Good Grammar Research Articles

Foreign Language Abstracts in Scientific Journals: Please Write Them Well

Recently, a postgraduate student of our team sent me an article by E-mail, with this comment: ‘‘If you want a good laugh, read the Spanish abstract of the article attached.’’ She was referring to a comprehensive and interesting article published a couple years ago in Wildlife Monographs, which was authored by 20 researchers, 15 from several United States government agencies, 4 from universities (including one in Florida, USA, which receives a lot of Latin American students, a fact that is relevant as the reader will see later), and one from a well-known international, nongovernmental organization. Most of the grammar in the Spanish version was laughable. I was concerned about how such a badly written abstract could have been published in such a prestigious scientific journal. So, I asked another postgraduate student of our team to analyze the French version of the same abstract. Her comments about its grammar were that it was even worse than the Spanish abstract. A rapid reading of the Spanish abstracts in 2 additional Wildlife Monographs revealed similar deficiencies in the second and many grammatical errors in the third, but compared to the first 2, its Spanish could be considered acceptable. I am far from being a language teacher, but as a biologist who has regularly published articles in well-known journals, I think I can say that both abstracts were flawed and wordy. In addition, verb tenses were improper, words were misused, and some ideas were not well connected. Because the abstracts were difficult to read and some parts of them were not very clear, I immediately suspected that they might have been made by a free translator available online and later submitted (and published), as produced by that translator, with only minor revision, if any at all. To validate this hypothesis, I copied and pasted the first English abstract I referred to above into 2 free, online, machine language–translation tools: Yahoo! Babel Fish (,http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_ txt.; accessed 1 Aug 2009) and WorldLingo (,http://www. worldlingo.com/en/products_services/worldlingo_translator. html.; accessed 1 Aug 2009). The 2 Spanish versions I obtained were nearly identical to those published and had practically the same mistakes. It seems that non–English-speaking researchers must be more than precise in our English grammar and wording in manuscripts we submit for publication, but that rule does not apply equally to foreign abstracts in journals that publish papers primarily in English. It is not clear to me whether those abstracts were made by the authors and were then not revised by the reviewers or the editorial committee of the journal or whether those translations were made directly at some point during the editing process by the editorial staff. However, the resulting products were, in either case, disappointing. To give a better idea of what I mean here (for the non– Spanish-speaking reader), I tried to construct an example using the reverse situation. For this purpose, I translated (correctly) into Spanish the original English abstract of an article of which I am coauthor, which was published years ago in the Journal of Wildlife Management. Then, I copied and pasted my Spanish version into an online machine translator, mentioned above, to obtain an automatic English version that could easily be compared with the original. To my surprise, the machine-made English version closely resembled the original and had only a couple of unimportant errors and acceptably good grammar. I then machinetranslated into Spanish the text of our English abstract, and voila!!—the automatic Spanish version I obtained was as bad and had similar errors to those I detected in the abovementioned Monographs. Therefore, it seems that the machine translators work much better when turning Spanish text into English than vice versa. The conclusion is that English-speaking people should be particularly conscious that, as most automatic translators warn, a machine translation can be used only as a guide to understanding the general meaning of a text. However, it is not a substitute for a human translator, especially in an English-to-Spanish conversion. Undoubtedly, everyone applauds the policy of some journals to include foreign-language abstracts because they allow a wider spectrum of readers to access scientific information. As a consequence, it may increase citation of the articles published in the journal (and its ISI Impact Factor) and evaluation metrics of the specific article (and the author’s Scopus h-index). But if those abstracts are poorly written, they could produce the opposite effect, discouraging people that might otherwise be interested in the topic. Indeed, publishing foreign-language abstracts that are produced by automatic translators seems not to be a wise 1 E-mail: navarroj@efn.uncor.edu Journal of Wildlife Management 74(5):915–916; 2010; DOI: 10.2193/2009-391

What makes a grant application competitive

The key step in preparing a competitive grant application begins with an idea. The idea doesn't have to be complicated; it just has to be sound. Your idea must be conveyed in a manner that is easy to understand, and sufficient information must be presented (e.g., background and preliminary data) to give confidence that new and useful information will be forthcoming. Follow instructions, use good grammar, and organize the application in a logical manner. Don't assume that the reader will understand what you mean; spell it out. Emphasize the importance of your idea.

Spreadsheet Design: An Optimal Checklist For Accountants

Just as good grammar, punctuation, style, and content organization are important to well-written documents, basic fundamentals of spreadsheet design are essential to clear communication. In fact, the very principles of good writing should be integrated into spreadsheet workpaper design and organization. The unique contributions of this paper are an integration of a review of the literature on spreadsheet design, with the results of a convenience survey of CPAs, and a “Spreadsheet Design Checklist” for pedagogy. The checklist is intended as a reference for use until the student or professional becomes proficient in basic spreadsheet design and organization and the checklist becomes just as “second nature” as creating well-written memoranda.

Howard Jackson, Key Terms in Linguistics

Professor Howard Jackson has written eight textbooks and numerous articles on grammar, vocabulary and lexicography. As with his other books (e.g. Words, Meaning and Vocabulary, Good Grammar for Students, and Lexicography: an Introduction), Key Terms in Linguistics (KTiL) is also aimed at undergraduate students. According to the preface of KTiL, the target user is a beginning student of language or linguistics who is undertaking one of the British GCE A-level courses in English Language, or is...

Correspondence

I was a bit surprised to see ‘Is your ‘within’ really necessary?’ in ELTJ 61/3. You could fill volumes with people's grumpy reactions to language usage, but I don't really think that's part of ELTJ's job. Jonathan Marks Łeba, Poland I enjoyed Laura Collins' recent paper on teaching verb tenses (ELT Journal 61/4): her research findings are interesting and important. However, may I take issue with her on one point? On page 299, Collins talks about sentence-level exercises that focus on the correct production of language forms, and cites an example from page 52 of The Good Grammar Book (Swan and Walter 2001). She says that such exercises are all very well, but that, ‘as Larsen-Freeman has pointed out', what matters most is that learners should understand the meaning and use of the forms. Well, yes. My co-author and I had come to that conclusion, and so had all other pedagogic grammarians, quite some time before the current wave of researchers brought us the news. Collins’ apparent implication that we restrict ourselves to practising language forms, while no doubt unintended, is unfortunate and misleading. On pages 54–67 of The Good Grammar Book, having introduced and practised the forms of the present perfect, we devote very considerable effort to teaching the various uses of the tense in appropriate contexts, and to explaining and practising the ways in which these uses contrast with those of other past and present tenses. We think we make a rather good job of this, and so do users of our book.

A grammar as a communicative act

A descriptive grammar is a document that is intended to communicate important and complex patterns of knowledge within a speech community. Previous conceptions of linguistic grammars have emphasized a metaphor in which the internal grammar of a language is perceived as a “machine” that transforms thoughts into language structure. Written grammars were conceived as schematic representations of such machines. The present paper argues for a different metaphor. Because a grammar is primarily an act of communication, a good grammar possesses qualities known to hold of other communicative acts. The paper invokes recent work in linguistic pragmatics to help potential grammar writers conceptualize and present their work as an efficient and engaging act of communication.

A typology of good grammars

Writing a grammar is an exhilarating and exhausting experience. All grammars must meet high expectations. This paper reports on a study of qualities sought in grammars based on a survey of reviews of grammars. The study reveals that linguists expect a grammar to be comprehensive, clear, and accessible to all. It should also contain careful argumentation and a wealth of data that is appropriate, authentic, and meticulously checked. Writers of grammars must ask themselves a variety of questions before they begin, including what the goal of the grammar is, who the audience for the grammar is, how much time there is to write the grammar, and what the language reveals about its grammar. The paper then discusses and evaluates specific examples of good grammars of various types.

Side Steps to Publication

After you have prepared an inservice presentation, a term paper, or a project, you often have the building blocks for a publishable paper. You have organized the content and done the research--now you need to translate your paper or oral presentation into the journal format. This experienced author offers tips for successfully building your article on this foundation.

To Grammar or Not to Grammar: That Is Not the Question!

Argues that, taught in the context of writing, grammar can enhance and improve students’ writing. Offers classroom examples showing how: good preparation for writing fosters good grammar and detail; students can use grammatical and syntactic constructions used by professional authors as models for their own writing; and how to help students learn revision strategies at the sentence and paragraph level.

Do you want good grammar or good machines?

Although American engineers design and build some of the best machines in the world, their machines may be accompanied by instructions in the form of a booklet, an owner's or operator's manual, whose quality does not always match the level of the quality of the machines. All the customer hopes for is clarity and simplicity. ANDRÉ GABRIEL wonders why American engineering companies don't hire proof-readers

Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt

Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt. WALTER ARMBRUST. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996; 275 pp. (paper). The creativity and intellectual sharpness of Armbrust's book will come as a relief to readers who had begun to suspect that and thin ethnography were made for each other. Armbrust's ethnography, conducted in middle-class Cairo, as rich as any work based in Egypt's Bedouin camps and peasant villages. Moreover, this richness achieved through an analysis of films, magazines, cassette tapes, posters, and newspapers: mass mediated artifacts designed to circulate widely and reinforce imagined (and necessarily composite) national identities. To lend situational nuance to his analysis, Armbrust develops an ethnographic style which, in his own words, is more like what Orientalists do with medieval texts-relating them to each other, comparing them with other textual traditions, juxtaposing them, classifying them-than like the anthropologist's fantasy of spending a year with `informants,' `picking up the language in the field,' and relying on 'theory' to do the rest (p. 6). Armbrust's method will prove radically unfashionable in some quarters, but the emphasis he places on systematizing mass market texts effective. It makes sense of Egyptian popular culture in much the way a good grammar makes sense of a language. Armbrust careful, however, to avoid a purely external system of classification. Instead, he explores the well-wom notion of isnad, or authenticating genealogy, which underlies modernist discourse in Egypt. The modern rendered authentically Egyptian, Armbrust argues, by linking it to the classical Islamic heritage and the Arabic language. Unlike the forms of modernity (once) prevalent in the metropolitan West, those prevalent in Egypt do not insist on a clean break with the past. In Armbrust's view, they cannot. For most of this century Egypt's popular (and largely state-controlled) media have cultivated a modern Egyptian identity by churning out films, music, and literature in which elements defined as traditional and authentic are placed in a with elements portrayed as modern and Occidental. For this representational maneuver to succeed, the links between the modem and the authentic must be drawn with obvious care. Armbrust discusses how this done in soap operas such as The White Flag, in the musical innovations of Abd al-Wahhab, and even in the work habits of the editorial staff of al-Ahram Weekly. Yet this synthetic formula no longer as convincing as it used to be. Since the 1970s works described as have become increasingly popular in Egypt. Armbrust files the oeuvre of pop singer Adawiya and the films of comedian Adil Imam under the heading of art. They belong in this niche because they make no attempt to strike a happy balance between heritage and modernity. In vulgar art the traditional protagonist not ennobled by his encounter with enlightened progress. Modernity cast as an illusion, and modern institutions-public schools, the state, and professional associations-are portrayed as failures. Armbrust suggests that the proliferation of vulgar art one facet of Egyptian postmodernity, a mass culture phenomenon which, like Egyptian modernity, cannot be understood by simple analogy to what these (very loaded) terms mean in the metropole. …

Naming Invisible Authority: Toni Morrison's Covert Letter to Ralph Ellison

And all those people were me. was Pecola, Claudia.... was everybody. Soaphead Church and his letter to God have occasioned a variety of critical responses.(1) A fact generally overlooked in the commentary on The Bluest Eye, even in articles specifically on narration, is that Soaphead, because of his letter, is a narrator too.(2) His narration is coterminous with his act of authorship. Since authorship is what Morrison herself stakes a claim to in her first novel, want to argue that Church stands as a significant early figure in Toni Morrison's attempt to fashion a usable racialized authorial identity.(3) Growing up in the working-class town of Lorain, Ohio, where there were no black neighborhoods, Morrison's youth and adolescence were largely free of race consciousness. I never absorbed racism, Morrison says in a 1992 interview, I never took it in. That's why wrote The Bluest Eye, to find out how it felt.(4) Morrison's various accounts of her relation to her first novel invite speculation on how this fiction figures in a process of racial selfdiscovery that is indistinguishable from the act of writing. Taken as an instance of self-fashioning. Church's letter to God reveals itself as a metafictional gesture that encodes Morrison's own ambitions and anxieties regarding her authorial identity. Church's urge to address God's transcendent spiritual authority symbolically represents Morrison's desire to address and contest the cultural authority of Ralph Ellison. Church's letter, in fact, provides further evidence of the way the central plot situation of The Bluest Eye -- Pecola Breedlove's rape by her father -- rewrites the Jim Trueblood episode of Invisible Man, a connection suggestively articulated by Michael Awkward.(5) To argue that Soaphead Church should be read as an instance of self-fashioning might seem to overlook perversely the more obvious authorial figuration, Claudia MacTeer, who rather straightforwardly seems a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Like Morrison, Claudia is in 1941 a ten-year-old girl living in Lorain, Ohio.(6) Morrison's thinly disguised autobiographical impulse becomes even more apparent when one examines her character's name. Morrison was born Chloe, and MacTeer is a family name. Beginning the novel speaking from the child's perspective, Claudia/Chloe nevertheless concludes the novel speaking from an older and wiser adult perspective. From this adult perspective, she speaks a theory of radical implication, one that refuses to blame Cholly entirely for Pecola's fate and sees rather the entire community's role in what befalls Pecola. Nor does Claudia excuse herself in her communal/self-critique: we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free. merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.(7) This moment of self-critique by one author-figure leads back to Soaphead Church in two ways. First, there is his letter's content. Church makes his living through false revelation by marketing himself as the medium of God's Word, but his letter contains a strong element of self-critique even as it overtly criticizes God for flaws in his design. Second, and perhaps more significant, a rhetorical pattern in Church's letter directly echoes the rhetorical strategy Claudia/Chloe deploys at the end of the novel. Speaking of his Caribbean genealogy and its relation to the white ruling class, Church maintains: In retaining the identity of our race, we held fast to those characteristics most gratifying to sustain and least troublesome to maintain. …

Anglican Attempts to found one good Grammar School in the Town of Sydney

William Grant Broughton, arrive en Australie en 1829, est a l'origine de la creation de deux lycees, specialement destine a des enfants d'origine modeste. L'objectif de ces etablissements est de permettre a tous les enfants d'acceder a l'enseignement superieur. L'A. presente la mise en place de ce projet

Effective Writing: Some Suggestions for Work Study Practitioners

Examines various methods which can be used to improve the writing skills of work study practitioners. Considers the need for organization of ideas, simplicity, clarity, unity, conciseness, cohereness and good grammar. Concludes that the objective of writing is to make messages complete and understandable; that affected, showy writing is inappropriate; and that use of these concepts will result in effective communications.

A Comment on "Do Good Grammar Skills Predict Success in a Business-Communication Course?"

A Comment on "Do Good Grammar Skills Predict Success in a Business-Communication Course?"

Do Good Grammar Skills Predict Success in a Business-Communication Course?

After reviewing the controversy over inclusion of grammatical instruction in composition and communication courses, this article details a data-based study that explored the relationship between grammatical proficiency and a number of variables in an introductory business-communication course. Em pirical data suggest a small, but significant correlation between grammatical proficiency and success in writing the formal report. The data suggest that a stronger correlation exists between grammatical proficiency and perform ance in the overall course, and that grammatical competency is a predictor of successful completion of the course. The article explores other minor correla tions, suggests the implications these correlations have for business- communication courses, and recommends other areas of study

Think It Gooder

Which would you rather hear: a Haydn quartet on the car radio, low fidelity, marred by static or discordant, computer-composed, Moog-performed noise through four perfectly balanced exponential speakers with all the tweeters and woofers, cycles and overtones just where they were intended to be? Me, I'll take Haydn. The beauty of sound is an important part of the musical whole: even Haydn is better with high-fidelity reproduction than with static. To have the sound clear and appropriate and correct is important for many reasons. The sound is, to begin with, not only the medium by which the artistic message is transmitted, but it itself is, in fact, a part of the message; if it is unclear, a part of the message is lost. The artistic compatibility of the sound and the composition, the appropriateness of the sound, is important because it puts and keeps the listener in touch with a cultural heritage. (Would the Mozart posthorn serenade sound right on a cimbalom?) And at least one psychological reason why the correctness of sound is important is that its absence is distracting it disturbs the listener's concentration on essentials and subliminally shakes his faith in the validity of the work as a whole. I mean to be drawing an analogy: music is mathematics, and static is bad diction, bad syntax, bad style. Intended conclusion: good language is important in the exposition of mathematics, but, just as in music, it is nowhere near so important as the intrinsic beauty of what's being said. The first duty of one who would communicate mathematics is to offer plausible motivations and unambiguous statements, appropriately organized and convincingly proved. Surprise: it can be done, all of it, with misspelled (or misused) false cognates, in mispunctuated (or mispronounced) sentences, with the number of the verb failing to agree with that of the noun, and with attributive adjectives predicatively used. It shouldn't be done that way, but it can come out sounding like a Haydn quartet just the same, marred by static, to be sure. Some editors insist that good mathematical communication means good diction and good grammar, and hardly anything else. I disagree. I remember the time when after a lecture in Moscow I found myself at the blackboard having an excited, detailed, complicated, and rewarding mathematical conversation with a member of the audience. It was only after we were finished, and both my newly found friend and I knew more about weighted shifts than we knew before, that I realized that we had no language in common. I could speak a hundred words of Russian (mainly having to do with breakfast), and my friend had somewhat less English than that. No matter by writing symbols on the board, by saying the crucial nominatives and infinitives loudly, and being forced to arrange our thoughts in nearly perfect order, we could overcome the obstacle of our lexical, syntactic, and stylistic deficiences.

Thumbing Noses at Prognoses

In an all-out attack on the despoilers of the American language, the 1970 Pulitzer Prize winner for literature Jeanne Stafford makes the following statement:¹ The prognosis for the ailing language is not good... I fear that it will be assailed by countless cerebral accidents and massive strokes and gross insults to the brain and finally will no longer be able to sit up in bed and take nourishment by mouth. Clearly, cerebral accidents, asthenia, and malnutrition are medical problems—indeed they call for the creation of a new specialty. Can doctors help the ailing language? It may be comforting to know they have done so already in one instance. The familiar "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" with its follow-up "What do you want, good grammar or good taste?"—a combination, that Miss Stafford finds singularly distasteful, even sadistic [<i>sic!</i>], because it equates taste as flavor with taste as discernment—have

Waddaya Want?

Violence on television shows has been criticized as an evil influence on young viewers. That may be so, but witness the advertising. "Onions taste good like they naughtily should." Evidently, some school teachers protested the "like," and the onion growers countered with, "Waddaya want good grammar or good taste?" (Fortunately, onions are no longer advertised on TV.) Also, witness the announcers, the commentators, and the script writers. Here are a few examples. Script: "We appreciate<i>you</i>gathering here." NEWS commentator: "A vast supply of ammunition and drugs<i>were</i>seized." Quiz-GAME announcer: "If one of our contestants wins five matches or $2,000,<i>they</i>can..." Sports announcers: "He's the kind<i>that</i>can score when..." or "Everyone's got<i>their</i>right to..." and "<i>These kind</i>of players... The list could be endless. We believe that the most pernicious influence on young television watchers is not violence; it is bad grammar. If we are to

The Grammar and Spelling of Physical Chemistry

Although this is a booklet addressed to physical chemists, it also covers almost the whole of physics except nuclear physics. It has all the properties to be expected of a good grammar.