Express Editing Writing and Research

Use ‘consequently’ when one event or idea is a consequence of another, meaning that the first thing led to the second.  For example:

• I asked Campbell to edit my thesis; consequently, it passed without amendments.
• Great Britain declared war on Germany as a consequence of the latter’s invasion of Poland.

Use ‘subsequently’, on the other hand, when you want to imply that event two happened after event one; it followed sequentially in time, but no causality was necessarily involved.

• Lionel Messi scored for Barcelona, and subsequently scored again.
• Kanye West posts a woman’s nude picture, subsequently deletes it (if this D-list tittle-tattle interests you, here’s the link)

Many people confuse these words or think they are synonyms. In fact, to imply is to suggest something (the implication), and to infer means to interpret that suggestion (the inference).

A woman implying, a man inferring ...

It struck me recently that cufflinks are the male equivalent of foot-binding, or perhaps of growing insanely long fingernails, or even being sewn into your clothes to avoid creases (as was Archduke Ferdinand, who was shot and bled to death on the streets of Sarajevo in 1914, and whose assassination triggered World War I … but I digress). Cufflinks are essentially an advertisement of status – not merely a way of showing the world that you’re wealthy enough to buy shirts that require cufflinks, but that you inhabit a rarefied plane of humanity on which people adopt highly impractical modes of dress to signal their detachment from the working world. Cufflinks serve no practical purpose other than keeping together the sleeves of a shirt designed to be useless without them – which is a bit like erecting a sign saying ‘Do not throw stones at this sign’.

Proles, of course, make do with buttons, those simple, cheap but nonetheless highly functional fasteners used by humanity for over five thousand years. After Ötzi – the 5300-year-old Man in the Ice – was discovered poking out of a glacier in the South Tyrol in September 1991, his possessions were found to include a pierced marble disc that was probably used as a button. Unsurprisingly, no copper-age cufflinks were found adorning his jacket, loincloth, cloak or quiver.

Cufflinks must make rolling up your sleeves a bit of a pain, but then again, doing so enables the cufflink-wearer to show off comprehensively, which is, after all, their true point. Nevertheless, the cufflink-removal performance can’t be a winner for every wearer: it must be a dead giveaway for politicians trying to boost their ‘man of the people’ credentials. Kicking the footy on the lawns of Parliament House or throwing a token shovel-load of soil on a building site can hardly look natural after a man has first extracted cufflinks from an expensive shirt.

Buy these at http://www.putitoutthere.com.au

It’s common (but painful, to me at least) to see may or may not used in a sentence. This is poor English, because ‘may’ conveys the idea of possibility by itself: if something may be the case (this newsreader may be drunk; humans may evolve in one of four ways; John Travolta may have molested a man over hamburgers), the simultaneous implication is that it may not. Adding may not to a statement already qualified by may is superfluous.

In formal academic writing, especially theses and journal articles, most text about methods and previous research is written in past tense (e.g., ‘We interviewed 666 people living in metropolitan Melbourne’; ‘Aitken et al studied a sample …’). Nevertheless, in some disciplines (largely in the social sciences) the use of present tense is permissible for describing literature. This can read slightly oddly, especially when referring to long-dead authors (‘Socrates tells us’; ‘Milton writes’), but is fine when it’s consistent. Introduction, discussion and conclusion chapters or sections often use present tense, unless the field is palaeontology, history or another past-focused discipline.

I would opt for present rather than past tense in the following circumstances:

1. text relating to the document itself (‘this thesis describes’; ‘the next chapter concentrates on’; ‘these results indicate’)
2. references to other published documents/theories/concepts, because they are essentially eternal (‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity holds that’; ‘Aitken et al’s article shows’; ‘the Act states’)
3. text that explicitly describes a phenomenon at a particular point in time (e.g., an evaluation of a public health program) or when there is no expectation of substantial change over time (e.g., a description of a new species)
4. text that relates to the implications of research, or conclusions presented as general truths (‘Our research proves that bicycles are more energy-efficient than cars’; The data imply …’)
5. when writing about a current and ongoing problem (young Australians’ binge drinking is a serious …’).

There’s a further refinement to point 2, which is that any associated actions or the actual work of the authors themselves (e.g. ‘the report was prepared’; ‘Aitken et al’s research proved that’) as opposed to its result (a document) can be referred to in past tense.

These words are often used interchangeably, but they have different meanings.

Can refers to objective possibility or capacity.  For example:

• Can you jump over that chair?
• I can edit this document in one hour
• I can go to that party on the weekend
• Can there be more debt-free Greeks in Melbourne than in Greece?

May is used in situations involving choice, chance, uncertainty or permission.

• There may be more debt-free Greeks in Melbourne than in Greece (but there may not)
• I may be able to edit this document in one hour (I’m not sure if I can)
• May I go to that party on the weekend? (i..e, will you allow me to go?)
• You may be able to jump over that chair (but I doubt it)

Usage of can and may has changed substantially in recent decades. People in polite society would once have asked “May I have this dance?” My children ask “Can I go to Stella’s/Emi’s sleepover on Saturday night?”, when really they should say ‘may’, but this usage, though polite and grammatically correct, is now very old-fashioned. Nevertheless, in my view at least, there remains a difference between can and may when it comes to table manners. Strictly speaking, “Can you pass me the salt?” is a question of capacity to pass the salt. “May I have the salt?” is better; after all, you already know there’s salt available, and you’re pretty sure your fellow diner can pass it to you – it’s just a polite way of getting someone else to do something for you.

Some clients tell me they’re struggling to get their thoughts on paper (not that anyone writes on paper any more, but you know what I mean); others have written plenty but say that it doesn’t flow logically and they don’t know how to fix it. My solution for both these problems is to create headings and subheadings that summarise the major ideas that need to be conveyed in the document.

For non-starters, this method provides a framework; the headings can be reordered, contemplated and reordered again until a logical flow appears. Once the structure is reasonably well sorted, the detail can be filled in.

For people who have managed to get some words down, inserting headings (as many as one for every paragraph, if necessary) then extracting them as a table of contents gives a simplified view of the document and shows where the existing structure is flawed. It also helps in creating a hierarchy with major ideas and their components logically grouped.

It’s easy (and far more efficient) to set up a Word document so that it generates a table of contents as you write, but it’s not hard to do it if you’ve already written some material. Select a heading, then press:

Shift-Alt-O

and mark it as a heading at the appropriate level. Once you’ve marked all the headings, click at the top of your document and follow the menu sequence below to generate a table of contents.

References-Table of Contents-Insert Table of Contents-Options-Build Table of Contents from: Table entry fields-OK-OK

This TOC can be updated by right-clicking on it at any time.

Australians are lucky to live in a largely functional democracy that allows almost all adult citizens to have a say in who governs us. What I find strange is that we are compelled to vote; after all, voting is about making a choice – it seems illogical that a democratic system should force its citizens to choose. (More accurately, what we do is compel people to give themselves the opportunity to make a choice, either in person at a polling booth or by postal vote.) Surely not voting is a perfectly valid choice – certainly as useful as a donkey vote or deliberately spoiling your ballot. 

Only 32 of the world’s 196 countries have compulsory voting (there’s more on this topic on the AEC‘s site), and only 19 actually enforce it. (FYI, the 19 are Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, Ecuador, Fiji, Greece, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Mexico, Nauru, Peru, Singapore, Switzerland, Turkey and Uruguay; the 13 who don’t enforce it are Bolivia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, France, Gabon, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Netherlands, Paraguay, The Philippines and Thailand).

I actually like voting; it’s one of the few processes that makes you feel like part of the entire Australian (or Victorian, or whatever) community. Almost everyone gets out on the same day and we collectively make a decision about who should be in charge. I reckon that’s a great thing and it should be celebrated (despite the inevitable disappointment with the result). So, instead of making feel people like voting is some sort of weird quasi-triennal punishment, why not actually encourage people to vote, by (say) paying everyone who turns up to vote $20? Yes, it’d make elections even more expensive than they already are, but it’s taxpayers’ money after all, and it would provide a relatively greater incentive to lower-income voters who are traditionally less likely to vote (one of the major objections to removing compulsory voting). I reckon voter turnouts would be even higher than we get now and people would be more likely to see the point of their rights and duties as citizens.

Using active instead of passive voice simplifies and clarifies sentences – and saves words, which is often important in academic writing. For example:

Those shoes were destroyed by your cat!

Terrible injuries can result from bicycle accidents.

Anchovies are what penguins like to eat.

are better as:

Your cat destroyed those shoes!

Bicycle accidents can cause terrible injuries.

Penguins like to eat anchovies.

In active voice the subject of the sentence is the actor (‘cat destroyed’), but in passive voice the subject is acted upon (‘by your cat’).

Annoyingly, it’s not always possible to use active voice in scientific writing and theses as it’s the convention to avoid the first person. This means ‘I conducted an experiment’ has to be rendered as ‘an experiment was conducted’. Otherwise, active voice is the go!

After seeing a great performance by Steve Hughes on TV earlier this year, I knew I had to see him at the 2011 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Steve was billed as ‘Steve Hughes: conspiracy realist’, and as expected he gave some darkly hilarious insights into some of the more disturbing features of modern Australia (and much of the Western world). One of his themes was thought crime – how insulting or offending people has become a criminal matter. What happened to ‘sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me’? Steve pointed out that being offended doesn’t have any serious or long-term effects: it’s not as though hearing something that offends your beliefs is going to cause a limb to fall off or your bank balance to halve. He maintains the great Australian tradition of sending ourselves up, but does it in an unusually thought-provoking and intellectually challenging way.

Steve’s brilliant monologue reminded me of a conversation I had with work colleagues a couple of years ago, in which we discussed ‘wrong’ words – words once in common use but now regarded as too offensive. ‘Nigger’ came up early on, rapidly followed by ‘cripple’ and ‘spastic’, but I think I hit the jackpot with ‘Jewess’. I can’t remember where (possibly in a Somerset Maugham novel or at least a novel of that vintage) I saw a description of a young woman as ‘a beautiful young Jewess’ (surely ‘a beautiful young woman’ or ‘a beautiful young Jewish woman’ would have sufficed?) As much as I agree with Steve Hughes about the perils of thought crime, ‘Jewess’ seems a superbly offensive word and well worth avoiding. Using ‘Jewess’ to label the female members of a group of humans as you might animals (‘mare’, ‘sow’, ‘cow’, etc.) conjures up (for me, anyway) the image of packed cattle trucks trundling off to Auschwitz – the reality of the most offensive policy of the 20^th century.