Category Archives: writing

A zoo of Latinistic abbreviations have crept into academic English: ‘e.g.’, ‘i.e.’, ‘cf.’, ‘viz.’, ‘ibid.’, ‘op. cit.’, ‘n.b.’, ‘et al.’ They are frequently mispunctuated. Most commonly sighted are ‘eg.’, ‘ibid’, ‘et. al.’, even ‘et. al’. They are frequently misused: ‘cf.’ … Continue reading →

I came across the following perfect example of the importance of the serial comma, in a ProPublica article describing a problematic data leak: The story prompted a leak investigation. The FBI sought to obtain my phone records and those of Jane Perlez, the Times bureau … Continue reading →

A common source of run-on sentences is the inclusion of a parenthetical full sentence at the end of another sentence, for instance, This is an example (there may be others). This construction is always wrong. Separate the two sentences, as … Continue reading →

For a while, I’ve been meaning to comment on the “that”/”which” controversy, the claim that “which” should not be used with restrictive relative clauses, nor “that” for nonrestrictive. From a linguistic point of view, it seems clear that this view … Continue reading →

Different people have different styles for overall organization of a technical paper. There is the “continental” style, in which one states the solution with as little introduction or motivation as possible, sometimes not even saying what the problem was. Papers … Continue reading →

I’ve just discovered James Pryor’s “Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper”. Despite the ostensible limited goal of the guidelines, they are much more broadly applicable than just to philosophy papers. I especially like the characterization of readers as “lazy, stupid, and … Continue reading →

Email messages should be treated as personal letters. You wouldn’t write a handwritten letter with misspellings, would you? Or a typewritten letter in which you didn’t bother to use the shift key? Then you shouldn’t do that in an email. … Continue reading →

To recurse is to curse again, not an activity that an academic, or an algorithm for that matter, should engage in. When a process is repeated or is subject to recursion, it is said to recur.

The use of the pronoun “he” as a bound pronoun of neutral gender is problematic on two grounds. First, its use is blatantly sexist (although the sexism is of a historical nature, so that those who continue to use “he” … Continue reading →