This book is not the place to learn basic grammar, but there are mistakes in and us- ages of punctuation that seem to be peculiar to academic writing. I briefly review a few of these.
Commas In general writing, commas should be used sparingly. In academic writ- ing, a few more commas may be warranted to avoid ambiguity.
• Between items in a list, and before the final and, etc., and or: ‘their own surveys, interviews, observations, experiments, and so on’. In a sentence such as ‘the four main groupings were children, employees, pensioners and the disabled, and the unemployed’, the consistent use of the list comma allows the reader to easily see that ‘pensioners and the disabled’ are a single grouping.
• After transitional words such as however, nevertheless, moreover, therefore, and similarly.
• To put a word or phrase in parenthesis. (To test whether something should be in parenthesis, try omitting the commas altogether; the sentence will lose some information, but should still make sense.) One comma must be placed before the word or phrase, and one after it: ‘and, as discussed previously, the three plaintiffs were approached later’. Leave out both, or none.
Semicolons The main use is to separate parts of a sentence that are too closely related to be broken into separate sentences: ‘Writers of thesiese nearly always use
31 Punctuation
the passive voice; their verbs are activated by other verbs; their sentences are long and complicated; they prefer long and seldom-used words to the short equivalent words common in every-day communication; jargon is rife; and so on.’
Colons The three main uses of the colon all have a sense of introducing something that is to follow: a list, or an explanation, or a quotation. ‘These systems make checks such as: whether it contains a verb; whether it is overly complex; whether the subject agrees with the verb; or whether stock phrases being used.’
Dashes and hyphens They are different, and each has its own specific uses. You should find out how to create both on your word processor.
• The dash (or em rule, ‘—’) has two principal uses: to indicate an abrupt change in the sentence structure, and to indicate material that is in parenthesis. Use spar- ingly. As with all parentheses, use two or none.
• The hyphen ‘-’ is used to build up complex words. The most common are words built up from suffixes such as sub- or non- (these suffixes should never stand alone as separate words). As time goes on, some of these complex words become words in their own right, and no longer need the hyphen: thus sub-zero, but non- conformist. Consult your dictionary.
Compound adjectives can be tricky. One student came out with ‘sulphur reduced residual fuel oil fired brick kiln’. Where should he have put the hyphens? Another produced a ‘non-cost of living indexed pension’. The first of these is a mixture of compound adjectives and compound nouns, some of which don’t take hyphens (such as brick kiln). The best solution is to break it up a bit. I suggest ‘brick kiln fired with sulphur-reduced residual fuel-oil’ and ‘pension that is not indexed for the cost of living’.
Exclamations Avoid them! They are annoying!
Capitalization Some researchers seem to like capitalizing Important Terms and descriptions of Common Processes, almost as if they were headings embedded in the text. This excess of uppercase letters seems to say ‘the author is unfamiliar with academic English’. If the meaning is still clear with a lowercase initial (and the word isn’t a proper noun) then don’t use a capital.
Brackets Curved brackets (parentheses), and square brackets have quite separate uses. Don’t use them interchangeably; and don’t use other types of bracket, such as curly brackets (braces), except perhaps in mathematical expressions; they don’t have an agreed meaning.
Quotations The principal use of quotation marks is to enclose the exact words of a writer or speaker, whether or not these form a complete sentence or sentences. For this purpose, use single quotation marks everywhere, and double quotation marks only for quotations within quotations—or, if you prefer, the other way round. But be consistent.
There are other ways of indicating quotations, and other uses of quotation marks.
These are the main ones:
• Long quotes from the work of others, say longer than thirty words, should not be designated by quotation marks and contained within the normal text, but instead should be presented as a separate block. The whole block should be in slightly smaller type, indented, with space above and below. Quotation marks are not needed, and should not be used. And the quote should not be in italics.
• Quotation marks are used to indicate that the enclosed words are the title of a chapter in a book, a paper in a journal, a poem, and so on.
• Quotation marks were used to indicate colloquial words in formal writing, or technical words in non-technical writing. However, it is now common to use italics for this purpose. (On this point, note that use of underlining is obsolete.) After the first use of the word the quotation marks may be omitted. Many writers extend this use by putting pet words or humorous expressions in quotes. It is best to avoid this as much as possible: it can become a bad habit.
Link words We use link words to indicate the logic flow in a passage of text. They are of two kinds: conjunctions, which are used inside sentences to link clauses, and transitional words, which are used to link a sentence to the one that preceded it.
Many writers seem to use them interchangeably. This is a great source of confusion.
Commonly used conjunctions are but, although, unless, if, as, since, while, when, before, after, where, because, for, whereas, and, or, and nor.
Transitional words are used to link one sentence to the next. Commonly used transitional words are however, thus, therefore, instead, also, so, moreover, indeed, furthermore, now, nevertheless, likewise, similarly, accordingly, consequently, and finally. We also make use of transitional phrases: in fact, in spite of, as a result of, for example, and for instance.
The confusion arises because some of the transitional words are commonly mis- used as conjunctions, as for example ‘in such reports the underlying theory used as a framework for the investigation might be reviewed however it is unlikely that new or improved theory would be developed’. The opposite fault is also common—con- junctions used as transitional words.
Repeated words In creative writing, or writing for popular publication such as newspaper articles, the usual advice is to avoid repeating words. In academic writ- ing, such avoidance of repetition can be downright annoying—if you have a precise thing you need to say, use the precise word to say it. I recently read a paper that referred to ‘the Levukans’, ‘the locals’, ‘the inhabitants’, ‘the natives’, ‘the resi- dents’, ‘the subjects’ (of the research, not of a monarch), ‘the villagers’, and others.
In the context of this paper, all of these meant the same thing. The problem is argu- ably more acute in technical writing, where for example the verbal gymnastics used to avoid reusing ‘synchrotron’ (machine, system, installation, equipment, and so on) made a paper completely unreadable.
A related issue is jargon. Some authors have a bizarre compulsion to completely avoid use of technical words, perhaps in the fear that they will be condemned for us- ing jargon; or they use technical words in all sorts of inappropriate places, perhaps to demonstrate that they know them. Both are examples of thesiese. There’s nothing wrong with using a technical word; yes, some people won’t understand it, but are these people the experts who will be reading your work? Write for the right audience.
33