In email, neatness counts
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...
View ArticleRunning on howevers
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...
View ArticleJames Pryor’s Guidelines
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...
View ArticleThree styles for writing a paper
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...
View ArticleThat/which
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...
View ArticleMS Word defects
Writers using MS Word tend to make certain standard errors in their typesetting. For instance, they use hyphens instead of em-dashes (ctrl-alt-hyphen or option-shift-hyphen). Mathematical typesetting...
View ArticleRunning on parentheticals
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...
View ArticleWhen copy editors make things worse
“Besides getting more data, faster, we also now use much more sophisticated learning algorithms. For instance, algorithms based on logistic regression and that support vector machines can reduce by...
View ArticleWhy the serial comma helps, and why it’s not sufficient
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...
View ArticleAbbrev.
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...
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