Watch what you refer to

Multinational corporations are understandably careful about how they use their logos. They are generally also paranoid about how others use their logos. Herein lies the context for today’s lesson, which is about referring to other places in your writing.

Recently BMW Motorrad, the motorcycle company (which predates their auto division, by the way), has begun enforcing standards for how BMW motorcycle clubs can use the distinctive BMW circular pattern in their club logos. Depending on the personality of the club, this ruling has created more or less of a stir among the members.

The BMW roundel. Am I being illegal to post this? Tell me so, BMW, and I'll take it down.

I happen to belong to both kinds of club. (Yes, simultaneously. See a recent post about using “both.”) Some clubs are like sheep, and they meekly go where they are told. However, imagine a bunch of motorcycle-riding extroverts being told that their club trademark isn’t good enough. Or is too good. Goats are not like sheep! After a lot of online and face-to-face discussion, one member presented a letter on the subject to send to the powers that be. The letter was very well written, and the discussion is ongoing, but one paragraph supplies the material for today’s lesson.

Part of the discussion included the possibility of the club withdrawing from the MOA and the RA, with many members reconsidering the value of their individual participation as well. Though regarded as extreme, the number of those willing to take this step was not insignificant.

Re-read that second sentence. Did you do a double-take? It looks as if the number is both extreme and not insignificant. This would, I suppose, always be true (We call this a tautology, and it’s related to the fallacy of begging the question, but I digress.). Shall we suspect, dear reader, that this writer does not mean to repeat himself? I gave you that first sentence so you could figure out what the writer meant. “Extreme” refers to withdrawal from the national organizations. Now it makes sense to connect the “not insignificant” with the number of people thinking about taking this extreme measure.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to re-write the sentence so its meaning is immediately clear.  My sincere thanks to the Mac-Pac Eating and Wrenching Society for supplying me with the material for today’s lesson, and I close with one of my cardinal rules for writing:

Bad writing must never be justified with the excuse that the reader will figure it out.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Pronouns are notoriously vague. Try never to use them, at least not in technical expository writing. Pronouns are problematic because they refer to something else, and often you have more than one “something else” that the pronoun could refer to. The rule is that a pronoun should refer to the closest noun that came before the pronoun. This rule is very easy to break. For example, recently I got an email from a colleague that said, in its entirety,

It should have been copied to the document server section.

The pronoun had no antecedent at all!

Here’s an example of breaking the rule and getting away with it. It’s slightly amended from a New York Times article a while back.

If your past employers gave you odd titles like “gatorbox wrangler” or vague ones like “senior administrator,” replace them with industry standard terms like “sales engineer” and “accounts payable specialist.” Otherwise, you’ll never be found, because no one will type those into LinkedIn’s search box.

The pronoun to look at is near the end of the quote: “those.” Common sense tells us that the writer could not be referring to the second (and closer) set of titles. But the sentence would be unequivocal if we change the pronoun to a demonstrative adjective and described the antecedent more plainly: “…type those unconventional terms into… .”

Two final examples.

Look at the first paragraph in this post. The second sentence ends with “them.” Look back—no nouns at all until you get to the first word in the post, and that’s the antecedent.

Here’s a trickier one—the last sentence before the quote. “I got an email from a colleague that said…” What does “that” refer to? Looking backwards, the first noun is “colleague,” and colleagues can certainly say things, but I hope you didn’t think I’d use “that” for people. We use “who” for people! So you have to keep looking, and you come to “email.” The email said, and that fits far better with the end of the sentence, “in its entirety.”

Now we have reached the end. “We” being you, dear reader, and me.

Regular readers of this humble site know that I’m a frequent reader of Scientific American. I can generally count on its English being as good as its science, though in recent years I manage to find more examples of how not to do something than I used to. Solecisms in that fine magazine are still few and far between, and perhaps my own increasing experience enables me to pounce on these misshapen gems. This item is a couple months old now, but the error is still a good warning to be careful what word you use.

English has two classifications of verbs, transitive and intransitive. You probably remember from high school English that transitive verbs take a direct object, intransitive verbs don’t, and some verbs can go either way. Sometimes a verb starts out innocently enough, but when you get into the past and perfect tenses, the forms differ depending on whether you want transitive or intransitive.

On to our example, taken from an online article earlier this year, Ten Things You Want to Know about Tornadoes.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the death toll had already raised to 118, ranking the event among the top 10 deadliest U.S. tornadoes of all time.

Our guilty word is “raised.” It’s transitive, but the usage here is intransitive—no direct object.  Here’s how these deceptive words go:

Transitive: raise, raised, raised—I raise the flag, I raised the flag, the tornado had already raised the, um, death toll.

Intransitive: rise, rose, risen—The sun rises, the sun rose yesterday, the death toll had risen every day last week.

Some words are the same in the present tense: “Shine,” for example. I can say the sun shines, and he shines my shoes, but in the past: the sun shone and I shined my shoes. Same thing for the perfect: The sun has shone every day this week, I have shined my shoes every day this week.

Some verbs are even more mixed up, the famous “lie” and “lay” mix-up. “Lie” is intransitive, and it goes lie, lay, lain. “Lay” is the transitive one, lay, laid laid. And let’s don’t even get into falsehoods: lie, lied, lied

We’ve all seen pictures of tornadoes, so here’s a NASA picture of a 39-mile tornado track in Massachusetts

Visible from space!

.

Here’s a headline from The Daily Galaxy, a science feed from the Discovery Channel.

Galaxy Devouring Black Holes -1st Evidence Found

by Casey Kazan Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

The alternate text for the picture is "Supermassive_Black_Hole_001." Presumably it's inside the bright spot at the center of this galaxy.

See if you can tell what word should be changed in this product review:

(HP dv6-6013) Weighing 5.6 pounds, it’s a tad heavier than both the 5.3-pound Sony VAIO VPC-EB33FM/BJ ($629.99 list, 4.5 stars) and the five-pound Editors’ Choice Acer Aspire AS5742-6475 ($599.99 list, 4 stars).

The word “both” should be “either.” “Both” combines the two other items, “either” keeps them separate, and you can tell from the context that that’s what the reviewer means.

Here’s an example to help make this distinction easier to see: Suppose you could mop the floor with back-and-forth strokes of the mop, or sideways sweeps of the mop. You can mop the floor both ways or you can mop it either way. Mopping the whole floor both ways is twice as much work!

The best way, by the way, is to make sideways figure-eight sweeps, and turn the mop over occasionally.