Writing advice

[robinturner]

Ooh, how I love syntactic ambiguity - am I writing some advice, or giving advice on writing? Since my life is currently dominated by student papers, it is of course the latter.

Years ago, I read a rather witty set of rules for writing, in which the language of every rule contradicted the rule; for example, "Use of the passive voice is to be avoided." I can't remember most of them, but here are a few of my own:

1. I read somewhere that failure to cite sources weakens the credibility of your argument.
2. The way I look at it, subjective judgements don't count for much.
3. Usually it is better to take a clear position rather than sitting on the fence, but there again, sometimes it isn't.
4. Bringing your personal feelings into the argument really pisses me off.
5. Let me put it really simply: don't talk down to the reader.

Comments

[vret.livejournal.com]

To gratuitously split an infinitive, or end a sentence with a preposition, is something to be ashamed of.

LOL !

[ankh156.livejournal.com]

I LOVE self-referential sentences in general.

One of my favourites ?

"I never, ever exaggerate.

At all."

[subbes]

I dislike it intensely when professors explicitly ask for a paper that has to involve the words "I think" or "in my opinion."

I'm in college, dammit, I'm past writing papers that refer to "I" or "me"!

Re: LOL !

[solri.livejournal.com]

My favourite self-referential sentence is "I declare this sentence a performative!"

[solri.livejournal.com]

Use of the first person in academic writing is something I've made a study of (not a real study, just library research, though I'm planning to do some serious corpus-based stuff some time).

What I found was the following:

1. Use of the first person varies widely across disciplines; for example it is rare in the physical sciences, but very common in philosophy
2. It is much more common in the introduction than in any other part of a paper (e.g. "In this paper I shall ...").
3. Contrary to popular belief, phrases like "I think" and "in my opinion" are used to weaken an argument, not to make it more forceful. "I think" implies "I'm not sure," and "in my opinion" implies "this is only my opinion."

I assume that your professors are trying to make students make a definite claim in their essays, but in that case, they should just say so.

[vret.livejournal.com]

for example it is rare in the physical sciences

That may simply be because science papers tend to be collaborative, and the authorial voice is plural. If you search for "we" and "us" you may find more hits.

[solri.livejournal.com]

You have a point, but it's also because science lends itself to the passive voice ("50ml of HCl were added to the solution"). It's only recently (5th edition) that the APA style manual has suggested that the passive could be replaced by using the first person. And that's in psychology, which most hard scientists consider to be a fluffy subject not far removed from English Literature or basket-weaving.

[solri.livejournal.com]

To add to that comment about sciences - computer scientists just write whichever way they feel like. In fact, if you can pepper your writing with eccentricities and in-jokes, people are more likely to think you're a genius like Donald Knuth or Larry Wall.

Yes !

[ankh156.livejournal.com]

And it works !

[vret.livejournal.com]

I heard that Stephen Hawking once started a paper "Imagine there were 2 little green men..." but the publishers changed it to "Postulate 2 inertial observers..."

[solri.livejournal.com]

Now in a philosophy journal, a sentence like "Imagine there were two little green men" would be perfectly normal. The only criticism I can think of an editor making would be along the lines of "We've had rather a lot of little green men recently - could they be sentient toasters instead?"

My favorite sentence from Ring Lardner...

[oblomova.livejournal.com]

"'Shut up,' he explained."

[ironed_orchid]

I hate the "I think" or "it is my opinion" stuff. On the other hand, I prefer simple phrases like "I will argue" or "I have argued" to the kind of annoying round about ways of saying the same thing.

The lecturer of the course I'm teaching this year asked for first person essays, so to avoid having to read banal opinions, I spent a bit of time showing how the different people we've read use the first person, i.e. not to say inane stuff like "I think" or "I believe", but to indicate their position as the author of the piece, or to differentiate their argument from that which they are summarizing or attacking.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I have some handouts on this subject. Mail me at robin at bilkent.edu.tr if you're interested.

Thanks

[ironed_orchid]

Semester finishes next week (she said, lazily), so there's not much use for them now.

I was planning not to teach next semester and get more thesis written. But then there's this course on Nietzsche and Tradgedy.... I doubt there'll be much work available in any case.

[vret.livejournal.com]

Can't think why we can get away with writing like that, but I'm glad we can. I was thinking that maybe it is because we aren't generally good writers, so it helps to relieve the reader's tedium. Could test it by comparing the average academic computing paper against some by Vernor Vinge and Stanislaw Lem.

(NB Robin already knows this, but I'm not an academic. However, I do sometimes write technical documentation, and I have taken to using a rather chatty style).