4/29/2015 1 Comment Dot, Dot, Dot, Dash, Dash, Dash IThis week and next week we’re going to address two types of punctuation that you’re likely to need in academic writing at some point: ellipsis points and a few types of dashes. I confess, I was going to make this just about dashes, and then the idea for the post title came to me, and I just had to include the dots too. In the interest of consistency and order, I’ll start with dots—that is, ellipsis points. EllipsisWhatchoo talkin’ about, Willis? These: . . . When to use them: They came up briefly last week, and the context covered then is the main context in which an ellipsis is going to be used in academic writing: for showing that content from a quotation was not included. Ex.: “New York and Los Angeles are the two largest cities in the United States. . . . There was something else interesting my source said about them, but it wasn’t important enough to leave in, so I took it out and replaced it with those three dots over there.” When not to use them: I (and others I know) have a bad habit of using ellipses in casual online real-time chat and text messages, usually when a period or semicolon would have been correct. If you share this habit of mine, keep it to the casual chat and don’t let it seep into your formal writing; it doesn’t belong there. You also might pick up a casual habit of using ellipses to suggest a pause or introduce a change in direction or tone. As effective as this technique can be in informal communication, it is also not an appropriate use for formal academic writing.
1 Comment
Last week I wrote about how to treat quotations with respect to the content of your lit review. This post is more about basic mechanical aspects. Punctuating quotations Quotations that aren’t being presented as block quotes (we’ll get to those in a second) are opened with quotation marks. That much is pretty intuitive, but the hard part is at the end. It can be tricky to remember the correct order for the various elements that fall at the close of a quotation that you’re citing parenthetically, but the order is as follows:
“Here is an example” (Popielinski 2015, 1). That particular parenthetical reference is in Chicago style. APA would use “(Popielinski, 2015, p. 1),” and MLA would use “(Popielinski 1).” In-text versus block quotes Most styles that govern your writing will have a rule or guideline as to how long a quotation needs to be before it gets set off as a block quote rather than appearing in the text with quotation marks around it, what’s called a “run-in” quote. For APA, it’s forty words. With Chicago, it’s five lines, and with MLA, it’s four. In all three, the punctuation differs a little from how it appears as a run-in quote.
A surprisingly difficult part of learning to write for an academic audience is how to quote other authors effectively. In my experience, some writers simply have an ear for it and have no trouble incorporating their source material into their analyses. But many others struggle with applying the text and ideas of others in a way that doesn’t feel awkward or mechanized and that moves their own ideas forward. Here is a set of approaches, encapsulated in the easy-to-remember abbreviation AC/DC, to help you strengthen your use of other authors in your writing. Problem: Over-quoting How many quotations are too many? And how much material should you be quoting from each? The conventions for this will vary according to your field and the type of publication you’re writing or writing for. I have read literature reviews that were made up 40–60% of direct quotations, and I would say that in most cases this is far too much. However, the graduate students’ professors had instructed them to provide this quote load, and in those cases, following professors' requirements is much like working with a house style guide in that there's probably a reason for the rule (though we may never know or understand that reason) and so you just go with it.
4/11/2015 2 Comments Co, Xe, E, Thon, Yo, Peh, Zie, CoSome modern languages have a gender-neutral pronoun for human beings, and others, like English, do not. The first country I’m aware of that has introduced a gender-neutral pronoun into its language in a deliberate manner is Sweden. The pronoun “hen” has been in use in Swedish long enough that the Swedish Academy has added it to the latest edition of its dictionary, which will be available on the 15th of this month. This should be leading English language lovers and professionals to wonder why we haven’t managed to do the same yet and how far off we are from doing so. It’s not for lack of gender-neutral pronoun options. On the contrary, the surplus of options is more likely to blame. E, Ey, Zie, Per, Co… …and so on. Most have their roots in a person or organization’s effort to invent an option that they perhaps believed did not yet exist. If they knew of earlier gender-neutral pronouns, they must have considered them inadequate in some way. Most emerged in the 1970s or later. I can’t claim to know why each one chose to create a new pronoun instead of taking an old one and promoting its cause; the only thing certain is that they did.
4/5/2015 1 Comment Why So Tense?One conundrum I sometimes face while editing academic writing is the question of tense and whether to use present or past when discussing previous work, as in a lit review. My own habit when I was in graduate school was to write in the present tense, but many of my clients use past, and I have wondered whether to change it or not. That is, were my own habits standard or just a style preference? or even incorrect? The answer is, it’s largely a matter of style, particularly pertaining to the field of research. There are arguments for both present and past tense in lit reviews and other parts of a paper that address prior research. The important thing is that the writer either be consistent in his or her choice or have a particular reason for any variation. Here are a few things to keep in mind when establishing present or past tense for an academic paper: Are you describing concrete findings or general theoretical contributions? This distinction is probably at the core of why I have a present tense habit in my own writing: although my background is a mix of social science and humanities, it seems the humanities have dominated my writing in this respect. When you’re describing general theoretical contributions, the kind of thing that is intended to apply broadly and into the future, the present tense will usually feel more natural (e.g., “Butler proposes…”). When the work you’re citing is an experiment or study with discrete preparation, follow-through, and conclusion segments, then past tense might be more appropriate (e.g., “the researchers found…”).
3/29/2015 1 Comment ACES: A Weekend in ReviewI had the pleasure of attending my first ACES (American Copy Editors Society) conference the past few days in Pittsburgh, PA. There were amazing presenters and fabulous energy, and I’m already hoping I’ll make it to next year’s meeting in Portland. Here are my impressions and takeaways from the sessions I attended: Rookie Mistakes That Even Veterans Make (Bill Walsh)Walsh’s humorous take on these common errors was a wonderful way to kickstart the conference. Subject-verb agreement and use of commas with multiple adjectives aren’t always straightforward. Editors need to keep up on the evolution of language but not always charge ahead with transformations before they become the norm. Balance clarity with not treating your reader like an idiot. If you can avoid stating the obvious, do so. Recognize when consistency can be sacrificed for readability. The Latest Research on Editing (Alyssa Applebaum, Steve Bien-Aimé, Fred Vultee)Does good editing actually affect readers’ perceptions of content and quality, reliability, recall, and professionalism? Applebaum’s research suggests no; Vultee’s research suggests yes. Their methodologies differ, though, and it’s a subject that could always merit more investigation. Takeaway: editing doesn’t make everything better for everyone, but it makes it better for some. Bien-Aimé’s qualitative work explores representations of gender and race in sports media. Topics differ, as stereotypes are both reflected in and perpetuated by coverage.
Early in one’s freelance career (or any career, really), it’s normal not to earn a lot of money per job. What we earn in those early projects is not so much material as it is experiential. I had an early client that became one of my first “learning experience” clients. We had good rapport at first, and we decided on an hourly structure for a job that would last a month, editing and applying APA style to her dissertation. The first two weeks went well, and I sent her weekly drafts of the work. She paid me readily for my progress on each.
After that, I fell behind a little bit but still had time to catch up. Instead of a third-week draft, I pushed forward and got my document back to her at the end of the last weekend of the month, submitting my time sheet on the bidding site we were using and thinking I had just completed a quality job. Apparently, the client didn’t agree. Even though we had made no agreement guaranteeing weekly drafts, the two weeks without a draft had made the client nervous, and we were riding her deadline for her dissertation draft. Although I’d included a lengthy (perhaps unbelievably lengthy?) list of fixes I’d made, she had taken a cursory look at the final draft and noted that I had neglected to include running heads in the draft, which she understood to be a detail critical to APA style. 3/18/2015 2 Comments How Ef-fectionateTwo words that are often mistaken for one another are “affect” and “effect.” Most of the time, the difference between the two words is explained by applying noun status to "effect" and verb status to "affect." It's a little more complex than that, though, and I’d like to present a simple chart that illustrates not only the commonly used meanings but the secondary meanings that make a rigid affect=verb / effect=noun rule inaccurate. The green boxes are "all systems go." These are the meanings you're most likely looking for when you use each word. If you're using it as a verb, you probably want "affect." If you're using it as a noun, you probably want "effect." Caffeine has a strong effect on me. ("effect" is usually a noun) However, you also might not. And that's what the yellow boxes are: "proceed with caution." Because there is a noun form of "affect" and a verb form of "effect," and these—especially the latter—contribute to the difficulty so many people have with remembering which is which.
3/12/2015 2 Comments I'll Be in DebunkYou know how sometimes just one small piece of a conversation you have sticks with you for years because you keep thinking of ways you could have addressed some part of it differently? I have one of those for you today. At some point between five and ten years ago (I know that’s a big gap, but like I said, I don’t remember the majority of this conversation), while I was in grad school for women’s studies, I was hanging out with a postdoc in biology.
Somehow we ended up talking about Sigmund Freud. I don’t remember exactly why or how, except that I had mentioned for some reason that psychoanalytic theory is used (among many other approaches) in some feminist theory. “Freud?” she repeated. “I thought he was debunked long ago!” I tried to explain that while a lot of Freudian theory was considered obsolete if taken at face value, there were other aspects that could be considered useful unto themselves and even more that later theorists had used as conceptual starting points and then built on into something completely different. While I didn’t think of it in these terms then—which is exactly why the conversation replays in my mind years later—I was arguing that there’s no such thing as “debunking” in the humanities… Everyone loves the internet, right? At least some of the time. When it comes to research, for instance, it’s hard to imagine what life was like without it. There are pitfalls to relying on the internet for research, however, and although they should be fairly obvious, it never hurts to be reminded of them. My main hobby is trivia: playing online trivia, writing questions, and hosting games. I do almost all of my trivia research online, and over the years I’ve become a much better skeptic than I was when I started in 2008. The other activity I do a lot of research for is citation editing. If I am given a particularly messy set of citations, I might spend quite a while trying to piece together the details missing from the entries. Many of the problems I run into with trivia fact-checking apply with citation editing, as well. But trivia is more fun to talk about, so take a trip with me. The Rabbit HoleA tweet by @HaggardHawks caught my attention. “B.O., as an abbreviation of “body odour,” it said, “was coined in an American deodorant advertisement in 1919.” And with that, I embarked down the rabbit hole, trying to find an image—or at least the exact text—of this infamous ad.
|
Archives
March 2017
CategoriesAuthorI'm Lea, a freelance editor who specializes in academic and nonfiction materials. More info about my services is available throughout this site. |