A Little About Word Order

English, being light on inflections, uses word order a lot. Classical Greek, for example, is heavily inflected, so word order can be played with more than it can be played with in English. They even have a figure of speech called chiasmus, in which they arrange the words symmetrically in the sentence (for example, noun, adjective, adverb, verb, adverb, adjective, noun) and you use the inflections to figure out what refers to what. 

Sometimes getting the word order correct in English can be tricky. I have mentioned where “only” should go several times. (Search for “only” in the search box in the upper right corner to see some examples.)

So this Buckles comic, first panel, gets it wrong, at least in expository writing. Perhaps we’re more relaxed in conversational speech.

The rule is that adjectives go right before the word they modify, so technically, the dog is saying that it’s Paul’s good pair, not good shoes. 

Not a lot of difference there; it could go either way, and you might even make the excuse that “pair of shoes” counts as one word. Well, maybe.

But when you’re explaining something, be on the lookout for ambiguity, and avoid it.

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Ambiguity is the bane of expository writing. You want your readers to understand what you write the first time they read it, and without strain doing so. The rule is 

Bad documentation must not be justified with the excuse that the reader will figure it out.

Here’s an example, from Wired:

Most radio astronomical surveys have a single job: Map gas. Find pulsars. Discover galaxies. 

Huh??? The writer says “a single job,” then the sentence lists three jobs! What gives? That’s a pretty obvious mistake; must be something going on. (Hmm Hmm Hmm) Aha! The writer mentions surveys, plural. So the surveys have one job each, mostly! I’m so smart; I figured it out. The writer wasn’t wrong after all.

Except the writing was ambiguous. How would you write the sentence to remove the ambiguity?

Here’s a picture of the telescope, almost a third of a mile across:

Here’s part of an article in Ars Technica that brings up a point about writing style. I’ll make the words I want you to think about bold:

Our brains are apparently really good at divvying up heavy mental loads. In the decades since scientists started taking snapshots of our noggins in action, they’ve spotted dozens of distinct brain regions in charge of specific tasks, such as reading and speech. Yet despite documenting this delegation, scientists still aren’t sure exactly how slices of our noodle get earmarked for specific functions.

Three words for the same thing. Is this good or bad? That depends, and herein lies the point of this post.

• If you’re engaged in informal writing, especially writing meant to entertain, variety is good. In fact, it’s considered gauche to repeat a word. We look on repetition as due to lack of imagination or vocabulary, and it’s boring.
• But if you’re explaining something, use the same word for the same thing every time. The reader of technical material wants to know exactly what’s going on, and giving something more than one name obfuscates the meaning. Call it “the half-inch wrench” every time. Don’t sometimes call it “the spanner,” and see the next bullet:
• Beware of using pronouns. Pronouns are supposed to refer to the closest preceding noun, and it’s easy to accidentally refer to a word that’s farther away. For example, someone might write “Use the half-inch wrench to tighten the cap screw assembly, then put it down.” Put what down? The wrench or the assembly? Be explicit.

Ambiguity is when something can be understood in more than one way. Ambiguity has its place in humor, when you are frequently led to expect one thing, and then something else happens. Puns rely on ambiguity by definition. Ambiguity belongs in poetry, which not infrequently means two or more things at once. Figures of speech are a type of ambiguity, where the surface meaning is understood not to be meant. You even find ambiguity in advertising, when they want to make you think the product is better than it is. (Sometimes it’s worse than mere ambiguity. Read this article about deliberate obfuscation called Dark Patterns.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with examples of these. (Some will be trivial, some you might have to think about for a while.) Okay, here’s one example, from my good buddies, Frank and Ernest:

But in expository writing, when you’re explaining something, you want to avoid ambiguity as much as you can. My first rule of good writing is to be clear. (This and the other four are in the essay I mention in the right margin.) Work hard to avoid being misunderstood. Ponder how what you write might be misinterpreted. Get someone to read the material. The rule is that when you have someone read what you wrote, if they get something wrong, the problem is in the writing. That’s why editors are so valuable. I have a related rule that I post on my wall:

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

This policy of getting someone else to read your stuff is more important than you might think. I read a Scientific American article recently that called to mind the trickiness of removing ambiguity all by yourself. Look at this sign:

Being a bicycle sympathizer, this ambiguity never occurred to me: Is it telling drivers to watch out for bikes, or is it reminding bicyclists that they don’t own the road? Apparently enough drivers thought the sign was telling bicyclists to stay out of the way that transportation departments are putting up signs that say something like “Bicyclists may use full lane.” The article also mentioned that some people interpret the phrase “antibiotic resistance” to mean one’s body becoming resistant to the curative effects of antibiotics instead of germs resisting the lethal effects of antibiotics on themselves. Read the article to find out how the medical community is being encouraged to get around this one.

Here’s the point: Do everything you can to prevent misunderstanding: proofread, try to think of ways to get it wrong, and have another person read your writing.

Do I make myself clear???

One principle of expository writing is that it be clear. This means, partly, that you can immediately tell what each word means. Many many words have more than one meaning, so you have to be careful if you want to be clear.

If you want to be funny, though (an antithesis, perhaps, of writing clearly) these multiple-meaning words provide a font of material. Here’s a comic, Fox Trot, that makes passing reference to correct use of case (I/me) but uses two words ambiguously to create humor. Can you tell what the two words are?

It occurred to me that a third word, “English,” could also have two meanings—the country or the language. (Snicker.)