Commas are simpler

I use commas to set off phrases, like this one, that add a little something to a sentence. But then (sometimes) I'll use parentheses instead, to place less emphasis on the interrupting phrase. And sometimes -- more noticeably -- I'll set a phrase off with dashes because I want more emphasis on it.

But if I have a sentence that I want to be very, very clear, I only use the commas. The other forms add or subtract emphasis, and the change in emphasis gives the reader something else to think about. I don't want that. Even though the phrase in parentheses is least emphatic, it is the comma that is least noticeable and least distracting.

Sometimes you need them; sometimes you don't.

Oddly, I try to avoid colons and semicolons. They make sentences depend on other sentences in a burdensome way. I think they create difficulty for the reader. They create difficulty for me when I proofread: What is the mysterious connection between these sentences, that the author is trying to convey? And why doesn't he just say it outright?

Oddly, I try to avoid colons and semicolons; they make sentences depend on other sentences in a burdensome way. I think they create difficulty for the reader: They create difficulty for me when I proofread.

Respectively???

Rochon and Rossi: Endogenous money: the evolutionary versus revolutionary views (PDF, 20 pages), page 3:

For this reason, within post-Keynesian literature we can identify two overall approaches to this question, which we label here the ‘evolutionary’ and ‘revolutionary’ views respectively.

Maybe I have this wrong, but my impression is that "respectively" is used to match up the elements of one set to the elements of a second set. Specifically, the word implies that the two sets are ordered in such a way that the i^th element of the first set corresponds to the i^th element of the second set, for all the elements in the first set.

Rochon and Rossi provide only one set:

{‘evolutionary’, ‘revolutionary’}

Therefore, the word "respectively" in their sentence is superfluous, incorrect, and frankly quite funny.

Way funnier than this post.

IS, you illiterate fool, THIS ... IS

From a list of Historical Income Tables at census.gov:

Table H-7. Divisions-by Median and Mean Income
This series of tables are no longer available

This series of tables is no longer available.
This ... is no longer available.

Or, if you prefer:

These tables are no longer available.
These ... are no longer available.

It's not that difficult to get it right.

The best discipline

Oh. I write every day. (Not this blog. My economics blog. Every day, four a.m.)

When I write, I'm fussy. After I get the idea down on paper I start at the top and read and fix things and take a break and read and fix things and take the dogs out and read and fix things. I start reading at the top, stop when I have to fix something, fix it, and start reading from the top again.

You have to read from the top, I think, to get the "flow" right. Also, sometimes the tense is wrong or the plurals are wrong or there is some other mistake, and you don't catch it if you start reading from the "fix". You have to start from the top. Or from a break point. I put little separator lines between separate ideas or after I've made a really good point.

//

Anyway, the point is, I keep fixing the thing until I'm happy with it. I read all the way through to the end without fixing anything, and come back later and do it again, and I'm happy with it. So by the time my post is up, at four in the morning, I'm pleased with it and pleased with myself.

Yeah, no, you wouldn't want to be around me then.

And it is tempting to read the thing over a number of times, just for the satisfaction I get from it. But it's such a waste of time. So I try to discipline myself to read it the one more time, and make sure I don't have to fix anything, put something in quotes or italics maybe, or look up a word just to be sure I used it right.

And then I move on to the more pressing matter: I have nothing scheduled for four o'clock tomorrow.

And that's the best discipline, having to write something else. It pulls me out of that whirlpool of ego and gives my mind a new focus. I try to write at this hour, three, four, five in the morning when the house is quiet and my mind is free of the previous day's work-related chatter. And there are lots of days when I've got a good start on something, or maybe even finished it, and I drive to work thinking about it, and the ideas in my head fascinate me till lunchtime.

And that's my day.

It's all right for words to mean what they say

Eudora Welty:

It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, for words to mean what they say. It's all right too for words and appearances to mean more than one thing — ambiguity is a fact of life. But it is not all right, not in good faith, for things not to mean what they say.

From Michael Leddy's Against “deep reading” at Orange Crate Art.

Diagramming sentences

From A Picture Of Language: The Fading Art Of Diagramming Sentences at NPR:

That reminds me... I was taught diagramming sentences in elementary school -- fifth or sixth grade probably, 1958-1960, certainly not later. Years later, in the late 1970s, I walked past an open college classroom door and overheard a student complain that diagramming sentences was difficult. Stuck in my mind.

From the NPR piece:

"It was a purely American phenomenon," Burns Florey says. "It was invented in Brooklyn, it swept across this country like crazy and became really popular for 50 or 60 years and then began to die away."

By the 1960s, new research dumped criticism on the practice.

"Diagramming sentences ... teaches nothing beyond the ability to diagram," declared the 1960 Encyclopedia of Educational Research.

And this:

Burns Florey says it might still be a good tool for some students. "When you're learning to write well, it helps to understand what the sentence is doing and why it's doing it and how you can improve it."

And this:

"It's like a middle man. You've got a sentence that you're trying to write, so you have to learn to structure that, but also you have to learn to put it on these lines and angles and master that, on top of everything else."

So many students ended up frustrated, viewing the technique "as an intrusion or as an absolutely confusing, crazy thing that they couldn't understand."

I don't know about all that. I'm sure I don't remember, now, how to properly diagram a sentence. But I know it gave me more than just "the ability to diagram". Diagramming sentences helped me read and write and think.

Let me give you an example. In the PDF The Rise and Fall of General Laws of Capitalism, one sentence from Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson:

"The distribution of the gains from new technologies were also shaped by an evolving institutional equilibrium."

I run into a sentence like that, I have to read it two or three times to see if I missed a word. No, I didn't drop a word. So I know what the sentence says, and this is how I see it:

I didn't know what to do with the first "The" and the "also" and the last five words, so if you actually know how to diagram a sentence... My apologies.

What I did is simple, really. I just pulled out the prepositional phrases and... adjectives (maybe?)... to reduce the sentence to a simple one:

The distribution were shaped by an equilibrium.

Oh, or it would be a sentence if it was written better:

The distribution was shaped by an equilibrium.

There! You can tell that's a sentence. Of course, it doesn't tell you much. The distribution of what?, you might ask. The distributions of gains? Gains from what?

Sure, and those questions are answered by the two prepositional phrases below the first two words in the sentence diagram graphic.

Anyway, pulling out the words that provide the details that flesh out the sentence, pulling them out allows me to simplify the sentence until it's easy to see whether you need a "was" or a "were" in there.

Marc F. Bellemare: How to Publish in Academic Journals

Via Reddit, Marc Bellemare's intro to his how-to, with link (PDF, 21 slides).

For the writing tips. Also, in the PDF, Bellemare links to Keith Head's introduction formula -- how to write the intro.

It's the which

Working on a post for the economics blog, as usual. Here is my opening paragraph:

GDP is a measure of final spending only. Not all spending. For example, GDP excludes things that can be taken as corporate tax deductions. Things like the "cost of goods sold" which, if you buy stuff in order to sell it, is clearly not "final" spending when you buy it.

This stuff is clear to me because I know it. But when I read the paragraph it isn't clear to me. The trouble is that last sentence. It doesn't make things clear. It makes things complicated:

Things like the "cost of goods sold" which, if you buy stuff in order to sell it, is clearly not "final" spending when you buy it.

I already put the word "clearly" in there, but it doesn't make the sentence clear. The sentence is constructed as one thought stuffed inside another, before the first is fully stated. So the reader has to capture the first half of the first idea and hold on to it, but set it aside in order to capture the second idea, and then capture the second half of the first idea, and then retrieve the first half of that idea and combine the two halves, and then hope to make sense of the assembled thought. This is far too much to expect of the reader. I can't do it myself, and I'm the one who wrote it.

The problem arises with the "which", which interrupts the first thought in order to present the second. I think I have to get rid of the "which". I think I have to break the sentence in two. God forbid -- gasp! -- an extra sentence???

I can do that:

The "cost of goods sold" is not "final" spending...

Nope. That's a conclusion. I have to prove it first.

Things like the "cost of goods sold". If you buy stuff in order to sell it, it is clearly not "final" spending when you buy it.

That helps. End the sentence instead of using "which". Huh, and now that I've made it clear I can get rid of the "clearly":

Things like the "cost of goods sold". If you buy stuff in order to sell it, it isn't "final" spending when you buy it.

Much better! Almost there, I think. But I don't want to say it isn't "final" spending. I want to say it's not final spending:

Things like the "cost of goods sold". If you buy stuff in order to sell it, it's not "final" spending when you buy it.

I think it's good. I have to try the whole paragraph now:

GDP is a measure of final spending only. Not all spending. For example, GDP excludes things that can be taken as corporate tax deductions. Things like the "cost of goods sold". If you buy stuff in order to sell it, it's not "final" spending when you buy it.

No, I have to change the tense... Oh, but that messes up the "it's not". Maybe like this:

GDP is a measure of final spending only. Not all spending. For example, GDP excludes things that can be taken as corporate tax deductions. Things like the "cost of goods sold". If you bought stuff in order to sell it, 'twas not "final" spending when you bought it.

Nope, not like that.

I have to wrap it up. Fit it into the essay, fix that contraction, summarize the thought, and move on to the next paragraph.

So it goes.

Repeating the inconsequential

From my email:

Focus

There is a lot of related but irrelevant stuff in things people say. That's what the word focus means -- to prune away the irrelevant.

Petty Little Things

Working on a post for the economics blog. My technique is to read and revise from start to finish. At the moment, I'm stuck in the title. My working title for the post was

The Myth in 'The Myth of the Great Moderation'
But the first word in that title tells the reader there are no other myths in the thing, just the one I'm writing about. I don't want to say that. So I changed the title to

A Myth in 'The Myth of the Great Moderation'
But now it tells the reader that the writer is a wuss. In this form the title is weak. So hey, take the word out:

Myth in 'The Myth of the Great Moderation'
That's not bad.

It'll be great when I finally get past the title so I can start actually revising the post!

Word Order

The words of each sentence must be in order such that the meaning of the sentence is never in doubt. "The next word" must never be allowed to create confusion. Every word must build on what has come before.