Stacked Adjectives

In English, we place adjectives before the noun they modify:

a brown dish

a small brown dish

When a stack of adjectives includes one that could modify the adjective after it OR the final noun, the result has more than one meaning (that is, it is ambiguous):

a small brown dog’s dish

Is the dog brown?  Is the dish brown?  Which of them is small?

Would punctuation disambiguate?  A comma only belongs between adjectives if you could sensibly put “and” there.  You would never say “a brown and dog’s dish.”  So you would not write “a brown, dog’s dish.” Could you disambiguate via a hyphen?  A small brown-dog's dish?  A small-brown-dog's dish? Weird.  Personally, I would write "a dish for the small brown dog."

Dogs may not concern you.  But below is an example where such stacked adjectives plus an unfortunate comma created ambiguity:

England’s National Health Service could save money by carrying out fewer, less effective procedures.

It seems that the writer is recommending “fewer and less-effective procedures.”  We hope not. But would "fewer less effective procedures" be any better?  No, we need a hyphen. Do you know where?

Length of phrase does not signal ambiguity.  The stacked adjectives in “bright chrome car-door handle” create a phrase that is long but readable. Yet the shorter stack, “old men’s bike,” is short but ambiguous.

You can rewrite most stacked-adjective phrases to clarify their intended meaning.

For example, mouse embryonic stem cell lines  =  lines of stem cells from mouse embryos.

Below are ambiguous phrases with stacked adjectives. How would you disambiguate each?

1. Pending home sales index
2. US politician killer
3. Free market research reports
4. Adjustable wooden dog feeder
5. Florida exotic pest plant council
6. Two beige upholstered plastic kitchen chairs
7. Roth IRA conversion eligibility
8. Police academy trained fighter
9. Hardy medium sized thick haired horned black cattle
10. Excessive genomic DNA copy number variation

 
 
There are web pages about English adjectives and their order and punctuation.  I reviewed many of them, and found them confusing or flawed.  Most ignore punctuation rules. But below are two sites that, if you take them together, cover the rules fairly well.  Warning: the second has an obnoxious audio ad.   

http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/adjectives-order_1.htm

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/commas-with-adjectives

 

Malicious Writing by Banks

Below is the letter that US Bank wrote me last week.  I am about pay off my mortgage, and I asked them for instructions.  They, like most banks, write instructions in Courier type with no space between the lines: they want to discourage customers from understanding the instructions.  If we misunderstand, we will miss a step and they can charge us more fees.

US Bank formatted this letter so I would not read or understand completely.  A customer not fluent in English would be totally confused.  I have used Track Changes to note how their language deliberately obscures these instructions for me. 

Buyer's Guide: 

Style Manuals in U.S. English
   

Americans follow several style manuals.  To help you choose the best one for your purpose, here is my buyer’s guide.  I have no financial interest in any product, and the information below comes from decades as a business writer, journal editorial staffer, student, and professor.

The MLA (Modern Language Association) Handbook presents the style used in most high schools and in university humanities classes.  Software for generating MLA references is free on the Internet at many sites.

If you are editing books or papers for journals in the social sciences, you might choose either The Chicago Manual of Style 16^th edition  or the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association 6^th edition (APA6; second printing or later).  

The Chicago Manual of Style is not an ideal standard for a business or a university classroom.  It includes two distinct systems of source notation: numbered superscripts and (Author, year).  Further, it was written by and for the staff of a large academic publishing house.  If your venue is a classroom, corporation, or association, you may have trouble finding answers to your style questions.  That is, the manual is arranged and indexed for editorial experts.  You must know the meanings of dagger, en-dash, run-in, and recto.  And you are paying for hundreds of pages of academic minutiae.

APA6 is friendlier to the teacher and student, but it is still written by editors who address published authors and reviewers.  It ignores the logistics of term-paper submission. 

For example, despite an enlarged and well-illustrated chapter on figures and tables, all of its examples of “table notes” presuppose that you reproduce tables in their entirety from a published source—requiring copyright information and permissions.  That chapter shows no examples of student-constructed tables that merely use some data from sources.  Such tables’ notes, I learn from the APA’s wonderful Style Expert blog, should simply include the citation(s) of your source(s), which you will of course expand, as usual, in your reference list.  I consult that blog regularly.

There are style manuals for every discipline: physics, chemistry, history, biology, etc.  And there is one for physicians: The American Medical Association (AMA) Manual of Style.  But when physicians and allied professionals teach, they normally require students to follow APA style, because the APA manual is so much easier to use.  The latest AMA Manual of Style (10^th edition) weights 4.25 pounds (1.928 kg) and covers over 1,000 pages.  I have a copy and I consult it when anyone asks.  But, like The Chicago Manual, it is a book for editors.  If you must follow AMA style, learn to use the free Zotero.org application.  You can buy AMA software for $40, and there are free style sheets available.

You don’t need either Chicago or APA6 if you are in business, because you rarely list sources.  The most respected resource for U.S. business English is The Gregg Reference Manual.  It has recently appeared in 9^th, 10^th, and 11^th editions, with changes that seem to me largely cosmetic and promotional.  All of those editions are good guides.  This book is complete and authoritative, and it is reasonably user friendly.  When I face questions about grammar or punctuation, I go to Gregg first.

Finally, think of the needs of journalists on assignment.  They need quick answers to questions about nations, politics, peoples, customs, and economics.  That kind of information is conveniently indexed in the 2011 and 2013 editions of The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law (AP).   For a browser of trivia like me, it is a delight.  And my friends in public-relations departments use it constantly.  But it is not a good guide for email, proposals, or term papers.  Its authors largely ignore both academe and corporate etiquette, and it follows the punctuation rules of journalists.

There are literally dozens of specialty style manuals. I have not even mentioned International Council of Medical Journal Editors ICMJE or Vancouver style  (accepted by AMA and widely used in Australia), Council of Biology Editors style

or the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications.  

If you contemplate buying a style manual, I’d be happy to confer with you.

APA Style for Referencing Laws

Last October, I posted about antiplagiarism sites. But part of avoiding plagiarism is knowing how to credit your source correctly.

If you follow APA style, the Publication Manual (6th ed.) describes legal references on the Manual's pages 216-224. The APA follows the legal Blue Book or Bluebook. But the APA's nine pages of legal guidelines leave out such sources as state bills that did not become statutes: unenacted legislation.   

For the text of unenacted legislation, I found a library guideline.

It seems that that reference needs four elements: 

• The name of the bill
• Its number (H for house, S for senate), including section number, if any
• The official name of the State's legislative body, including the session, if specified
• The year 

Fictitious Example:
Protection for Motorcyclists and Passengers, H 3409 section 32. South Dakota Legislative Assembly, Session 1, 2004.

The corresponding citation, in the text, would have two elements: the name of the law and the year.

For the many other government documents we must sometimes reference, I found a ten-page guide.  It came from a high school in Idaho, supplied for a senior project.   

Arizona State University has a page with a "citation engine" that will accept your typed-in information and generate a reference--in APA style or MLA style.  

Dr King as Business Writer: Restrained Power

--> Scholars have anatomized Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s peerless speeches and other public prose.  Little attention has gone to Dr. King as business writer.  

Below is a letter he wrote in December 1955 to the National City Lines. It persuaded them to send a negotiator to Montgomery, Alabama. The business goal was to change the racist policies of their affiliate, Montgomery City Lines.

I have put all the verbs in italic type.

8 December 1955   

The National City Lines, Inc.

616 South Michigan Ave.

Chicago, IL

Over a period of years the Negro passengers on the Montgomery City Lines, Inc. have been subjected to humiliation, threats, intimidation, and death through bus driver action.

The Negro has been inconvenienced in the use of the city bus lines by the operators in all instances in which the bus has been crowded. He has been forced to give up his seat if a white person has been standing.

Repeated conferences with the bus officials have met with failure.  Today a meeting was held with Mr. J. H. Bagley and Attorney Jack Crenshaw as representatives of the bus company, and Mayor W. A. Gayle and Associate Commissioners Frank Parks and Clyde Sellers. At which time as an attempt to end the Monday through Thursday protest, the following three proposals were made:

1. Courteous treatment by bus drivers.

2. Seating of Negro passengers from rear to front of bus, and white passengers from front to rear on “first-come-first serve” basis with no seats reserved for any race.

3. Employment of Negro bus operators in predominantly Negro residential sections.

The above proposals, and the resolutions which will follow, were drafted and adopted in a mass meeting of more than 5,000 regular bus riders.  These proposals were denied in the meeting with the city officials and representatives of the bus company.

Since 44% of the city’s population is Negro, and since 75% of the bus riders are Negro, we urge you to send a representative to Montgomery to arbitrate.

The Montgomery Improvement Association

The Rev. M. L. King, Pres.

The Rev. U. J. Fields, Sec’y

Until the end, 75% of verbs are in the passive voice.*  Passive verbs create a tone of objectivity and avoid blame.  

Dr King surrounds his passive verbs with nouns that, similarly, subdue outrage and instead pursue the letter's business goal.   He brackets racist behavior inside the nouns “humiliation, threats, intimidation, and death” and where he could have named the perpetrators, he substitutes the masterful understatement “bus driver action.”  

Then, in this business letter’s very last sentence, his power emerges.  We hear the ringing, personal monosyllables of “we urge you.”   

In other words, following the letter's restrained description of racism, its businesslike litany of implacable white leaders, and its equally businesslike statistics of the firm's African American customer base, Dr. King hits home.

Of course, the unseen dimension of a business letter is its choice of recipient.  Dr. King knew that when you are ill-served, you go to the firm's owner. 

I could go on to elaborate how Dr. King used his mastery of English in the format, the length, and every other aspect of this letter.  But you get the idea.  



*One active verb (have met) is there to frame the noun “failure,” which tactfully heads off the question of who failed whom.  The second active verb “has been standing” is scarcely avoidable; being intransitive, this meaning of "to stand" has no passive form.  "Will follow" is active voice; it promises proposals without specifying who will send them.