The Ground Truth

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” in this way have a defensible position). Second, and more importantly, many readers confronted with such a use of “he”, including myself, tend to find that it causes a jarring effect as they stop to wonder whether or not the writer intended to imply that the referent of the pronoun is male. Anything that causes a jarring effect like this on a substantial portion of your readers should be avoided, as it serves only to distract them from the important substance of your writing.

Now, I turn to a more recent variant of the same problem. The use of the pronoun “she” as a bound pronoun of neutral gender is problematic on two grounds. First, its use is blatantly sexist (although the sexism is of an anti-historical nature, so that those who continue to use “she” in this way have a defensible position). Second, and more importantly, many readers confronted with such a use of “she”, including myself, tend to find that it causes a jarring effect as they stop to wonder whether or not the writer intended to imply that the referent of the pronoun is female. Anything that causes a jarring effect like this on a substantial portion of your readers should be avoided, as it serves only to distract them from the important substance of your writing.

But what alternatives are there? In everyday speech, “they” or “them” is used for this purpose, but this disturbs the sensibilities of prescriptivists, who, I should remind you, are a substantial portion of your readers. And anything that causes a jarring effect like this on a substantial portion of your readers….

Rewriting the sentence is the only practicable alternative. Do it and be done with it.

Pat Winston in his lecture on How to Speak notes that covering up parts of overhead transparencies and revealing them slowly like a strip-tease artist is a technique that drives 10 per cent of your audience nuts. I am in that 10 per cent. The desire to use this technique means only one thing: There is too much information on the slide. Split it into multiple slides. Winston recommends using overlays instead, but overlays are really a different and specialized overhead technique, and are not typically necessary for remedying this problem.

By the way, if you make slides using computerized means and want to use an overlay, consider “implicit” overlays instead. An implicit overlay is a series of separate slides each of which includes the contents of a different prefix of the overlay slides. Implicit overlays have the advantage that no Scotch taping of slide material is required, and no fumbling with the overlay pieces is needed. One just continues placing single sheets on the projector as usual, but each one in the overlay series has some additional material added to the previous one.

A citation is not a first-class participant in a sentence; it cannot serve as a noun phrase. Rather it is a parenthetical — that is why it appears in parentheses — and like all parentheticals should be removable without changing the well-formedness of the sentence in which it appears. Thus, the following sentences are ill-formed. (Try reading them without the material in parentheses.)

1. The reader is referred to (Dewey et al., 1756) for further details.
2. (Dewey et al., 1756) describes the bizarre climatic conditions of northern South Nordland.
3. In (Farmer, 1987), it is shown how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
4. (Farmer, 1987) describes how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
5. Many researchers have followed the research methodology described in (Farmer, 1987) for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.

The following versions should be used instead:

1. The reader is referred to the early work of Dewey et al. (1756) for further details.
2. Dewey et al. (1756) describe the bizarre climatic conditions of northern South Nordland.
3. Farmer (1987) describes how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
4. Many researchers have followed the research methodology described by Farmer (1987) for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
5. Many researchers have followed a research methodology for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment (Farmer, 1987).

(Note that “Dewey et al.” serves as a plural noun phrase.) The BibTeXfullname style file and associated TeX style provide support for generating references like these. They are available with accompanying documentation at URL ftp://ftp.das.harvard.edu/pub/shieber/fullname/.