Metaphor in technical writing

In the most general sense, a figure of speech is when you do something artistic with your writing. You’re probably familiar with alliteration and onomatopoeia, but how about synecdoche? (Look it up. You use it.)

I generally recommend a writing style that doesn’t call attention to the writing itself, so conspicuous figures of speech are generally not a good idea. The less technical your writing is, the more you can get away with using figures of speech. They add color and interest to the writing; make it a little more fun to read.

Metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two things by saying that one thing is the other. A post a while back contained a lot of metaphors. You learn about metaphor in grade school, usually with its cousin, the simile, which compares to things by saying that one thing is like the other. (“My love is like a red, red rose…”)

Normally you won’t find it a good idea to use metaphors in technical writing. You should stick to the literal truth, the plain facts. Metaphors can confuse the issue but bringing in extraneous concepts. Recently I read a book that was on a technical subject, but it was addressed to a lay readership, and the introduction was the perfect place for the author to use a couple of metaphors to make his description of his subject more vivid. The book is about anthrozoology, the study of how humans relate with animals. The title of the book is Some we Love, Some we Hate, and Some we Eat. It’s a pretty interesting read, and you can click the link to go to Amazon to get it. Here are the metaphors:

“How much money are you giving out?” I ask. Two and a half million dollars a year, she says. “Fantastic! This is just what the field needs,” I say. I am thinking that Layla is going to have a very full dance card for the next couple of days.

Anthrozoology is a big tent. It includes the study of nearly all aspects of out interactions with other species.

As academic disciplines go, anthrozoology is a small pond, but in the last two decades, we have come a long way.

Those quotes contain four metaphors. Can you find them all? The fourth one is so common you might not notice it.

I try to find an excuse to put up pictures, so here’s what the cover looks like:

Sorry about the arrow; Amazon will be Amazon.

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First, a little linguistics lesson. If you want, you can skip to the last two paragraphs.

These folks haven't discovered the joys of linguistics yet

Hebrew doesn’t have tenses the way English does. Hebrew has aspect. Aspect has to do with whether what the verb describes is over with or not. The perfective aspect translates pretty easily into our simple past (He ran). After all, if an action is over with, it’s in the past, right? And the imperfective aspect goes pretty well with our  present progressive (He is running). (Greek has a past tense called the aorist that has this perfective aspect, equivalent to our simple past; and an imperfective past tense equivalent to our past progressive, “He was running.”) Here are a few examples:

Hebrew: katal—English: he killed. Hebrew: okal (pronounced okayl)—English: he is eating.  Hebrew doesn’t have a way to say “he eats.” (As far as I know, but we translate it that way a lot.)

We have aspect in English, too but we don’t usually call it that—partly, I suppose, because we have some verb forms that don’t quite fit. Some of our verb forms do, though. Our simple past fits into the perfective aspect, too. And the progressive tenses are all imperfective regardless of when they happen. I am running and I was running are both imperfective.

All that to introduce today’s lesson, how to use the past perfect and present perfect tenses, which show both aspects!

The last two paragraphs:

1. The past perfect says that something was done and then ended in the past.

He had entertained thoughts of being the winner until he saw the score.

The trick to using the past perfect is you need to make some indication of when the deed ended, not just when it happened. In this case, it’s the phrase “until he saw the score.” Here’s the rule: if you don’t state or clearly imply when the deed ended, use the simple past. For example, “Yesterday he entertained thoughts of winning.” You’re saying when he did it, but not when he stopped. Simple past. Let’s turn the rule around: If you use the past perfect, indicate when the deed ended.

2. The present perfect means that something began in the past and continues until now.

He has entertained thoughts of winning ever since he began training. Also: Ever since he began training, he has entertained thoughts of winning.

The trick with the present perfect is that you need to indicate when the deed started. In this case, it’s the phrase “ever since he started training.” If you don’t give an indication of when it started, consider rewriting your sentence.

I won’t get into the perfect progressive tenses, which emphasize the imperfective aspect even more. (“He has been entertaining” and “He had been entertaining,” if you’re curious.)

And we’ll save the future perfect for a future post.

Some words that many people get wrong:

Nauseous. Nauseous means “causing nausea.” Think green, slimy, glucky, and slightly quivering. Like under-cooked egg white, or what your dog upchucks on the kitchen floor. If you want to say you are experiencing the feeling of wanting to throw up, you say that you are nauseated. Don’t insult yourself by saying 1. that you are green and slimey, or 2. that you don’t know the correct usage of this word. Here’s the quote that reminded me of this error. It’s from one of the best motorcycle mechanics in the world. If your BMW needs fixing, go to him. If your text needs editing, come to me.

Some cool stuff  came out under him  and the low rider makes me nauseous….I would love a new Airhead but that aint gona happen…

Not very different from my bike

Enormity. Enormity means “extremely bad,” not “extremely big.” Yes, it looks like a version of enormous, but you have to go clear back to the Latin before enormous and enormity connect etymologically. Full disclosure: This mistake has been around a long time, a couple hundred years, and a lot of reasonably well-educated folks get it wrong. It’s still a mistake. Here’s the quote that reminded me of this one. It’s from an ebook that I’m considering buying (Chapter 1 is free). I plan to write the author and suggest he consider fixing the error. Easy corrections are another advantage of ebooks!

 “How shall I contact you?” Telisa asked, somewhat overwhelmed by the suddenness and enormity of what he offered.

Gotta show the cover of a sci-fi novel...

Niggardly. Niggardly means stingy. It’s the opposite of “generous.” Some under-educated dolts raised a ruckus a few years ago when someone in the government used this word correctly in a speech. They objected because the word is similar in appearance to nigger, and they didn’t catch the distinction. “Nigger” wasn’t even a racial slur until well into the 20th century. The words are completely unrelated. “Niggard” comes through Middle English from the Scandinavian, and “nigger” (and Negro) can be traced clear back to the Greek. It means “dark.” Speaking of Greek, one of the pastors in the church in Antioch was nicknamed “Blackie.” He was from Ethiopia. That church was integrated! See Acts 13:1, “Simon, who was called Niger…” Anyway, don’t let a bunch of lowbrows keep you from using this perfectly useful word.

Correct usage!

Healthy. Healthy means “possessing good health.” You are healthy. Your dog is healthy. Use Healthful to mean “causing good health.” Apples and exercise are healthful. And you don’t need a picture of an apple.

English has hundreds of words that can be confused, but these four are a good start to get right.

As if there were such a thing as a small mistake. It depends on your perspective, of course. I have a rule in cooking: if you have basically good ingredients, and don’t destroy them, you’ll come up with something that’s at least acceptable. If your cake falls, serve it under or over ice cream. It’ll still be pretty good. On the other hand, a single typo in your résumé could keep you from getting that interview.

Perhaps I can define a small mistake as one that’s easy to fix. Small mistakes are not the hard part of writing.

Today, class, we look at some words whose plurals are easy to get wrong.

Data—This word is plural. The singular is datum. You generally see this used correctly in scientific writing, where they perform a lot of statistical analysis on piles (scientific term) of data, and you can see sentences like “The data are fairly convincing; only one datum is an outlier.”

The plural of "date" is "dates" and they have nothing to do with data

Media—This word is a plural. When we say “mass media,” we refer to all the TV and radio stations, and all the newspapers and magazines. The singular is medium, and sometimes you see it when someone refers to one of the media.

The medium of radio is the only one you can use while you do something else.

This word has become contaminated by the use of “medium” to refer to someone who holds séances, and the plural of this word is “mediums.” I predict that “media” will eventually become a singular and its plural will become “medias.” But not yet, so get it right.

Criteria—Our third plural. The singular is criterion. I remember a fancy restaurant in St. Paul named The Criterion. They claimed to be the standard by which other restaurants should judge themselves. I ate there once. They cut the lettuce for the salad instead of tore it. Didn’t meet my criterion for how to prepare a salad.  I recently read a pretty good article about mistakes you can make in a job interview. The article got “criteria” wrong, and it’s this sentence in the article that gave me the idea for this post.

When I am hiring though, and if you happen to apply, the above is the criteria I will use to decide.

Since the writer was referring to a list of five items, she should have written “…the above are the criteria…”

These mistakes are commonly made by well-educated professionals. The plurals are slightly more high-falootin’ than the singulars, so I could have classified this lesson under my oft-used heading, “the sin of pretentiousness.”

I begin with a punctuation comic. It’s from a web comic I like, Of the Fittest.

(I think I've actually seen art like this...)

Most of the punctuation marks we normally use are on the keyboard. Sometimes, though you can class up your writing with some punctuation that’s a little harder to enter than striking a single key. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange has defined “numbers” for many characters that are not on your keyboard, but are used in writing, such as accented letters and math symbols. Here are a few that (in my opinion) are worth learning.

Many word processing programs and utilities attempt to make it easy to enter special characters by defining special keystroke combinations or letting you pick them from a chart. On a Windows computer, however, you can enter the ASCII codes for any character (even the ones on the keyboard) directly from the keyboard, no matter what software you happen to be using. (I have found a few programs with limited editing capabilities that don’t accept these codes. One that comes to mind is Pidgin, an otherwise excellent instant messaging program.)

Here’s how it works: Hold down the Alt key while you type the four-digit code number on the numeric keypad. If you use a laptop that doesn’t have a separate numeric keypad, look for the key that changes some of the keys on the right side of the keyboard into numeric keypad keys. Mac computers don’t seem to be able to do all the special characters (for example, the times sign), but you can get most of them with the Option key and certain letter keys. Here’s a chart, one among many on the internet.

Dashes

Alt-0151 is the code for the M-dash. Use this to make a break in your thought, such  as an interruption. A pair of them can be used like parentheses when the parenthetical remark is more important than a mere aside; you want to emphasize the remark. Here’s an excellent example from Carl Sagan’s book, The Dragons of Eden:

The advances we have made in the last few million years cannot therefore be explained by the ratio of brain to body mass, but rather by increasing total brain mass, improved specialization of new function and complexity within the brain, and—especially—extrasomatic learning.

Use the slightly shorter N-dash (Alt-0150) to show a range of the “from…to” variety.

Store hours: 7–9

Accents

I think the most common accented letter in English is é, e with an acute accent over it. The code for é is Alt-0233. You know that work history document you use when you’re job hunting? It’s a résumé, not a resume, even though you’re probably wanting to resume your career. Class up your résumé and job applications by getting this word right. Hmm. Would you like me to write a lesson with a few résumé-writing tips? Shoot me an email or comment.

The dieresis is falling into disuse, but if you want to be really classy and write “coöperate,” the ö is Alt-0246. You use it to show that two vowels next to each other are pronounced separately. Sometimes you see a hyphen instead of a dieresis: co-operate.

This isn’t an accent, but since we’re thinking about résumés, if you swing in academic circles, you might call it a curriculum vitæ. The code for æ is Alt-0230. Of course, if you swing in academic circles, you probably already know that, right?

Math

Sometimes you need to write a multiplication expression, perhaps describing the dimensions of a rectangle or piece of lumber. The code is Alt-0215. A two by four is 2×4, not 2×4, or (horror of horrors) 2X4.

Somewhat less often you want the division sign. It’s Alt-0247.  Doesn’t 365÷7 look a lot better than 365/7? for one thing, you’re sure it’s not a fraction.

That will do for now. I suggest you make a little chart and attach it next to your monitor. You’ll memorize the ones you use in no time.