary is to create mixed metaphors. 17.4. Mindless Pomposity In an effort to create prose formal enough for the occasion, some writers so overreach the norms of everyday language as to make themselves laughable. There is nothing "wrong" about it exactly, but the strain to seem formal is so extreme that the effect is comical at best.
The details of the syntax of the Mesoamerican writing system will be introduced and the basic details explained, though no attempt will be made to go into detail. Such detailed analysis involves a work no smaller than a book.
This kind of problem is usually solvable by simply reading the text aloud. So is the problem of a repeated word, which is strangely often linked to the same overblown style:
This variance illuminates, for epigraphers, differences in dialectical differences arising among scribal depictions of those from different regions and different time periods.
17.5. Misused Technical Vocabulary Beware of words with technical meanings if you do not mean them in those senses. For example:

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Anacoluthon

"Anacoluthon" refers to shifting grammatical structures mid-stream. The result is a sentence that "doesn't scan." Here are two examples, the first from a Colorado politician , the second from a student who may be destined to become a politician: The grammatical problem here is that there are two structures mixed together: "as basic ... as" and "more basic ... than." But "as ... than" doesn't make a known English structure.

Here are a couple more termpaper and thesis examples of structures that don't scan:

It is rare that any termpaper fails to include at least one example of anacoluthon, which is a mark of broken English. Watch for it in proofreading your penultimate draft! (A polite way to excuse it is to argue that you think so fast when composing that your mind gets ahead of your hand. Unfortunately, that can't apply to the final draft, where less charitable interpretations readily commend themselves to the reader's imagination.)

A special case of ambiguity arises when prefixes are applied to phrases rather than to single words. This often happens in technical jargon, when a multi-word phrase becomes frozen as a single technical term. For example, what is meant by "pre-terminal birthweight babies"? It seems to have two quite different interpretations:

  1. pre-(terminal birth weight) babies
    [= unborn babies who have not attained their terminal birth weight or babies whose weight has not yet come up to their weight at birth]
  2. (pre-terminal) (birth weight) babies
    [= babies whose weight is the same as it was when they were at term]

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Spelling & Proofreading

Proofreading is what you do when you finish a final draft to be sure nothing screwy got into it when you were typing it. Errors introduced by your hitting the wrong keys are called "typos." It is undignified to fail to eradicate them, but they don't reflect on your education. Spelling errors are another thing altogether. English spelling is perhaps the most difficult of any language using a Latin alphabet. (Indeed, despite the use of a small number of signs that make up our writing system, it is open to question whether English writing can be said to be alphabetical in any strict sense at all.) Nevertheless, it is often considered a mark of poor mental ability to make spelling errors, and even a strong argument is rhetorically undermined when the reader notices that it comes from a mind that can't "even" spell. If you have a computer spelling checker, you should leave it running as you type, or at least have it run over the text when you finish.

But that won't catch everything. In particular it won't catch homonyms: except/accept, to/too, dew/due, aloud/allowed, and so on. I will never forget the student who wrote:

The woman could, under the Confusion Cannon, be divorced.

boom The student meant to write "Confucian Canon," but managed to misspell both words. A "confusion cannon," I assume, would look more like the picture at the right.

Here are some more examples of student errors (probably mostly spelling errors) that were missed by spelling checkers because they happened to spell other words:

A common proof error is the excessive repetition of a single word. The following student seems to have been very impressed by the idea of difference:
This variance illuminates, for epigraphers, differences in dialectical differences arising among scribal depictions of those from different regions and different time periods.
Some sentences, when read after the passage of time or by someone who doesn't already know what you mean, turn out to have more than one meaning, sometimes even opposite meanings:
Laws against age discrimination are not on the books so we can keep older workers employed.

Could mean: We can keep older workers employed because there are not laws against age discrimination on the books.

Or could mean: The reason there are no laws on the books against age discrimination is that by not having them we can keep older workers employed.

Or could mean: There are laws against age discrimination, but that is not because we want to keep older workers employed.

So are there or are there not laws against age discrimination? Do we or do we not want to keep older workers employed?

Some sentences can turn out to be not only confusing, but actively stupid. Famous outrageous examples come from newspaper headlines that hit the stands before the proofreaders noticed anything wrong ("MacArthur Flies Back to Front"; "Iranian Army Push Bottles Up Iraqis"). But accidentally saying what you didn't mean happens in non-headline writing too. ("The pastor will preach his farewell address. The choir will sing 'Break Forth into Joy.'")

Here are a few examples written in the haste of UCSD exams:

Here are some instructions for doctoral participants in the UCSD graduation in 1988:
Adviser or substitute will hood the student as follows: Student removes mortarboard, gives hood to adviser, turns back to adviser, and stoops, if necessary.
Most graduates had no trouble with that, since they had been stooping all through graduate school, but the instruction was more poignant than intended when worded that way.

A lot of us have trouble proofing our own stuff, and some people are generally better at it than others. If you can find a patient friend to proof your writing. (or bribe an impatient one), that is not a bad idea. If you have to do it yourself, try to let some time pass between writing and proofing.

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Troublesome Expressions

All Right & Alright

The expression "all right" is formally written as two words; "alright" is still often regarded as an illiteracy, despite the expression having become a single word in spoken language.

Anyway

In written English, as in most spoken dialects, the word is "anyway," not "anyways."

As ... As & Than

The word "as" is used in comparisons in which one asserts the equality or inequality of two things:

"As" is also used with mutliples like "twice as much" and "half as much":

The word "than" is used in comparisons other than multiples to state that one thing has more or less of some quality than another thing:

For some reason, when the sentence gets a little longer, careless writers sometimes confound these two different kinds of comparison, and produce unacceptable hybrid expressions like the following example of anacoluthon:

As & Like

"Like" is a preposition and can occur only before a noun or noun-phrase. "As" is a conjunction, and can introduce a subordinate clause:

Rule: If you can't change "like" to "unlike" and still have a grammatical sentence, then you should probably use "as" or "the way"!
Observation: Some of the finest writers and rhetoricians in our language have used "like" as a conjunction, and its use in colloquial English requires it in some styles of writing. (That is presumably why it was used in the Winston cigarette jingle cited above.) It does not follow that you can ignore the distinction. The fact that the usage is very likely to be regarded as substandard by many readers means that it should be used in writing only with careful thought. Remember that it is possible to lose out in competition for a job because of an inadvertent "illiteracy" in your letter of application. From the employer's side, a job applicant inattentive to the stylistic demands of an application letter may be telling the prospective employer something important!
Finally, some students, in common with my grandfather in his day, use "as" to mean "because" in formal writing. The usage is not wrong (although it is often confusing), but it does not normally occur in spoken language at all any more, and it has never been particularly common even in writing. When "as" is used to mean "because" more than once per termpaper, it becomes obtrusive.

Compose & Comprise

Smaller parts compose a larger whole. (The provinces compose the nation; the nation is composed of the provinces.) In contrast, a larger whole comprises smaller parts. (The nation comprises the provinces.) In recent years people have taken to saying the smaller comprise the larger (the provinces comprise the nation), but this usage is still unacceptable to many speakers.

Effect & Affect

afféct (V) (1) to have an effect on (!); (2) to pretend
He affected not to know the child.
She affected to be a person of great education but spelled it "edjucation".
It was too late for his speech to affect the election results.
áffect (N) emotion (a technical term in psychology):
She expressed no affect as she told of the rape.

efféct (N) the result of something
He petitioned the governor to no effect.
The effect of his petition was that he was hanged.
His money had no effect on the election results.
efféct (V) to cause or bring about:
The missionaries finally effected a mass conversion.

In-laws

The plural of kinship terms ending in "-in-law" is formed before the "-in-law" is added. The possessive is formed afterward:
Being married twice, he had two mothers-in-law.
That is my mother-in-law's phone number.
(I never figured out what to do with the possessive plural, which would seem to be "mothers-in-law's," which looks pretty peculiar. Books on style wisely but unhelpfully keep silent on this.)

Infer & Imply

Imply = to state indirectly, hint, intimate. (People, their writings, or even circumstances can all imply things.)
You seem to imply that we were to blame.
The report implies we were to blame.
Infer = to conclude from evidence; to deduce. (Only people can infer things.)
Reading the report led him to infer that we were to blame.
Wrong: This pattern of building infers a less rigid mentality.
Right: This pattern of building implies a less rigid mentality.

Inter & Intra

"Inter-" means between. "Intra-" means within.
Inter-familial strife = strife between families
Intra-familial strife = strife within a family

Inter-office memo = memo between offices
Intra-office memo = memo within one office

Jealous & Envious

In spoken English the word "jealous" is far along in the evolution to being an nearly exact synonym of "envious." However written usage is more conservative. In written English, to be envious of somebody is to wish one could have or do what that person has or does. To be jealous of somebody is to be protective of him or her and want to keep other people away. Even in spoken English, "jealous" is not yet identical with "envious." For one thing, the burden of traditional written usage will probably always infect "jealous." For another, a fascinating new distinction seems to be emerging by which "envy" is a sin, while "jealousy" is an emotion. It will be interesting to read the dictionaries of 150 years from now to see what will have happened to this.

Lead, Led, Led (vb.) & Lead (noun)

Lend & Loan

"Lend" is a verb. "Loan" is a noun. What is lent is a loan. Although you can "loan" somebody something in speech without most people noticing the "error," in writing it still counts as a lapse of style.

Lie & Lay

"Lie" (lie lay, lain, lying) is an intransitive verb. "I like to lie in a hammock."

"Lay" (lay, laid, laid, laying) is a transitive verb. "Please lay the book on the table."

The difference is that simple, but confusion is caused by "lay" being both the present form of intransitive verb and the past form of the transitive one.

Don't lie in the water.Don't lay the book in the water.
He lay in the water.She laid the book in the water.
He's lain there for a week.She's laid the book there again.
He's still lying there.She's still laying stuff there.
He sure smells bad.Don't lend her your books.
Wrong: A new world of freedom lays before us. (President Bush!)
Right: A new world of freedom lies before us.
As the last example from (the speechwriters of) the first President Bush reminds us, in spoken English, the two verbs seem to be merging with each other, and one hears sentences even from educated speakers that do not observe the distinction described here, even though most editors still insist upon it in written English.

Manifest & Appear

"Appear" is an intransitive verb. "Manifest" is a transitive and reflexive one (except in some occult literature). (Manifest is also an adjective and noun, of course.)

I & Me

"I" is used as a subject, "me" as an object.

Apparently the dialectical use of "me" as a subject (or predicate complement) caused generations of English teachers to urge generations of urchins to stop saying, "Me and Jim played marbles" and start saying, "Jim and I played marbles." So uncharacteristically thoroughly was this learned that now the urchins of America say ungrammatical things like, "She told Jim and I to go play marbles." Confusing "I" and "me" should be avoided, especially by non-urchins.

"It's me," by the way, is so widespread as to be inconspicuous even in writing. Meanwhile, "it is I" seems to be becoming so formal as to be obtrusive in all but the most formal English.

An exactly parallel problem occurs with he/him and she/her. Note how the clumsiness of this paragraph from an exam is amplified by the wrong use of "he":

Method & Methodology

The method is the way you do something. Methodology is either the branch of logic that studies methods, or a systematically linked system of principles and practices appropriate to a discipline. They tried to rescue the cat with a ladder, but this methodology didn't work. [for method]

None

"None" seems like a contraction of "no one," and I assume historically it probably is, but in contemporary English it alternates between being singular and being plural. When it means "not one" it is singular. ("Of all the people in my dorm, none gets up before 10.")

It is singular also if it is followed by "of" and a singular noun. ("None of the chocolate is going to survive the day.") When it means "not any" of several things it is plural. ("None of the refrigerator drawers had green slime in them yet." "None of the books were available in time.")

Plus

The word "plus" corresponds to the "+" sign in arithmetic and is used to pronounce sequences like "2 + 2 = 5." Extensions into other contexts occur in spoken English, but only some of them are acceptable in written English: (The last example comes from an ad for the "American English Writing Guide," a computer program that probably should not be trusted!)

Presently

"Presently" means "very soon." "At present" means "at the present time" or "now."
Wrong: She's not here presently.
Right: She's not here at present.
Right: She'll be here presently.

Reason

One says "the reason that," not "the reason because":

Self

Words ending in -self may be intensive ("he himself said so") or reflexive ("she shot herself"). The term "myself" should not be used simply to mean "I":

Simple vs Simplistic

Simple means easy, uncomplicated. In earlier English it also meant stupid, and that usage lingers occasionally. Simplistic means unrealistically simplified to the point of being unrealistic:

Type vs Kind

One speaks of a single type or kind of thing (singular), or of several types or kinds of things (plural), but not of one "kind of things" or "types of thing." (It is true that a single thing can come in many types and a single type can have many examples, but that is a reality about the world that standard English does not recognize in this kind of phrase.)

Foreign Words

English is one of the rare languages that uses the Latin alphabet without diacritical marks. Foreign words used in English should normally retain the original diacritical marks (Méhariste, Ciudad de Tetuán, Ballo in Màschera, and the like). In the case of languages not natively written with Latin letters (Russian, Sanskrit, &c.), important consonant and vowel distinctions are often made with diacritics in Latin-alphabet transcription. Some editors carefully preserve these, even when only one or two words are carried across. Others casually ignore them, figuring that the Latin spelling is not normal orthography for that language anyhow.

In the case of transliterated Chinese, most Western publishers and editors ignore tone marks, which creates confusion if (as is often the case) two words differ only in tone (Wang with a rising tone is a different surname from Wang with an even tone; Xu with a rising tone is a different surname from Xu with a tone that falls and then rises.), But ignoring the tones is traditional enough that your sources will normally not include tone information.

Since different words are spelled alike when tone is ignored, information is lost and confusion promoted. It is unclear whether this is deliberate on the part of China specialists or not. One effect of it is to make all Chinese words look alike, and therefore to make Chinese look unnecessarily mysterious and difficult. Oddly, I once heard a prominent American historian of China argue that the tones "don't matter" because "nobody speaks Chinese anyway"!

Given that tone marks are rarely included, leaving off other markers of consonant and vowel differences as well is so much the worse. Chinese nu (slave) and nü (woman) are still different (nu and nü) when the tone marks are removed. But slaves and women become interchangeable when both are transcribed "nu"!

Similarly spellings like ch'un (spring), chun (avaricious), chün (gentleman) and ch'ün (flock) should not all be reduced to "chun," although some magazine editors do this. And the city of Xi'an has two syllables, while the spelling "Xian" is only one.

(In spite of all this, I might stress that diacritical marks should not be randomly added to dress up transcriptions! I have had a rash of student papers with random "tone marks" written over Chinese spellings. People figure I like diacritics, so they throw a few in.)

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Latin Abbreviations

English is one of the few languages that still retains Latin abbreviations (and a few short words that are not actually abbreviated) without retaining the Latin expressions they stand for. However confusing this may be, the writer in English is expected to use them correctly. (Using i.e. when you mean e.g. is an illiteracy that signals to the reader that you are an unserious person.) Since the abbreviations are technically in a foreign language, occasional editors still prefer that they be italicized (underlined) in acknowledgment of their foreignness. Here are the commonest ones:
e.g. (exempli gratia = "for example")
followed by an example, never by a restatement. ("She has a lot of classical music CDs, e.g. by Elvis Presley." "Fill in vital information, e.g., blood type.")
i.e. (id est = "that is")
followed by a restatement, never by an example. ("She has a lot of classical music CDs, i.e., she likes classical music." "She moved to heaven, i.e., she died." "We need help, i.e. money!")
viz (videlicet = "namely")
followed by a list, especially an exhaustive list. ("We have something from each of the four major food groups, viz grease, sugar, preservatives, and alcohol." "Bring just the necessities, viz money and credit cards.")
(The truly fussy omit the period after "viz" because the z is the historical remnant of a Renaissance period marker. Most editors insist on the period, however.)
ca. (circa = "around")
meaning "approximately," especially in historical dates. ("She was born ca. 1530 and died in 1582.")
fl. (floruit = "flourished")
used in historical dates. ("Huang Liandong [fl. 950] was an entirely incompetent poet blessed by a good publicity agent.")
ibid (ibidem = "in the same place")
referring to the source cited most recently. ("He goes on to say [ibid] that ... ") (Although it is actually an abbreviation, it is not unusual to leave the period out after ibid.)
op. cit. (opere citato = "in the work cited")
referring to a work cited earlier, but not most recently. ("As we saw earlier, Brown [op.cit. p. 337] disagreed.")
passim (= "in passing")
referring to a subject mentioned frequently but briefly throughout a source. ("She implies [passim] that kissing frogs is a normal thing to do.")
sic (= "thus")
placed in square brackets after an error in quoted material to show that the error is quoted exactly as in the original. ("He said, 'She weren't [sic] able to do it.'")

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