Express Editing Writing and Research

See my article at http://www.westernalliance.org.au/in-brief-3/mhealth-using-mobile-technologies-to-improve-access-and-efficiency-in-health-care-delivery/

See my article at http://www.westernalliance.org.au/in-brief-3/sugary-drinks-and-public-health-the-bittersweet-solution-of-a-sugar-tax/

See my article at http://www.westernalliance.org.au/in-brief-3/eradicating-infectious-diseases-could-hepatitis-c-be-next/

Lots of things of course, starting with an excellent idea. However, are particular words important? In his article for The Conversation (27 February 2015), Owen Churches (Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology at Flinders University) counts and charts the occurrences of words in the summaries of successful Australian Research Council Discovery Project applications. ‘New’ and ‘novel’ are very frequent (but oddly, not ‘innovative’), as are ‘understanding’, ‘Australia’ and ‘develop’. He also describes changes in word use over time. Well worth a look.

All languages evolve – if they don’t, they’re dead (Latin anyone?) New words arise from many sources. ‘Twerking’ was coined in the New Orleans bounce scene in the 1990s, and Miley Cyrus did the rest. Shakespeare alone added 1700+ words to English, including ‘amazement’, ‘bandit’, ‘dawn’, ‘hint’ and ‘secure’. Invaders, neighbours and trading partners have been hugely important. The number of words the Vikings added to the language is astonishing: ‘anger’, ‘call’, ‘give’, ‘knife’, ‘take’, ‘score’ – imagine modern English without those? In contrast, I doubt we’ll be using ‘twerking’ and ‘bezzy’ long.

Twerking and bezzy were just added to Collins Official Scrabble Words. Read Jennifer Down’s column in Overland here.

Modern science is almost entirely conducted in English. A Medline search will occasionally turn up an article with its English- translated title in square brackets and French or German or Spanish at the end of its publication details, which for most of us hopeless monolinguists means the authors may as well not have bothered. How many people ever try to read such an article or even have it translated, no matter how closely the title matches their search? I reckon I’ve attempted to read one article in Spanish and another in French in 25 years as a scientist, and I don’t remember getting much out of either (if they’d been about hotel rooms or breakfast choices rather than hepatitis and drug use I’d have done a lot better).

Despite the overwhelming predominance of English in science today, not long ago other languages were very important. Click here to read Michael D. Gordon’s story (Aeon, 4^th February 2015).

I’m very pleased and proud to report that I’ve signed a contract to provide editing services to Marie Stopes International (MSI). If you don’t already know, MSI is an international not-for-profit humanitarian organisation that helps men and women control their fertility through awareness-raising, education, family planning and healthcare services. It’s named for Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (15 October 1880 – 2 October 1958), a truly amazing woman – birth control pioneer, author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for women’s rights.

Wondering whether employing an editor or proofreader is financially sensible? In 2009, a 124-year-old family business employing 250 people was bankrupted thanks to a typographic error – a single misplaced letter ‘s’ – on a government register.

Companies House (the UK government’s registrar of companies) recorded Taylor & Sons as having gone bust, when in fact Taylor & Son had. Though the mistake was apparently recognised and corrected within three days, it was too late to stop Taylor & Sons joining Taylor & Son in bankruptcy.

On the 27^th of January 2015 the British High Court found the government liable for destroying Taylor & Sons with incorrect spelling, meaning taxpayers could be up for £9 million in costs.

 See the whole story at news.com.au

I’ve written previously about the importance of publishing in science and academia, and the proliferation of dodgy online journals that exist to harvest authors’ fees. In contrast to these dead-end dubiously refereed publications, high-quality online-only journals such as PLoS ONE are becoming the future of academic publishing and promise a huge democratisation of knowledge. As Craig Lambert writes in ‘The “Wild West” of Academic Publishing’, charging authors a reasonable fee but readers nothing inverts the traditional model in which publishing companies charge university libraries exorbitant prices and thereby restrict access to readers affiliated with rich institutions. Read Craig’s article (Harvard Magazine, Jan-Feb 2015) here.

To paraphrase a great line from Yes Minister, we can talk in clichés until the cows come home. Cliches are useful in everyday communication precisely because people know what they mean, but they don’t make for great writing. As lexicographer Orin Hargraves writes in It’s Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Cliches, clichés are

frequent, often used without regard to their appropriateness, and they may give a general or inaccurate impression of an idea that could often benefit by being stated more succinctly, clearly, or specifically—or in some cases, by not being stated at all.

Click here to read Joseph Epstein’s thought-provoking and amusing review (Sound Familiar? A report from the battlefield in the war on clichés, The Weekly Standard, 21^st Jan 2015).