Making syntax work for your writing

Continuing our summer series on Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style, I must admit I was not enthused to read the syntax chapter, replete with sentence diagrams. However, it did remind me of many of the syntax tricks I use in my own writing that I outline below. Although I won't be showing you any word trees (you're welcome), I will abbreviate some of Pinker's discussion to offer you some quick tips for maintaining good syntax.

Asking too much of your reader
One of the most common syntax faux pas is when a writer asks the reader to keep the subject of a sentence in their mind while leading them through tangential clauses before they conclude with the predicate. For example:

My best friend, Brian, whose sister's birthday was last week and wanted to go to dinner with their family, is busy on Thursday.

Here, I'm trying to say "Brian is busy Thursday," but to say that I lead my reader through a twisted and unnecessary path and ask them to bear the subject, Brian, in their mind until I get back to my original point and offer my reader a predicate, is busy on Thursday. Even though my example is silly, I encourage you to not test your readers' memories in one sentence. Find ways to write things where you're not placing the subject and predicate of your sentence far apart.

Coordination
Coordination, when it comes to syntax, refers to the aligning of tenses and plurals in a sentence. So when I say, The choir sing nicely, something sounds off and we realize that I have not coordinated my subject and my verb and it should be The choir sings nicely because choir is singular. This seems easy enough, but it's amazing how complicated it becomes when a sentence gets longer, with more clauses.

Take this NIH abstract example:

Lastly, we will assess the role that delinquency case dispositions (i.e., condition of probation) plays in the relationship between behavioral health service utilization and criminal recidivism.

In this example, plays is our verb in question. Do we see coordination in this example? The trick we use to check on coordination is to first figure out to what noun the verb is referring. When I first read this sentence, I thought it was referring to the role, in which case we're good, because the role plays is correct. But then I looked closer and decided that plays was referring to dispositions. We would never dream of saying dispositions plays because dispositions is plural.

What makes this example extra tricky is the parenthetical phrase condition of probation, which puts a singular noun, condition the closest to the verb in question, plays. Yet, using our trick of identifying which noun goes with our verb, we can then create an abbreviated sentence to check if we're using the right verb form, and in our example we're not. It should be play cause it's referring to dispositions.

Who vs. whom
I had a friend in high school who, when asked for on the phone, would reply, This is she. At the time, I thought it sounded pretentious, but of course (many) years later, when asked for Naomi on the phone, I reply with This is she, because my friend was correct. Figuring out the proper pronouns gets more difficult when we're talking about who and whom. Going back to our phone conversation, is it correct when someone says, Who's calling or what about Who are you trying to reach?

The trick to use for who and whom is to first categorize who and whom with like pronouns, as shown here:

Who: he, she, they
Whom: him, her, them

Next, we answer the question with one of the pronouns.

Who's calling? She is.
So, since she is in the same category as "who," "who" is correct here.
Who are you trying to reach? I'm trying to reach her.
Oops! Who and her are in different categories, so we need to correct our question to say, Whom are you trying to reach?

Using these syntax tricks can make your writing more readable and keep you out of trouble with the people who are always on the lookout for a grammar mistake. Below are a couple of resources. I downloaded the Grammarly App and so far it's been catching errors, although I noted that in our NIH example, it thinks that plays refers to condition. So, of course, we can never rely on these tools, but we can let them help us. The blog referenced below is a good place to go for quick and dirty grammar explanations. Happy, error-free writing to you!

Resources
Grammarly App
Grammar Girl Blog

What's in an abstract?

This week I was working with a PI on her proposal, and found myself considering what exactly should go in a proposal abstract. This may seem a question with an obvious answer, but oftentimes a PI will write their abstract as an afterthought to their larger proposal. The trouble with shirking an abstract is that although it might be the last thing a PI writes (which makes sense), it is the first thing that reviewers see. So, even if you wrote the clearest, most compelling proposal in history, if your abstract is lackluster, the reviewers will have a bad taste in their mind when they get to the main body of your proposal, if they even get that far.

Hopefully that's enough to convince you to give your abstract some serious thought. To help you with this, I thought I'd identify some dos and don'ts (in reverse order) for your abstract based on the errors and strengths I commonly see in proposal abstracts.

Don't

• Make the intro to your proposal and the abstract the exact same language. Remember, the reviewer who just read your abstract will now start reading the body of your proposal. It looks sloppy if you just do a cut and paste, even if it's using brilliant prose
• Give extraneous details/examples: remember you don't have much room. Make every word count
• Include an equation: Even if it's the key to your entire project, an equation cannot be fully explained in an abstract to justify its use
• Use jargon/excessive acronyms: Remember, even if your proposal has to be very technical, the abstract should still be understandable by the layperson

Do

• Describe the problem you're trying to address and how bad it is
• Show how your project will help solve the problem
• Give a brief summary of your project and your goals
• End with the vision or broader impacts of your project
• Use the first and last sentences of your abstract to drive home the importance of your project

I first learned to write an abstract in my freshmen biology lab. I remember our TA telling us that lab reports were not mystery novels, and that we needed to lay everything that was important out in the abstract, including our results. Don't treat results like the surprise ending to a novel; tell your reader the conclusion right at the start. This was good advice that I still remember today, and I share it with you to encourage you to put all you have into your abstract, so your reviewer is excited to read the rest of your proposal!

Resources

How to write an abstract - wikihow

Crafting a sales pitch for your grant proposal - Robert Porter

Trading the esoteric for the understandable

Continuing our summer series on Steven Pinker's book The Sense of Style, this week we look at what Pinker calls, "The curse of knowledge." Pinker explains that writers who are experts in their subject-matter often write about it poorly simply because they cannot remember what it was like before they were experts or before they understood their subject-matter. He argues that writers rarely muddy their writing with jargon intentionally, but because they are describing it through the concepts that they know like the back of their hands, and yet their readers do not understand.

Pinker then breaks down how we as writers can start recognizing the esoteric nature of our writing and revise to translate these concepts to our readers.

Chunking
As you become an expert, as a way of remembering and using the barrage of information of which you control, you must create umbrella concepts to package the smaller ideas and concepts that you've mastered. This "chunking" of concepts is useful to the researcher in this way. The problem comes when the researcher sits down to write a grant application and uses all of the high-level concepts she has been thinking about without any explanation of those same concepts for the reviewers.

Functional fixity
In addition to chunking, Pinker suggests that experts also develop a fixation on the function of objects, which they themselves are focused on, instead of offering descriptors of the objects themselves. So, for instance, Pinker uses the example below:

Focus on function: "Participants were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic isolation" (p. 73).
Focus on description: "We tested the students in a quiet room" (p. 73).

We realize that in the first example, the researcher was focused on what makes the conditions optimal (and in what way they were optimal). But in the second example, it's much clearer to the lay audience what she's talking about, because she described the room instead of focusing on its function. 

Technical terminology 
Now certainly chunking and functional fixity can lend itself to a researcher using technical terminology or jargon in their grant proposals. But, sometimes researchers are just using a term that could be easily substituted. Pinker offers a relevant example, when he suggests that researchers instead of saying "murine model" say "with rats and mice."

To combat these, Pinker suggests that being aware of the gap between our knowledge, as experts, and our readers, as lesser-experts (in our area) is key to being able to write for our audience. But, he also suggests that after we complete a draft that we put it away for a while and then re-read and revise the draft with a fresh perspective. Additionally, have a representative of your audience review a draft and give you feedback on what is confusing and what might be more helpful.

There's really no way around the gap of knowledge that occurs between an expert and a novice, but experts can still write well for novices by acknowledging the gap and bridging it through writing.

Resources:
Write for your Reader: A Plain Language Handbook - NWT Literacy Council