Fine-tuning your writing

Don't disguise your writing

By William R. Luellen

William R. Luellen can be contacted at Headquarters Office, 677 S. Segoe Rd., Madison WI 53711-1086; 608/273-8080, fax -2021, wluellen@agronomy.org.

Here is the beginning of a sentence from one of our publications: "Research has shown that although potassium has relatively little influence on improving stand establishment, yield and stand survival…"

What does this much of the sentence look like to you? To me it looked like a list of things that potassium has relatively little influence on, and I expected the next word in the sentence would be it. But the next word threw me, because it was are. Immediately I knew I needed to shift mental gears because the sentence with that word in it could not be a list.

I call this type of error disguised writing, which is not the best term because it almost connotes something the author did deliberately. But I cannot think of a better term for a sentence that looks like one thing but means something else.

The sentence's following three words confirmed my judgement that I was not reading a list, and gave me a second dilemma, because those words were, "highly dependent on." My mind's task suddenly had become one of figuring out a structure that would logically connect "highly dependent on" and "relatively little influence on" in the same sentence.

Here is the full sentence, as it was published: "Research has shown that although potassium has relatively little influence on improving stand establishment, yield and stand survival are highly dependent on an adequate potassium supply." As you can see, the mental shifting of gears does not take long, and after a person reads it a time or two the sentence can be interpreted in a way that makes sense.

STUMBLING BLOCKS

In an earlier column, I mentioned the need for an author to do the best possible job of getting his or her ideas onto paper, and the concomitant job of a reader to do the best possible job of interpreting those words so as to understand the ideas the author had behind them. Some have called this coding and decoding, which is not a bad choice of words.

I focused that earlier column on reader responsibility. This time I want to focus on the responsibility of the author.

The author of the sentence under discussion did a bad job of coding his or her idea, choosing a code normally interpreted by a reader as a list of items. The writing is not disguised so badly that the reader cannot figure it out, but the decoding of this sentence is more work and takes more time than necessary.

Disguised writing errors are far more common than you might realize. The disruption is seldom consciously noticed because it usually takes the reader only a fraction of a second to shift mental gears and decode what the author meant. Although the individual errors may not be noticed, they (or the lack of them) are the reason why some papers are a joy to read and some other papers are not. Each little impediment, each little bump in the road, makes the entire road just that much rougher to traverse.

THE SIREN IS CALLING

Like the mythical mermaid, science is constantly luring its unsuspecting practitioners to write: "Back in the old days when we didn't know much about (name the subject), scientists believed (name the incorrect earlier belief). Now that modern science has discovered the real nature (cause) of this (subject), we can definitively state that the entire and complete answer to that dilemma is (the current state of the knowledge)."

Unless sentences of that sort are used in a review paper of a subject that has been well defined for a number of years, I can just about guarantee that anything written with that much hubris will one day come back and bite its author.

REMOVING THOSE BLOCKS

The simplest way (but not the best, as I will show) to correct the confusion in the example sentence would be to move the center phrase to the beginning: "Although potassium has relatively little influence on improving stand establishment, research has shown that yield and stand survival are highly dependent on an adequate potassium supply."

No confusion here, the sentence reads logically and does not look like a list. The only problem is that this simple change also changes the meaning of the sentence. Only the second assertion in this revision is supported by the phrase "research has shown." Since both assertions in the author's version are so supported, they probably should be supported in any correction, too.

The only way I can think of to do that logically would be to recast it as two sentences: "Research has shown that potassium has relatively little influence on improving stand establishment. One should still apply it, though, because that same research has shown that yield and stand survival are highly dependent on an adequate potassium supply."

This version is longer (39 vs. 27 words) but would be read more quickly than the original because these sentences must be read only once to be understood.

ONE MORE EXAMPLE

Rather than burden you with too many examples in this column, I will give just one more: "Would that everyone could write as well as the best of us."

This construction is fairly common. You hear it a lot in speech, because the speaker is able to give the proper inflection so the listener can immediately comprehend the meaning. When it is written, though, the sentence starts out looking like a question, such as, "Would that person with the loud radio please turn it down?"

The third word presents a disruption to the reader, though. I cannot think of any logical question in which everyone would follow Would that. So, at the third word, the reader abruptly discovers he or she is not reading a question, and has to regroup and make a second effort at decoding the author's writing.

A person could correct this sentence two ways. One would be to go ahead and make it a (rhetorical) question, "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone could write as well as the best of us?" The other would be to remove the appearance of a question, "If only everyone could write as well as the best of us." A variation of that might be, "I wish everyone could write as well as the best of us."

LOOK FOR DISGUISES IN YOUR WRITING

As you are making your final few trips through your paper before you submit it, consider each sentence carefully. (I find that reading the text aloud helps me spot this type of error.) If any sentence causes you to stumble, you can bet that anyone less familiar with your work than you are will stumble even more than you did.

Determine exactly why the sentence caused you to stumble. If the problem was one of disguised writing, use the techniques I described in the two examples in this column to correct your prose.