Quickly: Write 500 Words about X

It's that time of year: students are dreading the writing of a 25-minute essay as part of their SAT exams.  When the examiners present a statement, how do you generate two dozen intelligent sentences about it? 

I myself am a motormouth; I can talk about anything almost endlessly.  So for those of you less congenitally verbose, here are two suggestions.

First, take the given statement, and quickly generate one or two mirror-images or opposites. Writing about each one will take up multiple sentences. If the statement is, "No one accomplishes anything important without persistence," then you add "Many people accomplish important things when they do persist" and "Many people accomplish trivial things when they give up quickly."  You should also consider the opposite: whether anyone has accomplished something important quickly and easily.  

Second, come into the exam room knowing seven stories that you can tweak to illustrate most situations. Glean these stories from your experience, from history, or from fiction--those novels and plays assigned in your English class. If you want to index these seven stories, I recommend generating them around either the traditional Seven Deadly Sins or the Seven Virtues:

Stories that illustrate the effects of Pride, Envy, Hatred, Greed, Lust (careful on this one), Sloth, and Gluttony.

Stories that illustrate the effects of Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice, Fortitude (persistence), Prudence and Temperance (look it up).  

These stories are easy to remember and will fill up your exam page.  

They may also make you an even more interesting person. 

Special English as Global English

Since 1959, the Voice of America (VOA) has been broadcasting in a simple version of American English called Special English. Via the Internet, you can now get transcripts of these VOA broadcasts, follow along, and learn English.

Special English may be the Global English I have been seeking: a simple, international "dialect" that is easy to understand and easy to learn. Special English broadcasts are available to hear via radio and via RealPlayer and MP3 downloads. To experience Special English, go to

http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/about_our_website.cfm

These Special English broadcasts and transcripts are a free way of learning American English. Now if only the Voice of America would provide software to translate business e-mails into Special English before these e-mails are sent around the world!

Dangers of Describing: the Noun Clump

When writers describe something, they often use an adjective, and adjectives precede nouns:

It is a cold day. He is buying a bigger truck.

But English does not always identify adjectives: elsewhere, "cold" could be a noun, as in "She has a cold."
Thus a noun phrase (noun plus adjectives preceding it) could grow:

Headline: Deactivated gun ban--this headline could mean a deactivated ban on guns, or a ban on deactivated guns.

"I am selling a vegetarian mother and baby book" could mean a vegetarian mother and a baby book.

A brand new brown women’s leather handbag--What is brown here?

In clarifying these noun phrases, writers have two tools: adding hyphens and/or working backward. For example, "Deactivated gun ban" could have simply become "Deactivated-gun ban" or "Ban on deactivated guns."

The book sentence would have been clearer if it had read, "I am selling a baby book for vegetarian mothers."
or possibly "a vegetarian mother-and-baby book."

As to the handbag, why not write, "a brand-new women's handbag in brown leather"? (Or is "women's" even necessary when the noun is handbag?) Note the power of the word "leather." It carries a hint for you e-Bayers: the last word in the description will get the emphasis.

Count and Noncount Nouns

On educational TV, I heard this sentence: “Women have been trying to go through childbirth with little or no drugs.”

Little . . . drugs? At first, that didn’t sound right.

Adjectives such as “little” and “much” normally describe noncount (also called uncountable) nouns. Noncount nouns name substances that do not typically come in units, substances such as flour, grass, or advice.

But the noun drug is a count noun: we can have a drug, two drugs, few drugs, or many drugs. We don’t normally say little drugs or much drugs.

The doctor who spoke on educational TV did not mean that women wanted to replace six or seven drugs with one or two. Instead, the doctor meant that women were choosing no drugs or only low doses. Thus the doctor treated drugs as a noncount noun. She could have said, “Women have been trying to go through childbirth with either no drugs or smaller doses.”

The lesson here is that English treats nouns differently, depending on whether they describe countable or uncountable things:

Count nouns
A car, one car, the car, few cars, fewer cars, many cars, more cars
An item, one item, the item, few items, fewer items, many items, more items

Noncount nouns
Advice, little advice, less advice, much advice, more advice
Flour, little flour, less flour, much flour, more flour
Grass, little grass, less grass, much grass, more grass

If we must segment an uncountable substance, we build a phrase such as “one piece of advice” or “one species of grass” or add a clause such as “a flour that many bakers use.”

If you are unsure whether a noun is count or noncount, consult an international dictionary of English such as Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary. Every noun there is identified with a C for countable or U for uncountable.

A College Grammar Course Online

If you go to

www.ccc.commnet.edu/sensen/index.html

you will find the home page of a college-level online course that teaches English sentence structure.

Learn the parts of a sentence and how you can make them work to express your ideas.

This free course, called Sentence Sense, is designed for use with Netscape, but also works on other browser and hardware configurations. It requires Javascript.

Dangling Modifiers

Can you tell why English teachers criticize the following sentences for their dangling modifiers?

1. Calling themselves a "creative hub," each photo page displays a variety of HTML codes needed to post it elsewhere.

2. Once used only in space, consumers can now install photo voltaic cells to generate their own electricity.

3. Unlike Demetrios Island, goats have been Stratos’s only source of income.

4. Using a phenomenological approach, the participants completed an audiotaped, unstructured, nondirective interview.

When a sentence begins with a dangling modifier, and no comma follows the modifier, that sentence can baffle readers:

5. When searching through the console log node TZ9a6 was found to be missing.

There is / There are

Logic does not always govern grammar.

For example, which sentence sounds correct: There is more than one way to use these trails.
OR There are more than one way to use these trails.

Native speakers of English vote for the first: There is. Yet logically the subject of is/are is the nominative more. You would think that more would be plural, especially in the phrase more than one.

For this example, I am grateful to my collegiate godson, Bill Egan. He it was who, at age four, presented me with my favorite example of how idiosyncratically English treats its pronouns. Counting a number of objects and holding up two fingers, he said, "I have two--these many." Logically, his grammar would seem correct: if the substantive many is more than one, you would think it should be described by "these," not the standard "this."

The good news: my Microsoft grammar checker will catch There are more than one way. The bad news: It will not catch I have these many toys. (Granted, an advanced speaker might intend these and many to describe the noun independently. "I give unto you these many privileges.")

How do foreigners ever learn our language?

Lord Kinnock Speaks

Recently, the British Council studied how, where, to whom, and by whom English was being taught. The study, published elegantly and presented on the Internet, included a preface by The Right Honourable Lord Neil Kinnock, Chair of the British Council. In his foreword, Lord Kinnock wrote the following sentence:

"The anticipation of possible shifts in demand provided by this study gives all interests and organisations which seek to nourish the learning and use of English with a basis for planning to meet the eventualities of what could be a very different operating environment in a decade's time."

The study results suggest that fewer people, worldwide, are turning to Britain for instruction in English.

I wonder why.

[This blog post is dedicated to Dr. Carlo Graziani.]

AutoSummarize: I'm Unimpressed

In its Tools menu, Microsoft Word offers a function called AutoSummarize. I tested this function and it does not impress me.

I tried AutoSummarize on four documents: one business letter and four well-written essays. In one feature, AutoSummarize lets me choose the length of the summary. For example, it would yellow-highlight either 25% or 10% of the document. But neither 25% nor 10% summaries seemed to contain the essence of the document.

True, in one case, AutoSummarize selected the final sentence of the first paragraph, which is the essay's traditional place for a point sentence. But in the three other cases, AutoSummarize ignored the first paragraph, even where the document's point sentence was there.

I cannot recommend AutoSummarize as a quick way to shorten your reading time. Instead, I recommend that writers have an agenda as they read or skim a document. I suggest that the reading emphasize the document's key locations: the introduction, its point sentence, its subtitles, the first sentences of sections and paragraphs, and conclusion.
(Flesch Reading Ease: 43. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10.9.)

Brians Errors

His name is Paul Brians.

His collection of common errors and confusables in English is at
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#errors

Visit that site, and I predict that it will explain at least one mystery that has tickled your brain. Do you ever wonder whether you should write "among the three children" or "between the three children"? Yes, you could consult your dictionary. But if you go to Brians Errors, you stand a good chance of wasting glorious minutes among hundreds of other linguistic questions.

Now here is mine. I wonder why Paul Brians did not title the page "Brians's Errors."

Protect Yourself

More evidence is accumulating: e-mails risk insulting people. Books are being written; blogs are taking up the refrain. If you want to protect yourself, make every e-mail exude cordial good will.

Start with a salutation: Hi Jedediah, or Hi Friends, or Dear Bashemi, or even Dear Mr. Wolfe.

Close with cordiality: Thanks again, Take care, Best wishes, Best regards, or even Sincerely.

Never write an e-mail while you are angry, and if you do, save it as a draft and review it the next morning.
Consider phoning instead.
If you must send an e-mail with a negative evaluation, lard it with good wishes and include whatever praise you can.
If someone has hurt you, and you must reply, start by thanking them for their input.

Sound more cordial than you feel. Remember, an e-mail message does not automatically convey the goodness of your personality. An e-mail appears on the receipient's screen like an inkblot. He or she projects emotionality onto the words. And even "please" can be an insult if recipients take it that way.

Cultivate cordiality. It could save your career.

Scrambled Spelling: Does It Matter?

Almost everyone has seen the following so-called discovery about English:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

This so-called discovery has primarily been used by spammers to evade software that detects words that signal spam.

As an excuse for misspelling English, it is invalid.

First, all the words shorter than four letters must be spelled correctly.

Second, the message must be simple and contain familiar words. The message above further compensates for its misspellings because the message's content is echoed in the message's form.

Third, and most importantly, you will notice that these misspellings are carefully structured. For example, "Aoccdrnig" keeps far more of the basic structure of the word than, say "Anircocdg" would have. "Rscheearch" is a very disciplined misspelling compared to "rrhcscaeeh."

Finally, no one who wishes to be taken seriously scrambles letters or misspells words deliberately. Correct spelling is still a mark of both courtesy and prestige.

Here's what I think would be really interesting research: Just which misspellings are easier to overlook? The ones that retain the silhouette of the word? The ones that keep three to five final letters in their appropriate spaces, as "rscheearch" does? Or the ones that never move a letter more than two spaces, as "Aoccdrnig" does? In short, how DO we recognize a word? And do our recognition patterns depend on our individual learning styles?

Electronic References: DOI

APA has dropped the requirement that electronic references include the database (such as OVID or PsycInfo).

The source of this new guideline is http://www.apastyle.org/elecmedia.html:

"With the exception of hard-to-find books and other documents of limited circulation delivered by electronic databases, the database name is no longer a necessary element of the reference. This change is made in the interest of simplifying reference format."

The APA has published (in PDF format only) a 24-page "booklet" on electronic references (copyright 2007) that is available for $11.95. I have purchased it. It doesn't say too much that is new except to suggest what are called Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs).

APA has added a recommended element to an electronic reference: the DOI or Digital Object Identifier. I have tried to learn whether RefWorks automatically inserts the DOI, and I believe that it does. In any case, I quote below from the APA web site:

"Direct readers as closely as possible to the source you used. Along with this general principle, consider these guidelines for citing sources:

"1. All content on the Internet is prone to being moved, restructured, or deleted, resulting in broken hyperlinks and nonworking URLs in the reference list. In an attempt to resolve this problem, many scholarly publishers have begun assigning a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to journal articles and other documents.

"A DOI is a unique alphanumeric string assigned by a registration agency to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet. When a DOI is available, include the DOI instead of the URL in the reference. Publishers who follow best practices will publish the DOI prominently on the first page of an article. Because the DOI string can be long, it is safest to copy and paste whenever possible. Provide the alphanumeric string for the DOI exactly as published in the article. When your article is published and made available electronically, the DOI will be activated as a link to the content you are referencing.

"The DOI may be hidden under a button labeled 'Article,' 'Cross- Ref,' 'PubMed,' or another full-text vendor name. Readers who wish to look up the source can then link to either the actual article, if they have authorized access, or an abstract and an opportunity to purchase a copy of the item.

"If the link is not live or if the DOI is referenced in a print publication, the reader can simply enter the DOI into the 'DOI resolver' search field provided by the registration agency CrossRef.org and be directed to the article or a link to purchase it."

Adjectives Again

In one of the blogs I follow, I read this item:
“A report in the Gloucester Citizen,” writes John Gray, “about a traffic accident said that ‘Mr Brown died of multiple and fatal injuries.’ I suppose you can die of nonfatal injuries?"

Then I wondered: What if the newspaper had written, “Mr. Brown died of multiple fatal injuries.” Would that sentence mean that two or more of his injuries were such as to cause death? I suppose that situation is possible.

But the newspaper could have written simply, “Mr. Brown died of multiple injuries.” If he died of them, they were fatal.

By the way, the Gloucester Citizen, a U.K. paper, evidently follows the British habit of leaving out the period after “Mr.” Hmmm. That dropped period is a thrifty idea that never caught on here in the colonies.

Short Before Long

"None of the ingestions resulted in more than moderate clinical effects or death."

So reads the final sentence of an abstract in the journal Human Clinical Toxicology. That sentence illustrates the pitfalls of writing a series whose first item consists of many words. Readers are not sure where the "trunk" of the sentence ends. Is the trunk of the sentence "None of the ingestions resulted in more than"?

If so, then ingesting the substance never caused more than death.

Is the trunk of the sentence "None of the ingestions resulted in more than moderate"? If so, then ingesting the substance never caused more than moderate death.

Is the trunk of the sentence "None of the ingestions resulted in"? If so, then ingesting the substance never resulted in death or in more than moderate clinical effects--which would have been a good way to write the sentence.

When a series ends a sentence, it is wise to order that series from short item(s) to long.

Merriam-Webster on "They" as Genderless Pronoun

As one of you pointed out (see Anonymous comment to my post "A Pronoun Must Match Its Antecedent"), we do sometimes use "they" to refer to an organization.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, includes the following in a note at the entry for "they":

"usage They, their, them, theselves: English lacks a common-gender third person singular pronoun that can be used to refer to indefinite pronouns (as everyone, anyone, someone). Writers and speakers have supplied this lack by using the plural pronoun" [There follow several examples from Shakespeare, Auden, Thackeray, and G. B. Shaw].


"The use of they, their, them, and themselves as pronouns of indefinite gender and indefinite number is well established in speech and writing, even in literary and formal contexts. This gives you the option of using the plural pronouns where you think they sound best, and of using the singular pronouns (as he, she, he or she, and their inflected forms) where you think they sound best."

Shall I write, "The client called; they want you to call back"? Well, only if I wish to conceal the gender and identity of the caller. Otherwise, I would write, "The client called; it was Sheila Marston, and she wants you to call back."

Commas and Adjectives: A Long, Loose, Red Shirt

When should you put a comma between two adjectives? In general, the comma is correct if you could use an "and" between the adjectives.

Try out that rule in the following sentences:
He saw a bright chrome car-door handle.
There were fierce local gun battles.
It had been a long, hot, humid day.

Sometimes a noun phrase uses several adjectives, and some take a comma while some do not. For example, take the sentence, "He brought a worn, faded, loose red polo shirt."
We say, "He brought a worn and faded red polo shirt."
Or "He brought a faded and loose red polo shirt."
We could even reverse those two adjectives: He brought a loose and faded red polo shirt.

But we never say, “It was a red and polo shirt” or “...a polo red shirt.”

The Plural of Mouse

Microsoft publishes a Manual of Style for Technical Publications (that is its title). In its latest (third) edition, on page 17, the manual tells us that the plural of mouse is not mice, but mouse devices.

(We are here referring not to the small mammal, but to the movable control module on a computer.)

So imagine my surprise when I was browsing Microsoft's sales site, at
microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=otherproducts,
and found the following:

"Learn more about Mac-compatible mice."

Ah well, it is easy to promulgate a rule; it's hard to enforce it always.

Americans Are Not the Only People

Now let me be clear: I support the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. They do great work.

But when I went to their home page today, I saw the following sentence:
"In April 2002, 4.2 million people were working part-time who wanted full-time work."

That sentence reminded me again that we Americans are still (still!) ethnocentric. The sentence said nothing about which people were working part-time. Does this statistic (4.2 million) refer to Americans? If so, let's say so.

I try (I sometimes fail) to remember that the word "people" is not synonymous with the word "Americans." If I cite a statistic, I try to mention the population from which it is drawn.

In fact, my friend Angie from South America reminds me that even "Americans" is often a misnomer. The Americas include Central and South America, Mexico, and Canada. If I want to be precise (and globally aware) I should use "U. S. residents" when in fact I mean only that group.

The words I use reflect (help shape?) my consciousness; and it's past time for my consciousness to encompass the world.

Botched Sentences

Every day on the Web, I read sentences that force me to edit before I can understand.

First, there is the "one...they" confusion. "One" is singular, but "they" is plural. A Ph.D. takes that confusion even further when he writes, "The level of autonomy and independence that one achieves influences both the range of a person’s ability to adapt to his environment and their level of self-respect." If "one achieves," and one is a person with "his environment," how can we write of "their level of self-respect"?

Another gem: The new head of a research facility is said to "have duel French and English citizenship." I know that England and France are politically at odds theses days, but has it come to "duel citizenship"? I think the writer meant "dual."

I could go on, but I'll conclude with a badly written sentence whose unnecessary noun actions and passive verbs leave it so fuzzy that readers could miss the grammar error. "While occasional references to Islam as being etymologically linked to 'peace' is often made by Muslims, a comprehensive peace education curriculum is generally absent."

Stripped to its bare subject-and-verb structure, that sentence says "...references...is often made by Muslims." To rewrite this sentence, I would use the Doer-Action Rule, well known to my students. "While Muslims occasionally mention that Arabic etymology links the word 'Islam' to 'peace,' their schools generally do not teach peace comprehensively."