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!