WRT333

Latinizations, redundancy, noun clusters, negatives
Week 4

Links this page: latinizations | redundancy | noun clusters | negatives

Longer, more abstract words take even highly intelligent readers longer to decode. Words referring to concrete things or actions are more familiar and our brains can grasp their meaning more easily. Help the audience with word choices that are easy to envision or that adhere to familiar frames of reference. Here's a simple metaphor to make an obscure technical phrase align with a much more familiar word, used as an analogy (comparison of two things that share some common feature or function but are otherwise not similar).

The Central Processing Unit, or CPU, was an electonic microchip that was the brain of the computer, keeping track of numbers and logical relations like an accountant on speed.

Latinizations

English is a hybrid language, with both Latin and Anglo-Saxon parents, often giving us a wide variety of ways to say things. When the Latin form is more abstract, longer, or harder to understand (often), consider the simpler Anglo-Saxon vesion.

Latinate	Anglo-Saxon
interrogate	question or ask
aggregate	collect
utilize	use
utilization	use
terminate	end
promulgate	announce or publish
initiate	start

(more wordy phrases and alternatives—google "Wordy Phrases":
garbl | King County, Washington | U. Wisc. Writing Center

Redundancies

Overuse of Latinate words is often accompanied by redundancy, as both tend to sound very official. Learn to spot pretensious, overblown phrases. Prefer the simple.

"Sometimes you can observe a lot just by watching."—Yogi Berra

Avoid	Prefer
a considerable number of	many
a majority of	most
in order to	to
oftentimes	often
general consensus of opinion	consensus
at that point in time	then
extraordinarily unique	unique
in the not-too-distant future	soon
it is suggested that	I think
needless to say	leave out, and leave out what follows

(more, and still more, redundancies—google "Redundancies":
Brain Candy | Fun With Words

Noun Clusters

A dominant characteristic of contemporary scientific journal writing is the use of strings of nouns—understood by others who are highly trained within a discourse community—to create efficient, shorter sentences (more). A benefit within a knowledge elite, noun groups can present reading problems.

Words that look like nouns can be used to modify nouns that follow. When you read them, your brain initially sees them as a noun, and must recode them into a different role of adjective, slowing reading. When several nouns appear in a cluster, it is also possible to be confused about possible meanings.

south beach low carbohydrate weight reduction diet
homeland security terrorist protection policy

Again, advice and an example from Virginia Tufte (2006):

With nouns making up the largest share of our general vocabulary, any edicts against nominal style—and many have been advanced—become hard to obey The best advice, in general, does not worry so much over the length or number of noun phrases as about the way they are made long and the way they are distribute—with a strong preference for commas and nonrestrictive modifers (also called loose or free modifiers) ... rather than bound modifiers.

"It is encourageing to note the progress made by beekeeping to meet the challenging times, particularly in connection with the difficult problem of pesticides as they relate to the keeping of bees in the highly cultivated areas where bees are needed for pollination." —John Eckert and Frank Shaw, Beekeeping.

We can break these up, making it faster to decode the modifiers, if we add connective prepositions (about, at, behind, by, for, in, on, over, past, since, to, as, except, like, of, with, etc.)(LBH-8, p. 267)

homeland security policy for protection from terrorists

or should it be:

homeland security and policy for the protection of the rights of terrorists

Speed up reading and enhance clarity by breaking up clusters.

Negatives

We know we should avoid double negatives ("There isn't no reason not to...") but negatives are sometimes hard to spot.

His contradictory opinion didn't cause the failure of the ballot initiative.

To get the meaning of a negative sentence, your brain translates it into its positive forms, which takes time and may be confusing.

The initiative won voter approval despite his contradictory opinion.

(Exercises)

References