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Grammar Guide #3: Simple Past vs. Present Perfect

6/1/2012

Few subjects cause as many headaches for language learners as new verb tenses, and for students of English, the present perfect tense is a frequent source of exasperation. Because it's used to express actions in the past that are still relevant to the present, we use it often in scientific discourse to discuss past research or hypotheses. Indeed, it's used abundantly in the Introduction and Discussion sections of scientific papers when authors describe how past work is relevant to their own. However, when describing anything that has already taken place, the simple past tense also plays an important role. If you're feeling a bit unsure about when to use each tense, and how to use them together, here are some simple guidelines to help you:

1. Use the simple past for actions that occurred one or several times in the past, but do not continue to occur today.
Examples:
"This technique was used until the 1980s, when technological improvements rendered it obsolete."
"The data supported our hypothesis."

2. Use the present perfect when describing an action or body of research that took place in the past, but pertains to your research today.
Examples:
"This technique has been used since the 1980s, and has been shown to be highly efficacious (Smith, 1984; Jones, 1995; Zhang et al., 2002)."
Here, it is implied through the use of the present perfect that this technique was used in the past, continues to be used today, and during that entire time has been highly efficacious.

"Until now, most published data have been consistent with this hypothesis."
Instead of referring to a single set of data that tested one hypothesis at a specific moment in time, as in #1, here we're referring to data collected over a period of time that have continually supported the hypothesis until the present day.

3. If you are referring to a single study, you may use the simple past, but if you refer to multiple studies or an on-going body of work, the present perfect is better.
Example:
Simple past: "In their 2010 paper, Kapolsky and Slater highlighted the need for more precise methods."
Present perfect: "The research of Kapolsky and Slater (2010; 2011) has highlighted the need for more precise methods."
"Research" is an somewhat abstract term, encompassing various experiments that Kapolsky and Slater have performed (and, implicitly, continue to perform) that are relevant to the subject topic.

4. Use the two tenses together when you're expressing past actions that occurred over a period of time and that are still relevant today (present perfect), punctuated by a single, completed event (simple past).
Example:
"Ever since she introduced her famous hypothesis in a 2000 Nature paper, Jenson's work has been highly regarded."
"She introduced" is in the simple past because it happened once, and the action was completed. The present perfect is used in the second clause because the hypothesis has been highly regarded in the past and continues to be highly regarded today.

Wondering about examples from your own work? Post them in the comments and we can help!

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Grammar Guide #2: Numbers, Numbers Everywhere

5/25/2012

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Scientific documents are often packed full of numbers, and determining the clearest, most efficient way to represent them in your documents can be a pain. Obviously, the most concise way to express numbers is to use numerals, e.g., 5, 9, 11, 54, 101; however, when used too freely, an abundance of numerals tends to impede readers' understanding. Consider the following phrases: "9 4-cell-stage embryos", "54 2-hour samples", "75 500-individual groups".
Reading them, the mind automatically stumbles a bit; is that "9 embryos that are at the 4-cell stage" or "embryos comprised of 94 cells"? Clearly, some level of compromise is required between "all numerals, all the time" and "every number written as a word", but how best to optimize the tradeoff? Luckily, if we are going to keep our writing concise (and we are), but not sacrifice ease of expression (and we are not), we need only follow a few simple guidelines:

1) Numbers less than 10 (1-9) are usually written out, while 10 and above are expressed as numerals.
Therefore, in the example above, one correct way to write it would be "nine four-cell-stage embryos". "But wait!", you say, "I see '4-cell-stage embryos' all the time! In dozens of papers!" Exactly. In your particular field, conventional usage may have trumped standard grammar rules, so that "nine 4-cell-stage embryos" is perfectly acceptable. It's always a good idea to check with the journal you have in mind to see if they have a preference for either style. For the other two examples, we'd have "54 two-hour samples", but I'd rewrite "75 500-individual groups" to "75 groups of 500 individuals each". Yes, we've added text, but we've dramatically increased clarity.

Important Note: Rule #1 may be broken for the sake of consistency. If numbers less than and greater than 10 appear together in a sentence, express them all as numerals, e.g., "We sampled leaves at 4, 6, 10, 25, and 36 days after germination." "From site A and site B, we obtained 8 and 11 samples, respectively."

2) Numbers at the start of a sentence should always be spelled out.
This one is fairly inviolable. The sentence "25 samples were included in this study" would correctly be "Twenty-five samples were included in this study". However, "278 sites were tested for contaminants" is a little trickier. Instead of burdening your reader with "Two hundred seventy-eight sites were tested for contaminants" , try a quick rewrite: "We tested 278 sites for contaminants." The same goes for "4-cell-stage embryos" - if it starts a sentence but you don't want it spelled out completely, rewrite your sentence!

3) Use numerals for measured quantities
"40 mL water", "5 g tissue", "2.5 min"

4) Leave a space between a number and its unit, except for percentages and degrees.
So, we have "70%" and "70°C" (no space), but "70 mL", "70 days", and "70 mg".

There are more, but these four rules should get you through most of the numerical situations you'll encounter in your scientific writing. (See what I did there?) Remember, the rules of grammar exist to increase the clarity and ease of understanding of any given document. Instead of viewing them as archaic, pointless shackles on your personal expression, try envisioning them as useful tools towards your ultimate goal: easy communication with your readers!

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Grammar Guide #1: The Correct Usage of Which vs. That, or, How Restrictive Clauses Can Open Up New Worlds in Your Writing

5/17/2012

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Scientific writing is difficult. Nowadays, scientists are under immense pressure to conduct and publish groundbreaking research as quickly as possible, write compelling grant proposals, and stay abreast of the latest developments in their field; these challenges are increased exponentially for those whose native language isn't English. It's no wonder that careful attention to grammar often goes by the wayside, even for those who have spoken English since infancy. Enter our "Grammar Guide" series: short, to-the-point guidelines to help you navigate the murky waters of English grammar with confidence and make its intricacies work to your advantage. First up, which vs. that.

We're starting off at a somewhat advanced level, but scientific writing is complicated and knowing when it's appropriate to use "which" vs. "that" can increase the clarify and precision of your writing. The difference may seem small at first, but incorrect usage can sabotage the meaning of your sentence. Let's look at an example to see what I mean:

1) "We sorted all the samples that were collected at the Lake Lucas site into categories based on morphology."
2) "We sorted all the samples, which were collected at the Lake Lucas site, into categories based on morphology."

Without knowing anything about the grammatical differences involved, you can see straight away that the "which" clause is separated from the rest of the sentence by commas. This is important, and can help you remember the essential difference between the two. Here it is:

"That" specifies a particular group of the overall subject and is crucial to the understanding of the sentence (in grammatical terms, a restrictive clause).
"Which" is followed by information that is descriptive but not necessary to understand the sentence (a non-restrictive clause). Here, the commas help to set off this clause as an aside to the main action of the sentence.

In other words, "we sorted all of the samples that were collected at the Lake Lucas site into categories" tells you that all of the sorted samples were collected at Lake Lucas and only the samples from Lake Lucas were sorted. It restricts the action of the sentence to the subset described by "that". There might be other samples, collected at other sites, that may or may not have been sorted, but we don't know anything about them from this sentence.
In the sentence "we sorted all the samples, which were collected at the Lake Lucas site, into categories", the clause introduced by a comma and "which" is more of a "by the way, here's some additional information about the samples". You can leave it out and still understand the true meaning of the sentence: "We sorted all of the samples into categories". Here, "which" is non-restrictive and descriptive: all of the samples were sorted, and they all came from Lake Lucas.

If this still seems nit-picky to you, consider the difference between these two descriptions:
1) All of the mice, which had been tested for antibodies, were given 50 mL of the solution.
2) All of the mice that had been tested for antibodies were given 50 mL of the solution.

In 1), all of the mice in the experiment were given 50 mL of the solution (and they had all been tested for antibodies). In 2), only the mice that had been tested for antibodies were given the solution (and we can infer that there are other mice, which had not been tested and were therefore not given the solution). By changing one word, we've completely changed the reader's understanding of the experimental set-up!

Recap: Clauses introduced by "which" are always set off by commas and are used to describe additional information that is nice to know about the subject. Clauses introduced by "that" are not set off by commas and they specify a subset of the subject on which the action was performed.

If you're more of a visual person and are still feeling a bit muddled on the topic, here's another short explanation, complete with color-coded Venn diagrams. Feel free to add questions or examples in the comments!

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Just How Different Is Scientific Writing, Really?

5/9/2012

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It doesn't take much exposure to scientific texts to realize that they're structured quite differently from everyday writing. Words tend to be longer; suffixes and prefixes abound; and the words themselves can be obscure, or even unknown, outside of a particular field. Over at his blog Ideas Illustrated, Mike Kinde analyzed passages from different types of English texts and quantitatively confirmed what we intuitively already know: scientific (in this case, medical) writing is strikingly different in composition from that found in literature and professional texts.

Using Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary, Kinde matched words with their linguistic origins, then wrote a script to color-code each word in a given passage with that origin and link it to its dictionary definition. The results look like this:

Here, the pink shading designates words that come from Old English, while the gray represents Gallo-Roman and Middle Low German origin, respectively. (The link of each word to its definition, as well a mouse-over label for its etymology, aren't reproduced here, so I strongly encourage you to check out Kinde's original post, as well as the Etymology Dictionary, for more details.)

Things get a little more interesting when he increases the length and complexity of the passage, using an excerpt from Charles Dickens's Great Expectations:

Now we have a nice mix of word origins, although Old English is still clearly the main source. Interestingly, when he analyzes a passage from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the percentage of words derived from Old English drops to 72.9% of the total, in part due to the addition of Greek, Old Norse, Scandinavian, and Native American to the list of word origins. A legal text, describing nations' borders at sea, provides even more insight: the percentage of words derived from Old English drops to 64.4%, while Latin and Old French combine to provide nearly 20% of the total. The further away we get from everyday spoken English, the lower the percentage of Old English-sourced words appears to be, and the more a text correlates with a high level of education on the part of the author, the more frequently we find words of Latin and Greek origin. Case in point, the following excerpt from a medical text:

Barely over half of the text is made up of Old English-derived words, Latin gives us an astonishing 17.1%, and Old French comes in close behind representing 11.1% of the sample. Of course, French comes from Latin, and Kinde admits in the comments section that his selection of a category for any given word was somewhat arbitrary, choosing to simply use the first language mentioned in the Etymology Dictionary entry. Still, it's a fascinating look at just how different "the English language" can be depending on the way it's used and for whom it's intended.

At the beginning of his post, he mentions having wanted to write an app that would analyze any given text in this manner, and I can imagine spending (wasting?) hours and hours comparing different branches of science, different journals, or even publications from different research groups. It would be fascinating to see if papers written in English by a French research group, for example, tend to have a higher frequency of French-derived words than those from a German group. I know I use word cognates frequently in speaking another language, even if the meaning in the non-English language may not be exactly what I intend, only because they come to mind much more readily. Who knows what kinds of hidden linguistic patterns we might find in academic publishing?

Unfortunately, he's abandoned this idea as infeasible (for now, at least) given the amount of "manual intervention" that was required for his current analysis. A basic, much less visually-pleasing version exists over at the Etymology Discovery Message Board (though it pains me to direct traffic to a site with an its/it's mistake in the first line). Until Mike Kinde, or another like-minded programmer, can figure out how to automate his process for the masses, we'll have to be content with these analyses for a reminder of just how complicated (but interesting!) English can be.

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More Resources to Help Improve Your Writing

5/2/2012

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In keeping with the theme of the last blog entry, let's see how a professor of English tackles academic writing. Professor Jonathan Gottschall wrote an article for NPR last week discussing the transition he made from writing for academia to writing for the general public. Though the style of writing in humanities' journals is obviously much different than scientific ones, each suffers from similar flaws, among them, in Dr. Gottschall's words, "maze-y sentences" (the humanities probably win here) and "ugly jargon" (I'd give this one to science).

He lists three books that helped him improve and clarify his writing: Stephen King's "On Writing: The Memoir of a Craft", Jon Winokur's "Advice to Writers", and William Zissner's "On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction". The first two will likely be of limited relevance to science writers, unless they wish to make the jump into writing for the general public. "On Writing Well", however, seems promising, especially in the author's attitude towards "cluttered" writing. Along with outlining clear, concise rules for punctuation and grammar, William Zissner decries clutter as a "disease of American writing" and offers suggestions to improve writing that is "strangl[ed] in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon". Sound like anything you know?

Obviously all of these books are directed towards native-English writers, and don't address the challenges inherent in writing in a second (or third, or fourth) language. If you feel fairly comfortable writing in English, these resources could supply some tools to help your prose feel more natural. In the end, academic writing is the same as any other kind of writing: communication with the reader is key. While scientists don't have the luxury of agonizing over every word the way a professional, full-time author might, I can't see the downside to taking small steps towards improving the overall quality of scientific publishing.

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Meet Dr. Helen Sword, Advocate for Stylish Academic Writing

4/25/2012

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Let me describe a scene for you, dear readers, and you decide if it’s at all similar to anything in your experience:

You have a stack of printed-out papers, journals, and books with strips of paper marking relevant chapters on your desk, all requiring your attention. You sit down at your desk, firmly determined to read and make notes on as as many as you can. Perhaps you’ve strengthened your resolve with a giant mug of coffee or fresh trip to the espresso machine before settling in; in short, you are ready for the task at hand. You resolutely pick up that first paper, but two paragraphs in, you find your attention wandering, your eyes drooping, and your hand desperately reaching for that cup of coffee. Although these papers should serve you in your research, you find them, at best, dry, and at worst, overly-technical and confusing. Guilt and self-degradation ensue: “Is it me? Am I just not sophisticated enough to understand this?”, followed by the nagging doubt: “If I were a real scientist, this kind of writing would not be a problem.”

Rest assured, long-suffering readers, the problem is not you, and Helen Sword is here to advocate on your behalf. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Dr. Sword bemoans the “weary, stale, and flat” (Shakespeare’s words, not hers) writing that pervades academia, and gives mind-boggling, real-life examples of the jargon and unnecessary technical terminology that have taken the place of clear, concise explanation. Take a look at this gem, altered a touch to protect the original author’s anonymity:
“The continued contestation of authenticity on manifold fronts tends, unsurprisingly, to induce a defensive posture to establish professional authority, which is accomplished by legitimating practice through symbolic representation.”

It’s not that any of the individual words in this text is impossibly difficult or obscure, but taken together, we have a prime example of the Instantaneous Skimming-Over Effect -- I read the text three times before I could force myself to actually interpret its meaning. Decoding layers of jargon and unnatural word usage is challenging even for highly-educated native-English readers; the problem is compounded a thousand times for those whose mother-tongue is not English. In her article, Dr. Sword proceeds to debunk the “myth” of academic publishing: that this sort of tortured, intensely impersonal writing is desired, nay, required by the editors of today’s top journals. “Nearly everyone,” she writes, “including the editors of academic journals, would much rather read lively, well-written articles than the slow-moving sludge of the typical scholarly paper.”

If we are going to give editors articles that they actually want to read, then, we must make some changes in the standard method of academic paper writing. To make your papers livelier, Dr. Sword continues, it is not enough to simply clarify your text and remove jargon; you must pay attention to the craft and style of your writing, in the same way that any professional writer does. Appropriate style will vary between disciplines, of course, but whatever the tone for your particular field, good writing will always enable real communication between writer and reader, and create a personal connection to efficiently and effectively teach information.

To illustrate, she includes several exampes of stodgy-made-stylish academic writing from various disciplines, which are worth a look for anyone who might think that it’s impossible to liven up his or her own writing and still remain professional. Here’s my favorite, appropriately enough from the field of life sciences:
“Stodgy: A significant variability in nutrient-gathering behaviors has been observed in various insect species.
Stylish: "Insects suck, chew, parasitize, bore, store, and even cultivate their foods to a highly sophisticated degree of specialization." (Richard Leschen and Thomas Buckley)”

Her underlying advice? Make an effort to de-clutter your writing, pay careful attention to the structure of your work, and let your verbs do your explaining. She even provides an online test that can categorize your writing as "flabby or fit" based on the relative frequencies of various parts of language in a sample of your writing. (I, unsurprisingly, have a weakness for prepositions.) Although it requires more thought to write stylishly, it's certainly a positive trend for academic writing as a whole. A penny’s worth of author’s effort before publication will equal a pound’s worth of readers’, and reviewers’, saved headaches!

Sword, Helen. “Yes, Even Professors Can Write Stylishly.” Wall Street Journal. April 6, 2012. Retrieved from www. wsj.com.
Helen Sword is the author of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press) and writersdiet.com.

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Welcome!

4/25/2012

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We're very excited to have this blog as a place to share articles, websites, and other sources that might be of interest to science writers. Please feel free to join the discussion in the comments!

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Forward>>

Grammar Guide #3: Simple Past vs. Present Perfect

Grammar Guide #2: Numbers, Numbers Everywhere

Grammar Guide #1: The Correct Usage of Which vs. That, or, How Restrictive Clauses Can Open Up New Worlds in Your Writing

Just How Different Is Scientific Writing, Really?

More Resources to Help Improve Your Writing

Meet Dr. Helen Sword, Advocate for Stylish Academic Writing

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