If and when

 Proofreading. Tweaking words, really. I come to this sentence:

In the United States, and elsewhere that finance has grown, long-term economic decline develops along with finance if finance creates cost-push pressure and policy reduces the resulting inflation.

Difficult to read. Difficult topic, economics, because you can't just say "foot": you have to say "the foot that's connected at the ankle to the leg". All the concepts have to be laid out tediously.

No problem. Look at simpler concepts:

In the United States and elsewhere, B happens if A happens.

No. Shorter:

B happens if A happens.

Usually, the order is different, in causal sequence, like this:

If A then B

But this is not what I'm trying to say. I want to say

When A then B

or

B happens when A happens.

//

Logically, it seems to me, they are the same, "If A then B" and "When A then B". But when I go back to my tedious phrases instead of capital letters, "when" is the word I want to use.

Why? (And this is the reason for today's post, to consider why "when" is better for me here.)

To understand "B happens if A happens" I have to grab B and keep it in mind, grab A and keep it in mind, and then compare the two, looking for the relationship between A and B that makes the sentence make sense.

But to understand "B happens when A happens" I have to grab them both, but the relationship between them is only pointed out.

When I use "if" I'm saying there is some relation between A and B, but I don't say what that relation is. When I use "when" I simply acknowledge that the relation exists. That satisfies the reader in me. I can still ask "why" B happens when A happens, but that's a separate thought that develops the idea.

Using "B happens if A happens" I can't get out of that thought without wondering "why", and the absence of an answer in that same sentence makes the sentence unsatisfying. I don't want to put the answer in the same sentence because there is enough tedium in that sentence already. And because the purpose of the essay is to emphasize that the relation between A and B exists, not to explain it.

So, I change the word "if" to "when" and that solves my problem.

In the United States, and elsewhere that finance has grown, long-term economic decline develops along with finance when finance creates cost-push pressure and policy reduces the resulting inflation.

//

Good grief! That's a lot of struggle over one word in one sentence.

But yes, if I say this happens if that happens, the sentence feels unfinished. It wants a "because" and an explanation: This happens if that happens because yadda yadda. 

"When" it is, then.

Dashing!

Swear to god, the first time I saw this I thought they meant HOW to RUT them, and wondered What's a FREE TURN anyway? It sounds like something you'd get in a video game, not on a lawn mower:

That's why god invented the dash. RUT-FREE TURNS, DAMMIT. RUT-FREE, not RUT FREE.

Word order

From ABC News: Fauci fires back at White House aide who trashed him in op-ed
Subtitle: "Let's stop this nonsense," Fauci said.
by Ben Gittleson, July 15, 2020.

This sentence:

Over the weekend, the White House provided several media outlets with a misleading list of comments made by Fauci, in an effort to undercut him.

Note: "a misleading list of comments"

I think they mean to say "a list of misleading comments", which would mean that Fauci's comments were misleading, or were thought to be misleading by the White House.

As written, the statement means ABC News finds the list of comments misleading.

"... Quantitative Writing ..."

For my econ blog I want to evaluate the fall in GDP that may follow from increased unemployment due to parts of the economy shutting down in response to the pandemic. A well-known link between unemployment and GDP is "Okun's law"; Google led me to an impressively useful PDF by Miles B. Cahill, on working out Okun's law in a spreadsheet.

I looked up Cahill and on his home page found a link to Teaching with Spreadsheets. Well, I had to go there! The link leads to several related pages. I want to look through it all.

In addition, the sidebar contains several links I couldn't resist visiting, including

• Quantitative Writing
  

  'A good quantitative writing assignment engages students with an open-ended, ambiguous, data-rich problem requiring the thinker to understand principles and concepts rather than simply applying formulae. Assignments ask students to produce a claim with supporting reasons and evidence rather than "the answer" ...'

• Examples
  Examples include updated versions of Cahill's PDF, "Exploring Easter Island Economics with Excel", and "What would GDP have been in 2009 if growth didn't slow down in the 1970s?"
  
  
• and References
  Not all the references have links, but some do, including Melanie Dawson's Peer Editing Guide which might well make a handy self-editing guide.
  

I sure don't want to misplace these links!

"How to Edit Your Own Writing"

How to Edit Your Own Writing at the New York Times.

"relatively easier" -- The Double Comparative

Eric Boehm at Reason:

"Having failed to be fiscally responsible when it would have been relatively easier, our elected officials now face an impossible choice..."

Dipshit.

snip like usual

From Windows 10:

Counting cats

Google Search's "People also ask" turned up the question What is syntax in English grammar? In high school, I dismissed the need to know that. Now I regret that decision, so I clicked.

The answer they offer:

Syntax is a form of grammar. It is concerned primarily with word order in a sentence and with the agreement of words when they are used together. So it is, in a sense, acting as a kind of 'police officer' for the way in which sentences are constructed. English is a language that has a structure known as SVO.

The answer is attributed to What is Syntax? Perfect Your English Grammar With WhiteSmoke. I didn't know what SVO was, so I clicked again. Then I got distracted by their cat, and now I'm writing this post instead of the one I was working on for the past two hours.


Again,

Syntax ... is concerned primarily with word order in a sentence and with the agreement of words when they are used together.

Good to know. I won't remember it. But good to know. And the SVO thing?

English is a language that has a structure known as SVO. That is subject, verb and object. The cat (subject) washes (verb) its paw (object). This is the correct word order and also there is agreement between the words.

Ah, okay, SVO order and agreement. Nice.

Next three sentences:

If there were no agreement within the sentence, it could read, “The cat washes their paw”. This does not make sense. The cat may have four paws, but it is only washing one paw.

Yeah, no. (I love that "yeah, no" thing. One place I worked, the boss would say it all the time. I use it to mean "Yeah I hear you, but no, that's not right".) That's not right. And I'm not even looking at the "if there were".

If The cat washes its paw is right, and The cat washes their paw is wrong, the problem is not that the cat is "only washing one paw". The problem is that there is only one cat, but the word their refers to more than one cat. Or it did, you know, in the days before we decided to solve a gender problem by replacing it with a how many problem: How many effing cats are we talking about here? I still struggle with the change, but "they" is now used to mean "one or more". When I learned it, it meant "two or more". For me it will always mean two or more.

WhiteSmoke, in fact, says there is just one cat:

The cat may have four paws, but it is only washing one paw.

"The cat" tells me there is only one cat. The word "it" confirms this.

The rest of that paragraph:

For there to be agreement, the possessive ‘it’ has to be correct. Thus “The cats (plural) wash their (plural) paws (plural)”. This is the correct use of the plural possessive (their).

Wow. What does that even mean? They say "the possessive ‘it’ has to be correct." They don't say it has to be corrected. Probably they mean it has to match the noun and verb. In other words, "their" should be changed back to "its", or "cat" should change to "cats" and "paw" to "paws".

But which change should we make? Well, it depends how many cats you're talking about! Isn't it better to get the fact (the cat count) right (even if the syntax is wrong) than to get the syntax right and the fact wrong?

Or are you talking about one of those crazy old ladies with 37 cats?

"Writing the Intro to Your Economics Research Paper"

See the article by Timothy Taylor at Conversable Economist. Probably useful outside of economics as well.

Taylor:

Barney Kilgore, a famous editor of the Wall Street Journal back in the 1950s and 1960s, posted a motto in his office: “The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading.”

Well, if it makes the vegetables happy...

From fitness-resources.com:

Vegetables are encouraged when you are on a low-carb diet.

Link: How to organize an essay

I'm writing today because I'm trying to organize my desk.
My ordinary way to deal with "things" is to take them out of my pocket and throw them on my desk.
Today's one of those rare days when I try to deal with the accumulation of stuff on my desk.

No. I can't throw any of it away.
My problem (as I see it) is that I don't know where to put the stuff.
(I'm tying to organize, remember.)

After an hour, I'm on my third "thing". It's a small page of scribbled notes. Here's what it says:

thesis statement sets the course

a topic sentence for each paragraph

thesis or argument

topic sentence offers a preview of the paragraph

logic, flow, and argument

Part of my problem is I don't know the difference between a thesis and a topic. That's why I take notes like that.

In my on-line notes dated November of last year, this file in first draft, I have

https://www.wikihow.com/Organize-an-Essay

and nothing else. Turns out, that's the source of my scribbled notes. (So yeah, that page of scribbled notes sat on my desk for two months. Now you know how disorganized I really am.)

Okay, it's all in the computer now. I can throw away that page of notes and move on to thing 4.