You often hear or read about someone’s personal opinion, personal favorite, personal experience, or personal best.
Having an opinion, a favorite, or an experience, or bettering a best time running the 10K implies a connection to the person. The word personal becomes redundant. You can’t have someone else’s opinion, or run someone else’s best time.
The main exception: You might want to use the word personal to distinguish a public figure’s private decision from a business, professional, or political decision. “This personal dilemma prevented the CEO from participating in the forum.” If you chair the town budget committee, for example, you might address the attendees at a public hearing, “Speaking personally, I don’t understand how Johnson can support this idea.”
Similarly, writers and speakers often use the word “own” redundantly, as in “my own opinion.” Sometiomes they even commit the double redundancy of “his own personal accounts.” Saying or writing my car implies the car belongs to you. Writing his values implies the vaues belong to him.
Cutting unnecessary words from a text makes it denser with meaning, easier to read, and less intimidating to the eye.
The word unique means "one of a kind." Adding a qualifier, such as very, highly, absolutely, somewhat, almost, etc., won’t make it more or less so. Enough said.
You may choose to write as statements of fact: “Three Nobel scientists support this practice,” or “Dr. Ribes of our biology department said recently…”, but using such statements as part of your argument to convince readers to adopt a point of view, or accept a theoretical understanding of some particular phenomenon commits the logical fallacy known as “appeal to authority.”
A Latin term for this fallacy, argumentum ad verecundiam, means “appeal to the sense of modesty.” The fallacy often works as a persuasive device because many listeners or readers will feel “too modest” to challenge someone they perceive as an authority.
Advertisers, politicians, and interest groups often rely on this fallacy as a rhetorical device to persuade (or dissuade). For example, a shoe company presents a star athlete raving about a certain brand of shoe, or an interest group tells you to ask your Congressional representatives to oppose a certain bill, noting that celebrities X, Y and Z, the Rev. CQ and famous-doctors WF and CC oppose it.
The bottom line: Writers who want to make a credible case for a point of view, a practice, or a perspective, should cite research-based or evidence-based facts and conclusions, using appeals to genuine authorities only as introductory or complementary matter.
The most egregious form of the fallacy appeals to false authorities—famous people who lack expertise in the topic at hand. But, strapped for time and space, many of us pull out a subtler version of the fallacy we might call an “appeal to abstract authorities.” We write: “Research has shown…” or “Government experts have learned…,” without offering much in way of the facts of the matter.
Make sure you don’t introduce this device unless and until you’ve actually looked at the “research” and “findings” of the authorities you cite, enough to convince you of the validity of the research design and its conclusions, and from which you could provide the data if a reader requested it.
Where applicable, in addition to the facts of your topic, you might further enhance your credibility with readers if you also acknowledge such aspects of your topic as its unknowns, findings from legitimate researchers that contradict mainstream ideas, and disproved or discredited hypotheses.
A host of fallacies closely related to the appeal to authority include:
Appeal to popular opinion: Eighty percent of Americans can’t be wrong.Appeal to veneration: Experts at Harvard Medical School join the Dalai Lama in supporting this practice.
Appeal to tradition: Human societies have honored this practice for thousands of years.
A recent Newsweek special edition, The Future of Medicine, quotes MIT geneticist-mathematician Eric Lander: “Evolution has been carrying out experiments for the last 3.5 billion years. It gets up every morning and says, ‘Let’s change a few letters.’ And then it leaves us notes.”
Newsweek offers this colorful quotation as an example of Lander's renowned teaching skill. But in it, Lander commits a logical error known as the pathetic fallacy, defined as “attributing human aspirations, emotions, feelings, thoughts, or traits to events or inanimate objects which do not possess the capacity for such qualities.” The term derives from the Greek word pathos, which means “having to do with emotions,” and the Latin root fallacia , which means “deception.”
Most of us use the pathetic fallacy in informal speech. “My car refuses to start.” “My computer hates me!”
But at his Bad Science Web site, Alistair B. Fraser, emeritus professor of meteorology at Penn State, argues against scientists and teachers using the pathetic fallacy in their writing and speaking.
My personal rule is that in describing the behavior of the natural world, I am not obliged to explain it, but if I do, I am obliged to get it right. A teacher or writer must not present nonsense as a way of pretending to give an explanation, and, alas, to offer the pathetic fallacy is to offer scientific nonsense.
Fraser cites as “examples from places that should know better”:
If the tornado wants the windows open believe me, it will open them whether you like it or not! National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Even though it sometimes seems like the atmosphere tries harder, the oceans are more successful at transferring heat... University of Oregon
The water molecules align with the field, as the field changes, the water attempts to change its position to align with the field. The Ohio State University
Sunlight heats the Earth and the atmosphere tries to redistribute the heat from warm areas to cool areas. University of Virginia
I like this line from Australian science journalist Nick Goldie: “Today the great linguistic divide is not so much based on class or culture, but the gap between those who actually speak to one another, and those who use jargon to confuse and rule.”
This observation holds for written, as well as oral speech. I don’t think most of us involved in non-formal education try to impress readers with our superior knowledge, alienate them with pompous prose, or bore them with stuff. But it does happen sometimes, mostly because we learned from, and keep learning from, models of pompous academic prose. We also forget to examine our own work critically.
To close the linguistic gap, we need to ask of each piece of our own writing, and of the writing we cite or recommend: Does it engage readers with back-and-forth discourse, challenge them to think critically about the topic? Does it respect readers’ intelligence, invite them to respond from their own experience, and explicitly or tacitly acknowledge our own, as well as our readers’ ignorance?
Writers often confuse these words, in part, I think, because the words sometimes carry similar meanings when used as different parts of speech: i.e., We managed to affect the outcome. Our actions had the desired effect. Arrghh!
Affect comes from the Latin roots facere (to do or make) and ad (to, towards), meaning "to apply oneself to, to act upon, to aim at." Nothing you can do will affect the outcome. Sometimes it means "to move, touch (emotionally) or influence": His words affect me deeply.
Effect also derives from the root facere (to do or make), with the prefix ex (from, away). It means "to work out, to accomplish, bring about." Congress passed three bills intended to effect long-term improvements in the system.
As a noun, effect means a result: We didn’t see the effects of the storm until the following spring.
The noun affect generally refers to an emotion, or emotional state. A good teacher quickly picks up on a child’s affect.
Then we have the adjective forms: Effective means something that "works as designed or intended," and affective refers to something involving the emotional side of experience.
The roots affect and effect have given us a slew of words that deliver subtle shades of meaning: From affect we get affected, affectionate, affectation, affectationist, affecter, affectual, affectioned, and afffectuous. Effect has produced effectual, effective, ineffectual, effectivity, effecter, effectable, effectuate, and more.
But let’s save these for another day.
Face-to-face communication provides rich physical context that benefits both speakers and listeners: Speakers can use, and listeners take in, subtle changes in tone, inflection, register, speed and volume; meaningful pauses, changes in breathing; and body language: rolling the eyes, smiling, frowning, grinning, clenching teeth, gesturing, changes in posture, pounding the table. Speakers can tune in and respond immediately to listeners’ body language. Most of us find it easy to read shades of boredom, confusion, frustration, excitement, wonder, understanding, etc. in our listeners’ body language.
We lose nearly all that physical expression in written communications. The abstractions of words and punctuation and their arrangement on the page seem lifeless by comparison.
As one form of compensation, many writers use exclamation points merely for emphasis, especially to express strong emotion: You’ll find the flowers as astonishing us as the snakes and parrots! Dr. Winifred Allen offered a fabulous lecture on social Darwinism!
In a rush of feelings, writers sometimes lay down two or three exclamation points to increase the emotional emphasis: The talk was great!!!
Text peppered with the enthusiasm of exclamation points feels breathy and childlike. To develop emotional context in your writing: Choose strong, meaningful words, especially concrete nouns and verbs that convey action. Vary the length and structure of sentences and paragraphs. Encourage readers to engage with your ideas by asking open-ended questions and introducing ideas that hint at the unexplored aspects of your topic. Explore rhetorical devices such as irony, metaphor, analogy. and physical imagery.
Save the exclamation point for true exclamations: Grandma, what big teeth you have! Run for your life! Yikes!
Note: Most style guides encourage writers to avoid exclamation points in formal and academic text.
Last week, I got a letter from my bank containing instructions for when and where to send my final car payment. Good news, except the letter-writer used the noun payoff as a verb three times: To payoff your loan, please send a check for $180.86 to this address... Yikes!
English speakers have a long history of combining short, punchy verbs with short, punchy adverbs to make new nouns: payoff, cutout, signup, layoff, putdown, workup, workout, getup, signup, signoff, standoff, markup, knockoff, stand-in, holdup, standby, pinup, sendoff, rundown, screw-up, login, logoff.
But when writers go back to using the original verb, modified by the adverb attached to it, they need to separate the two words. So: I will pay off my loan. I will work out on Friday. Marcia will sign up for camp. You have to register before you can log in. We will send off the troops with a parade. They mark the sweaters up15 percent, but they knock at least 10 percent off the jeans.
Linguists use the term hypercorrection to describe what happens when teachers or parents correct us so often about our use of a certain verbal construction we learn to think of it as the only correct way to use the phrase.
So, when you said “Me and him both made the team,” and your teachers corrected you with "He and I both made the team," you transferred the memories of those corrections, so now you say or write, "Please give it to he and I by Friday."
But pronouns can serve as both subjects and objects. In the first example, He and I serve as subjects of the sentence, so you would correctly write, "He and I [the so-called nominative case of these pronouns] both made the team."
But the second example should read, "Please give it to him and me by Friday," because the pronouns him and me serve as indirect objects of the verb give.
In this example: "The ball hit both him and me," the pronouns serve as direct objects of the verb hit.
You don’t have to remember your nominative from your objective to get it right, though, if you use this handy trick: When you use a pronoun in a compound subject or object, speak the the sentence aloud uing only one pronoun at a time.
It would sound right to your ear to say or write, "He made the team." or "I made the team." Therefore, when you put them together, you get. "He and I made the team."
But it would sound wrong to say, "Give it to I," or "Give it to he." You'd immmediately correct it to, "Give it to me," and Give it to him." Put them together and you get the gramatically correct, "Give it to me and him. "
Same goes for, "The ball hit I." and "The ball hit he." Your ear would make the corrections: "The ball hit me," and "The ball hit him." Hence, "The ball hit him and me."
Waking Up Writing welcomes contributions (new posts, not simply comments) from Cooperative Extension staff and volunteers who write for UNHCE.
If you want to post—once, occasionally, or often—just send me an email and I'll send back instructions on how to proceed.
The ground rules for guest bloggers:
Extension professionals sometimes produce written materials designed to help the public understand the various risks involved in certain situations. These might include long range risk assessments: the economic and public health effects of land use changes, or the effects of divorce on children, as well as more acute and critical situations: a pesticide accident, a food safety outbreak, an insect-borne health risk.
Because of our emphasis on research-based information, Extension professionals may feel tempted to cite statistics and empirical research, implicitly suggesting that people should assess risk and base decisions on these factors alone.
Yet people often assess risk on the basis of non-empirical factors, such as values, moral beliefs, and emotions. They use a complex calculus that may include the origin of the risk, their past experience, their perception of their own or their loved ones' vulnerability, and whether they have control over any of the risk factors.
Besides, most people know that science doesn’t reveal ultimate truths; in the light of new knowledge, what seems like irrefutable fact today can emerge as tomorrow’s half-truth or even falsehood. They also understand that, in the face of public health and economic risks, commercial and political entities often mount intense public relations and damage-control campaigns that may spin the facts, deliberately attempt to confuse, or even lie outright.
Also, situations may occur in which we jave no well-developed research base, or in which respected experts cite conflicting research results.
Professionals in the field of risk communication suggest using these seven cardinal rules, developed by Vincent T. Covello and Frederick H. Allen of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as guidelines.
1. Accept and involve the public as a legitimate partner.
2. Plan carefully and evaluate your efforts.
3. Listen to the public’s specific concerns.
4. Be honest, frank, and open.
5. Coordinate and collaborate with other credible sources.
6. Meet the needs of the media.
7. Speak clearly and with compassion.
Notice the emphasis on collaboration with many partners, and on listening to people’s specific concerns. For a more thorough introduction to risk communication, visit this online tutorial , prepared by Dr. Katherine McComas of the Food Safety Risk Analysis Clearinghouse.
The title of this Ohio State fact sheet Are Electromagnetic Fields Hazardous to Your Health? implies its function as a risk communication. Judge its effectiveness for yourself.
While you edit, remove all those little phases that refer to your plan for the piece of writing: This letter is to inform you…. As I will demonstrate…. As we have shown in the previous section…. That said, let’s move on to.... Because they don’t deliver information about the topic itself, these “scaffold” phrases diminish the power of your text.
Rather than inform the reader what you plan to write next or what you’ve already written, simply introduce each point or idea directly. Let the scaffolding—the steps you took along the way in preparing the final document—hum in the background, implicit in your words.
Most rules have exceptions: Abstracts of academic and technical papers typically serve as an introductory scaffold for those documents; the conclusion section reiterates the research steps and its findings in a summary form.
Do ideas sing and dance in your mind, but land dead on arrival when you try to write them down? If so, you probably suffer from poor teaching, not lack of writing talent or inspiration.
The people who taught most of us to write made us work from outlines, always write in complete sentences, begin at the beginning, mind our grammar and spelling and the length of our essays.
This method of teaching writing seems to confuse the written product—arranged in perfect linear fashion from beginning to end—with the process of writing—discursive, nonlinear, messy, often interrupted by new ideas or new perspectives that come suddenly from nowhere and don't fit the outline.
Think about some of the features of a written product:
Traditional methods of teaching writing have you imagining the product in advance: planning what you'll say and in what order to write, how much space you can take, and so forth.
So, as you write, you worry about what you'll need for the product: a beginning, a middle, an ending, topic sentences, complete sentences, word order, punctuation, syntax, grammar, and the like, while the good stuff, your connection to the invisible heart and guts of your topic, disappears. It feels like trying to run backwards and forwards simultaneously. Your words fall heavy and awkward on the page.
When writing write! Get into the process. You can't order, weigh, see, measure, or contain ideas and thoughts. Forget that you need to end up with a product. Put away your notes. Bring your topic to mind, and just write, and keep writing.
You can [and you must] fuss with the flow, the grammar, the word choices, and all the rest of it later.
Last week, Andrea asked when to use a colon, when a semicolon. Good question! You'll find the "rules" for these two punctuation marks much more fluid than, say, for the period, the exclamation point, or quotation marks. In brief:
The colon creates a sentence “break” nearly as complete as a period. It announces something to come. Use it:
A semicolon separates two closely related elements in a sentence. I’ve heard it referred to as a “muscular comma.”
Use a semicolon:
[Awful truth: When you use a coordinating conjunction— and, but, for, or, nor, so, or yet—to introduce an independent clause, you use a comma rather than a semicolon: Andrea has a long commute, but she arrives early and eats breakfast at work.]
A recent study by the Carnegie Corporation, titled Abandoning the News found that only 19 percent of 18 to 34 year-olds read a daily newspaper and 12 percent never read newspapers at all. The study also found:
“What’s the future of the news business?” asks Merrill Brown, introducing his report on the project.
There's a dramatic revolution taking place in the news business today and it isn't about TV anchor changes, scandals at storied newspapers or embedded reporters.The future course of the news, including the basic assumptions about how we consume news and information and make decisions in a democratic society are being altered by technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways.
In short, the future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news.
Through Internet portal sites, handheld devices, blogs and instant messaging, we are accessing and processing information in ways that challenge the historic function of the news business and raise fundamental questions about the future of the news field. Meanwhile, new forms of newsgathering and distribution, grassroots or citizen journalism and blogging sites are changing the very nature of who produces news….
This audience, the future news consumers and leaders of a complex, modern society, are abandoning the news as we've known it, and it's increasingly clear that a great number of them will never return to daily newspapers and the national broadcast news programs.
I urge you all to read Brown’s report in full. As you read, plug in the words “teaching and learning" for “news” to get (1) a deeper understanding of the cultures and communications models increasingly preferred by young audiences, as well as (2) a taste of the challenges of preparing them—and ourselves—to become sophisticated and critical interpreters of online messages.
In this post to the blog A List Apart, writer Nick Usborne asks readers to imagine a day when the Bad Internet Fairy shuts down all the commercial and organizational [even the “educational”] Web sites. Even then, he says,
…the internet was still ablaze with activity. Tens of millions of people were sending billions of messages to each other. Young people and old people alike. Instant messages were flying. Blogs were being written and updated. Newsletters were being edited and sent out. Discussion lists were being read and replied to. Personal sites were being created and published. Emails were being written to family and friends.People were reading and writing.... People were engaged. Tens of millions of them. They were reading line after line, page after page. What did they enjoy the most? The best writing. The most interesting opinions. The most original thinkers and voices. Yes, everyone was reading like crazy. People love to read when the subject is close to their hearts, when the writer is known to them and trusted, when the writing is exciting and well crafted...
Although these millions of people don’t think about it or analyze it, they all know a simple truth: their experience of the web is about words...
Of course, the Web also offers more than words: images, sound, video—even tactile simulations (via the new science of haptics), that, for example, help surgeons develop technical skills in virtual reality.
And Usborne knows that writers alone don’t make the Web. They depend utterly on the folks who develop the hardware, the software and all the rest of what makes the Internet work technically.
But his main point deserves close attention: Millions of ordinary people—people writing for others and reading each others’ words, exchanging ideas and information, expressing beliefs and values, teaching, learning, collaborating—continuously build the Net.
This new medium enables anyone with an Internet connection to communicate with any and all the other people online. Contrast this with the print publishing and electronic broadcasting models, where a powerful few determine which words, images, and formats the rest of us will see and hear.
Out of context, “blooper” newspaper headlines become all the more hilarious:
Farmer bill dies in house
Stiff opposition expected to casketless funeral plan
Enraged cow injures farmer with ax
Queen Mary to have bottom scraped
This doozey appeared in the Concord Monitor a couple of weeks ago: Mom: Man gave finger as payment.
Writers especially need to sweat the small stuff online. Well-crafted headlines, titles, subtitles, captions, email subject lines—“microcontent” in online lingo—can serve as brief abstracts that help narrow and focus a reader’s attention and encourage someone to open an email or stay interested in your page.
Microcontent takes on a magnified importance on the Web, so writers need to take special care in crafting it:
To write effective microcontent, follow these rules of thumb:
Think of each bit of microcontent as a meaningful abstract of the more detailed information to follow.Keep it word-sparse and meaning-dense.
Make it strong and meaningful enough to stand alone.
Lead with the strongest, most meaningful words. For example, write Water Quality Monitoring: Citizens & Experts Join Forces, instead of Lay Lakes Monitoring Program: Citizens and Experts Join Forces. Lay Lakes won’t mean much to most readers when it turns up on a search engine hit list.
Rewrite the titles of links to external resources so your readers will know what they’ll get if they go there. Say you want to link to an online paper the original author has titled Come again?. Because the page helps writers revise their rough drafts, you could retitle your link Revising your rough drafts.
Avoid colloquial expressions, slang, professional jargon, metaphors and other figurative speech, and puns or “cute” words.
Research by Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen and others has shown:
People can comfortably read only half as many words on a computer screen as they can from a printed text page.Online, people scan; they don’t read word for word.
Web users often keep several browser windows open, switching back and forth among them as they look for information.
Only highly motivated readers will scroll in search of essential information.
People who come online looking for information don’t tolerate jargon, wordplay or hype.
Effective writing for the Web entails making lean text even leaner and “designing” text for easy scanning. Some strategies:
Lead with an abstract. Draft a three- or four-line abstract summarizing the information you will deliver. Some Web writers highlight the background of their abstracts to attract reader attention.
Limit the scope of your topic. Announce the scope and limits of your document by the words you use in the title and brief introductory abstract. Add links, rather than text, to expand the document’s scope.
Introduce only one idea per paragraph. If your complex topic demands great detail, present the essential matter and link to a more detailed explanation you or another online writer has prepared.
Chunk your text.
“Chunking” refers to separating long text blocks into segments for ease of scanning and reading online. Some strategies for chunking:
Use plenty of headings and subheadings/titles and subtitles. Boldface headers create clear, visual separations between text blocks that facilitate scanning. Treat titles and subtitles like mini-abstracts to deliver information that summarizes what comes next. Make sure your titles and subtitles lead with strong, meaning-dense words.Create white space. Think of white space—the emptiness between words, sentences, and paragraphs—as your primary design tool. Use short words and simple sentences. Keep most paragraphs to five lines or fewer.
Use bulleted and numbered lists where appropriate. Bulleted lists visually separate ideas, but suggest a close relationship among the items in the list. Web usability experts suggest using no more than two levels of "information hierarchy"—more increases the cognitive load for readers. Use numbered lists only to illustrate sequences, such as how-to instructions or timelines.Highlight keywords and phrases in bold. In addition to frequent subheadings and bulleted lists, bolded words and phrases help scanning readers discern the meat of your document and decide whether it bears closer reading to pick up the details. Warning: Don’t underline for emphasis. Online readers associate underlining with active links. Also, use italics sparingly. Usability studies show that readers find italicized text difficult to read online.
Use links to pages that provide background, offer more detailed information, or introduce related topics. Links to internal or external pages can direct beginners or more sophisticated readers to pages that explain or amplify your main points.
Use visuals to provide details. Images often deliver what words cannot. Use charts, graphs, photographs, cartoons and other visual elements to provide information and impact that support and extend your text. Select graphics that deliver meaning; don’t clutter the screen with visuals that offer only decorative value.
Take a look at the Web-writing guidelines produced by the MIT libraries. I consider it one of the best examples of online writing style and page display.
That little black stroke called the apostrophe causes no end of difficulty for writers. People put it in when they shouldn’t: Used Car’s for Sale. Tomatoe’s $1.29 lb. Dr. Hunt lecture's in college classroom’s nationwide.
But people also leave it out when they need one: Help build your childrens esteem. Sell your produce at a farmers market. Selma served on a citizens panel.
English requires an apostrophe to indicate omitted letters in contractions: They’ve gone to Bermuda. I’ll get to it tomorrow.
The apostrophe indicates ownership or belonging: The child’s mother. The river’s edge. For plural nouns, the apostrophe typically follows the s: Veterans’ Home, farmers’ market. For proper nouns ending in s Jones, most style guides call for adding an apostrophe s: the Jones’s house.
Of course, much of the confusion arises because we add es or s to most words to make plurals, and people confuse those plurals with possessives taking an apostrophe s or s apostrophe.
The apostrophe made international news last month—at a land grant university, no less—when the nonprofit University Gateway Corporation, the group developing a $4.5 million walkway at the University of Minnesota, voted 4-1 to name it Scholars Walk, rather than Scholar’s or Scholars’ Walk.
As reported by the Associated Press:
[Gateway Corporation chair Larry] Laukka argued to board members of. that an apostrophe would add distinction by suggesting it is owned by those it honors. That argument didn't work. The board voted 4-1 against the punctuation mark.The board worried that the apostrophe would make the four-block walkway appear exclusive at a time the university wants to be inclusive. It might even mean adding apostrophes to Regents Professors Square and a Professors Lane.
“Apostrophes would be out of control!" said board member Margaret Carlson.”
Readers who want to learn more about the apostrophe or join a rising movement of punctuation activists could turn to the Apostrophe Protection Society, founded in 2001 by retired British journalist John Richards with the rallying cry, “The little apostrophe deserves our protection. It is indeed a threatened species!”
Do you often write “verbal” when you mean “spoken” (rather than written)?
In its broadest sense, verbal (from the Latin verbum, meaning word) means “having to do with words,” or “communicated by means of words"—spoken or written.
When you want to distinguish something as spoken, use the more precise “oral,” e.g., “They’ve worked under an oral agreement since February.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the English poet best-known for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, divided readers into four classes most of us would recognize today: