Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists.
I'm not sure why Orwell thinks that these phrases were "killed." They are still very much in common use and, in my opinion, have a clear meaning even if sometimes overused.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
In other classes I have taken at BYU, especially historical phonetics, the ability of English to accommodate foreign words so readily has been heralded as a great equalizer and the reason why English is now the predominant language of science.
It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
I don't agree with the concluding statement here at all. I think that using prefixes and suffixes to add to an already known word results in much less vagueness in meaning than thinking up an uncommon "English" word.
Slavish adherence to them will succeed no better than has slavish adherence to avoiding split infinitives or to using the active voice instead of the passive.
I appreciate how this article ends by making it clear that the suggestions given are meant to be helpful but do not constitute rules against which we should check every sentence.
When old information consistently arrives in the topic position, it helps readers to construct the logical flow of the argument: It focuses attention on one particular strand of the discussion, both harkening backward and leaning forward.
I think this sounds like a great way to lead the reader to follow along with your conclusions. Am I right to think of this as a chain? For example: A is caused by B. B shows that C. C allows us to conclude D. etc.
We cannot succeed in making even a single sentence mean one and only one thing; we can only increase the odds that a large majority of readers will tend to interpret our discourse according to our intentions.
This reminds me of the probability functions we work with in physics. We can never determine exactly which state every particle is in, but we can make assumptions and even measurements of group behavior.
Anything of length that intervenes between subject and verb is read as an interruption, and therefore as something of lesser importance.
Unless you are writing in German where out of grammatical necessity, the verb often goes to the end of a sentence with lots of important information between. I agree with this point for English syntax, however.
Good writers are intuitively aware of these expectations; that is why their prose has what we call "shape."
I have been graded in the past for things like grammar, style, and voice but "shape" was never one of these considerations. Perhaps it could fit into formatting requirements, but still most of the information I have ever portrayed in writing was in the form of dense paragraphs.
If you want to make it a productive exercise, you need to have a clear idea of which kind of information you need to get in the first place, and then focus on that aspect.
I think this is why the research matrix shown in class can be helpful. Knowing in advance the main ideas of your thesis helps you know what information to look for within an article. If a quick scan reveals none of your keywords, it is probably best to move on to another article.
Many of you have come to us asking for more (and more serious) advice on how to make sense of the scientific literature, so we've asked a dozen scientists at different career stages and in a broad range of fields to tell us how they do it.
Haha, this was exactly what I thought after reading the first article. I am glad that they recognized the need to ask multiple professionals for concrete tips.
So for those new to reading journals, welcome. Good luck. And we're sorry.
Is it just me or does this article not offer much of a confidence boost? It seems to commiserate but not offer any practical suggestions.
It took me more than 2 hours to read a three-page paper. But this time, I actually understood it.
Very impressive, but if this is what is required, I don't think most students feel they have time to do this. To me, this seems almost like the academic equivalent of hitting your head against a wall until you figure something out.
But if you had asked me a simple question about the book's contents—What kind of animal is Wilbur? How did Encyclopedia Brown know that Bugs Meany wasn't really birdwatching?—I couldn't have answered it.
I feel like these type of details would actually be more simple to remember because they are part of a story. How many scientific articles try to tell a story?
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While I agree that this letter is less clear, it definitely seems like something from a mystery show. I immediately imagine this note pasted together from cut-out magazine letters.
Butyou have done more than simply filled in the blanks.
This statement makes me think of the difference between plagiarism and using a paper as a model for a genre. If you take a previous paper and simply replace a few words, you have filled in the blanks and plagiarized.
Like the writing process, it isn’t a plan that’s imposed on us.
I find this thought interesting because although the writing process as a whole is not enforced, the little things like punctuation and format are controlled in writing which seems to oppose the point made in the previous sentence.
Knowing that we need to know more, knowing where to go to find out, and knowing how to keep track of what we’ve learned—these are all parts of being a strategic writer.
If there is one thing that being a physics major has taught me, it is that we need to know more about pretty much every physical system. As far as keeping track of what we have learned so far, scientific papers are the way to go. We would not have anything to go off of if previous scientists hadn't recorded what they had learned.