What makes a paper bad?

Bad organization

What causes bad organization?

Failure to think your paper through

Consequences of bad organization:

Repeating yourself Rambling

Poor transitioning (flow)

I guarantee that, when you turn in your final drafts, the worst paper

among them all will be:

The one with the worst organization

In my proofreading experience

A bad paper = a badly organized paper

The outline

Is the best place to examine and change your

organization

The outline

Allows you to organize each level of the paper

Organization

• A paper is organized into sections– Sections maybe into subsections

• Subsections into paragraphs– Paragraphs into sentences

» Sentences into ideas

• Organization is needed at every level.– Chapter 3 is sentence level

organization.

Tips in writing drafts(chapter 3)

• Don’t start at the beginning

• Divide drafting and editing phases– Philosophically, at least.– In reality, you do some editing while drafting.

You just don’t target it.

• Don’t get lost in your notes

Sentence organization

• Parallelism

• Subordination

Parallelism

• There are different ways to make parallelism:– With and’s: “IBM, Victor, And Digital”

• Nouns parallel nouns, verbs parallel verbs

– With repeated words• Clauses• P77 shows how you increase the emphasis of the

parallelism by repeated more words• (It actually can also be used across sentences too)

– With special typographical offsets

Parallelism

• Just because they are parallel does not mean they do not need to be in order

• Proper parallelism can produce writing that sounds well written.– Page 79 contains an example. This piece is

written in rhetorical style, not technical style. • But the point is still well made: proper parallelism

produces writing that sounds well written.

Subordination

• Explicitly makes one idea less important (or subordinate)

• Page 80 shows 3 recommendation letter examples. – The ideas are:

A) He is meticulousB) He makes mistakes

– The choices are:• Although B, A stresses meticulous, sounds positive• Although A, B stresses mistakes, sounds negative• B, but A parallel, stresses neither, sounds neutral

Subordination

• The top of page 81 makes a good point:– Inexperienced writers tend to favor parallelism.

• Just because things can be written in parallel does not mean that they should be.

• When non-parallel ideas are made parallel, you confuse your reader.

– The top of page 81 illustrates a good example. – After reading this sentence, the reader is as likely to remember

that the pressure plate has 3 layers of paint as he is to remember that it holds the components together

» Maybe more likely, because the 3 layers stuff came earlier

Degrees of subordination• Just as there are degrees of parallelism, so there

are degrees of subordination– But, whereas more repeated words increases parallelis

m, more words can detract from subordination.– After all, the ideas are not equally important, so don’t sa

y too much about the less important idea.– In fact, the less important idea often has only tangential

relevance to the main idea.• The “Markovsky” examples on p 81-82 show this

– The main idea is that our research is promising

– Markovsky is only important as evidence to support the main idea. Markovsky is an expert, but that’s all we need to know about her – and the fewer words to give her credentials, the better.

Appositives and modifiers• These are ways to express subordinate info

• Appositives follow noun phrases and restate them in different words– …our technique – protoplast fusion – …– They emphasize by reiterating or clarifying it

• Modifiers describe, restrict, or qualify other nouns, verbs and modifiers– Professor Markovsky, a microbiologist…,

Bad modifiersPage 83 makes a note about two common errors:• Misplaced modifiers

– “You must enter the room where the experiment is taking place quietly.”

• It sounds like the experiment is quiet, not you.• “quietly” is a misplaced modifier. Put before “enter”.• To be even clearer, try: “You must be quiet when you enter the

room where the experiment is taking place.”

• Dangling modifiers – “In monitoring the emissions carefully, air quality was

significantly improved”• It sounds like your monitoring caused the improvement.• “In monitoring the emissions carefully” is a dangling modifier.

Where is the noun phrase that it is supposed to modify?

2 important types of subordinates

• “That” and “which” clauses

• Subordinate conjuncions like “if”, “although”, “because”, …

That or Which?

• People often get them confused. It’s generally more likely for a “which” to be wrong than for a “that” to be.

In other words, “which” gets overused. Sometimes you say “which” but should have said “that” Another way to say it: if the sentence still sounds correct after replacing the “which” with a “that”, the that is probably correct.

The bottom of page 84 and top of page 85 give a formal answer.

Which

• “Which” is a pronoun, so it should refer unambiguously to a previously mentioned noun.– Page 84 gives a good example of a which that has

no such noun to modify. • On one hand, you could argue that the sentence still

makes sense.• On the other hand, the alternative does sound better.

– So “which” should connect to a noun– Sometimes the best solution to a dangling “which” is to rewrite

the sentence without the “which”

That• “That” clarifies meaning

– The ball that has a blue stripe on it is gone.

• Insert a that when it is needed tovent misreading• Sometimes the “that” can be dropped:

– The director feels [that] we…– But it would not be wrong to keep the “that”, so, when in

doubt, keep it.• The example “We discovered the problem was not in the new s

oftware but in the firmware for the system.”– The reader thinks that you discovered a problem

– Actually, you discovered the source of an already known problem

– Such an error is easy to miss in revision, because it sounds right to you (but to no one else).

Subordinating conjunctions

• There are many subordinating conjunctions– Temporal: “after”, “since”, “while”, “when”, …– Causal: “because”, “as”, “thus”, …– Conditional: “if”, “although”, “though”, ….

• Each of these has a different meaning, and you should choose the right conjunction carefully. – Technical writing uses these words precisely– Consider the p 85 example of when and whenever

• “Since” and “while” are evolving words in the English language.– They begin to be used not only for temporal conjunctions– If you are overusing the word “whereas”, you can use “while”– If you are overusing the word “because”, you can use “since”

Homework

Written:

• Exercise 3.1: numbers 1, 3, and 5.

• Page 96, review questions 8-13.

Readings:

• Finish reading chapter 3, if you have not

• Read pages 1-33 of “the Elements of Style”