... and risk tiring your readers. Avoid unnecessary
words.
You should have less than 20 words per sentence on the average; avoid more than 35
words in the longest sentence. Sentences like this ... (expectation) and common sense (error bars are
Guide for writing technical reports
14
4 Language aspects
4.1 Concise and simple sentences
The writing style should be precise, clear and scientific. ...
overstressed construction, which happens for example when too many words are
squeezed in-between the subject and the related verb. Keep related words together.
Instead of: The lab equipment that we borrowed...
... and the formal writing down of a new government's
principles.
Because words must constantly be adapted to a changing
world, no neat one-to-one correspondence exists between
words and meanings. ... compound is always designated in
words by sodium chloride. The common term salt, in contrast,
has a number of meanings, and we must depend on the con-
text (that is, the words around it) to clarify ... cosine. We may think of
such words as small and nucleus, so to speak.
They have no circle of connotations around
Connotation looms larger than denotation in other cases.
Some words have large and diffuse...
... than by any single word. Each of these phrases is dead:
Writing poetry requires experience as well as sensibility. A prereq-
uisite to writing poetry is being able to write prose.
dislike television. ... remember that extreme
caution in writing is more often a vice than a virtue.
A false sense of what is significant, confusion about what
you want to say, ignorance of words, and timidity, then, are
some ... spends
twenty words explaining what kind of music he means. How
much easier to have begun
Popular music is similar to dress fads. . . .
Sometimes deadwood stems from ignorance of words.
That's...
... Vocabulary:
Dictionaries
Vocabulary is best extended by reading and writing. Memo-
rizing lists of words has dubious value. The words are ab-
stracted from any context, so that while you may learn ... last known
example in the case of obsolete words or meanings). The dated
citations make the OED indispensable for scholars studying
the history of words or ideas.
On the other hand, the OED is ... means stringing together a
number of words, all the same part of speech and grammati-
cally parallel, that is, connected to the same thing. Most com-
monly the words are a series of verbs serving...
... Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hancock, Elise.
Ideas into words: mastering the craft of science writing / Elise Hancock.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8018-7329-0 — ISBN 0-8018-7330-4
1. Technical writing. I. Title.
T11 .H255 2003
808′.0665—dc21 ... intentionally left blank
... Elise’s “educated curious”; this made it “science writ-
ing,” not “scientific writing or “technical writing. ” Science
writing is so hard to do well because it dares aim intellectu-
ally formidable ... material you should
hold off writing, think things through first; begin writing
only “when you’re clear enough that you won’t go wrong.” I
never get that clear. I use the act of writing itself to find ... ad-
vice that a title came last, after the hard work of writing. Yet
here Elise reveals it for the profound compositional trick it
really is. Writing a headline, she writes, “will force you to
get...
... language writing: Assessment issues.
In B.
Kroll
(Ed.),
Second
language
writing
(pp.
69-86).
Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hamp-Lyons,
L.
(1991a). Reconstructing
academic
writing ... vagueness
in
academic writing.
In E.
Ventola
& A.
Mauranen
(Eds,.),
Academic
writing
(pp.
1-18).
Amsterdam:
John
Benjamins.
Myers,
G.
(1999).
Interaction
in
writing: Principles
... Amsterdam:
John
Benjamins.
Dong,
Y. R.
(1998).
From writing
in
their native language
to
writing
in
English: What
ESL
students bring
to our
writing classroom.
College
English, 8(2),
87-105.
Dudley-Evans,
...
... impersonally. When writing subjec-
tively, he or she is no longer an impartial observer, but rather
enters into what is perceived. Point of
view—in
most
cases—
becomes personal; and words have overtones ... Thesaurus of English Words and
Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Ex-
pression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. Roget
devised a system of grouping words in numbered ... of descriptive writing must fall. Most de-
scriptions involve both, in varying degrees. Generally, how-
ever, one mode will dominate and fix the focus. In scientific
and legal writing, for instance,...
... encumbered
by
her luggage, so I offered to carry two of her bags.)
enervate (v.) to weaken, exhaust (Writing these sentences enervates
me so much that I
will have to take a nap after I finish.)
enfranchise ... characterized by sick sentimentality (Although some nineteenth-
century critics viewed Dickens’s writing as mawkish
, contemporary readers have
found great emotional depth in his works.)
maxim ...
aversion
to autumn, winter, and cold climates in general.)
The 1000 most
common sat words
SAT Vocabulary
A
abhor
(v.)
to hate, detest
(Because...
... network connecting English and for-
eign words. We use this network to iden-
tify the semantic orientation of foreign words
based on connection between words in the
same language as well as multilingual ... has
17561 unique words and 7822 synsets. The Hindi
Wordnet (Narayan et al., 2002; S. Jha, 2001) has
56,928 unique words and 26,208 synsets.
In addition, we used three lexicons with words la-
beled ... source of seed labeled words. The lexicon con-
tains 4206 words, 1915 of which are positive and
2291 are negative. For Arabic and Hindi we con-
structed a labeled set of 300 words for each language
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Arabic...
... coherent scene; the words in
a segment a~e linked together via lexical cohesion
relations. LCP records mutual similarity of words
in a sequence of text. The similarity of words,
which represents ... cohesive).
LCP
V
~
LCP
olo
o o o olo[o o ]
words
Figure 2. Correlation between LCP
and text segments.
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
loo 2;o 4oo
i (words)
Figure 3. An example of LCP
(using rectangular ... determined not only by
reiteration of words but also by lexical cohesion.
Morris and Hirst (1991) used Roget's the-
saurus to determine whether or not two words
have lexical cohesion. Their...