17 posts found.
September 28, 2015
I begin – in continental style, unmotivated and, frankly, gratuitously – by defining Ackerman's function \(A\) over two integers: \[ A(m, n) = \left\{ \begin{array}{l} n + 1 & \mbox{ if $m=0$ } \\ A(m-1, 1) & \mbox{ if $m > 0$ and $n = 0$ } \\ A(m-1, A(m, n-1)) & \mbox{ if $m > 0$ and $n > 0$ } \end{array} \right. \]...
May 07, 2015
A zoo of Latinistic abbreviations have crept into academic English: ‘e.g.’, ‘i.e.’, ‘cf.’, ‘viz.’, ‘ibid.’, ‘op. cit.’, ‘n.b.’, ‘et al.’ They are frequently mispunctuated. Most commonly sighted are ‘eg.’, ‘ibid’, ‘et. al.’, even ‘et. al’. They are frequently misused: ‘cf.’ to mean ‘see’; ‘e.g.’ to mean ‘i.e.’ But none of...
September 29, 2014
My colleague Steven Pinker has a nice piece up at the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Why Academics Stink at Writing”, accompanying the recent release of his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, which I’m awaiting my pre-ordered copy of....
August 29, 2014
With few exceptions, scholars would be better off writing their papers in a lightweight markup format called Markdown, rather than using a word-processing program like Microsoft Word. This post explains why, and reveals a hidden agenda as well.1 Microsoft Word is not appropriate for scholarly article production …lightweight… “Old two...
November 21, 2013
… altogether too much concern with the contents of the journal’s spine text… “reference” image by flickr user Sara S. used by permission. Precipitated by a recent request to review some proposals for new open-access journals, I spent some time gathering my own admittedly idiosyncratic thoughts on some of the...
October 15, 2013
I came across the following perfect example of the importance of the serial comma, in a ProPublica article describing a problematic data leak: The story prompted a leak investigation. The FBI sought to obtain my phone records and those of Jane Perlez, the Times bureau chief in Indonesia and my wife. Under the serial comma...
January 03, 2013
...our little tiff in the late 18th century... "NYC - Metropolitan Museum of Art: Washington Crossing the Delaware" image by flickr user wallyg. Used by permission. I'm shortly off to give a talk at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (on why open access is better for...
May 17, 2006
A common source of run-on sentences is the inclusion of a parenthetical full sentence at the end of another sentence, for instance, This is an example (there may be others). This construction is always wrong. Separate the two sentences, as This is an example. (There may be others.) or coordinate...
February 09, 2006
For a while, I've been meaning to comment on the "that"/"which" controversy, the claim that "which" should not be used with restrictive relative clauses, nor "that" for nonrestrictive. From a linguistic point of view, it seems clear that this view is descriptively barren. Geoff Pullum provides a convincing and entertaining...
October 09, 2004
Different people have different styles for overall organization of a technical paper. There is the "continental" style, in which one states the solution with as little introduction or motivation as possible, sometimes not even saying what the problem was. Papers in this style tend to start like this: "Consider a...
June 10, 2004
I've just discovered James Pryor's "Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper". Despite the ostensible limited goal of the guidelines, they are much more broadly applicable than just to philosophy papers. I especially like the characterization of readers as "lazy, stupid, and mean".
May 26, 2004
People seem to fall prey to adverbials like "however" and "rather" seducing them into running on sentences. This type of approach has been used in previous models, however, the presented algorithm adopts a different foundation. But these words are not conjunctions, subordinating or otherwise. They are adverbs, like "on the...
May 11, 2004
Email messages should be treated as personal letters. You wouldn't write a handwritten letter with misspellings, would you? Or a typewritten letter in which you didn't bother to use the shift key? Then you shouldn't do that in an email. Doing so implies to many readers that you don't respect...
May 11, 2004
To recurse is to curse again, not an activity that an academic, or an algorithm for that matter, should engage in. When a process is repeated or is subject to recursion, it is said to recur.
May 11, 2004
The use of the pronoun "he" as a bound pronoun of neutral gender is problematic on two grounds. First, its use is blatantly sexist (although the sexism is of a historical nature, so that those who continue to use "he" in this way have a defensible position). Second, and more...
May 11, 2004
Pat Winston in his lecture on How to Speak notes that covering up parts of overhead transparencies and revealing them slowly like a strip-tease artist is a technique that drives 10 per cent of your audience nuts. I am in that 10 per cent. The desire to use this technique means only...
May 11, 2004
A citation is not a first-class participant in a sentence; it cannot serve as a noun phrase. Rather it is a parenthetical -- that is why it appears in parentheses -- and like all parentheticals should be removable without changing the well-formedness of the sentence in which it appears. Thus,...
