This commentary is intended for students in the author's MIS 202 and Tier III 415A classes. The former work in groups, the latter individually; all are presumed able to transpose the wording appropriately (especially between singular and plural forms).
Richard D. Piccard
A criterion for evaluation of your presentation and paper is content that goes beyond the material presented in class and beyond the material in the course text(s).
There are two primary reasons to avoid the passive voice. First, the passive voice is impersonal. Second, the passive voice generally leads to more complex grammatical constructions, which are more challenging to read.
"It is estimated that ..." is a passive voice construction that forces the reader to conclude that one of the following two statements applies:
Neither of these creates a positive impression.
If a phrase or clause is a "restrictive" one, i.e., it completes the definition by eliminating one or more possibilities, then removing it from the sentence would create a significant change in the meaning communicated, not just a reduction in the information content. In such cases, the appropriate connecting word is "that," and neither commas nor parentheses should be used to set off the phrase or clause.
For example, consider the sentence, "In this section we consider several English usage issues that have arisen in technical writing." We are restricting our attention to only those usage issues meeting the specified description, hence the use of "that" and the absence of commas.
For another example, consider the sentence, from a software user guide: "Any punctuation that is not supposed to be typed by the user will be outside the quotes, regardless of the conventional style otherwise used, which is described in the next point." Here we see both cases illustrated. The punctuation to be placed outside the quotes is restricted, it includes only that not to be typed by the user. The fact that the conventional style is described in the next point does not change the meaning of this point, it is simply extra information.
For example, the phrase "It should be noted that ..." should nearly always be removed, and the rest of the sentence presented as a straightforward declaration. This changes the sentence from passive to active voice, and avoids the word "note." For another example, sentences or paragraphs introduced by constructions such as "NOTE: " will usually benefit from the removal of that word.
In some of these cases the information involved is a side-comment embedded within an extended discussion or example, and may therefore be a candidate for presentation within a marginal, plain-framed text box.
The hyphen makes it clear that they belong together as one compound describing word. For example, "compound describing" in the previous sentence is not hyphenated, because each of those two words individually describes "word," without being misleading. An example of a missing, but needed, hyphen was provided by a Canadian subscriber to the usenet newsgroup comp.os.vms, as follows:
"Vancouver is a Nuclear Free Zone."
when what they really meant was:
"Vancouver is a Nuclear-Free Zone."
When a quantity in the form of a number with units of measurement is used as a noun, no hyphen joins the number to the units, but when used as a modifier, the number and units are joined with a hyphen. For example, "a four-gigabyte disk" but "a disk that can store four gigabytes." This is true whether the number is written out with letters or as a number with Arabic numerals.
"Client-server" is hyphenated. "Client-server" is an adjective, so it must modify a noun (commonly, "software" or "application").
"Hands-on" is hyphenated.
See the discussion on "wandering tenses".
In technical writing, where the listed items are often themselves complex grammatical structures, it is a very wise habit to consistently include the second comma in a three-item list, even though the standard usage would permit its omission.
When one or more of the individual items are so complex grammatically as to require commas or parentheses within the item, then it is sensible to use semicolons (";") instead of commas to separate the list items.
A comma should be found before but not after the word "including" and the phrase "such as" when they introduce a list.
Spellbound
- by Janet Minor
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I've run this poem threw it,
I'm sure your pleased too no,
Its letter perfect in it's weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.
Care should be focussed especially on any paragraph that contains sentences in more than one grammatical tense. Sometimes this will indeed be a logical necessity, but often the paragraph would be improved by using one tense consistently throughout.
In your abstract, use the present tense when referring to the rest of the paper. Although your reader will probably read the abstract first and the rest later, by the time your reader is reading the abstract, the whole paper already exists, so the present tense is logically correct.
"Input" is the object of the verb, "to enter."
"earth" is dirt, often found on the surface of the Earth.
When individuals assist each other with their term papers, they should be very careful to avoid the possibility that the instructor will perceive that one person is submitting under his or her own name work that was done by someone else. This should not be a problem if the help that each one provides to the other is comparable to the help received. If the two papers are on the same or similar subjects, be sure to consult with the instructor before reading each other's work.
Minimally acceptable results can be obtained for group projects if each person in the group writes a portion of the paper and one person assembles the final product.
Good results are much more likely to result from a process in which everyone contributes to all of the final product. Each person ought to read and mark up a draft of the complete paper. For larger projects that would go through many drafts, this might be done with one person seeing one draft, the next person seeing the next draft, and so on. It would usually be more reasonable to have everyone see the same draft, with the group assembling to talk through each person's suggestions for changes. Explaining why you think something ought to be changed or kept as-is will bring the critical issues to a conscious level. Often everyone in the group will agree as to the problem, even though it may take some discussion to reach an agreement on the solution. One or two cycles of such complete-draft revision should polish the paper quite well.
Dick Piccard revised this page (https://people.ohio.edu/piccard/english.html) on January 25, 2006.
Please E-mail comments or suggestions to piccard@ohio.edu