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Common bugs in writing (2021)

cs.columbia.edu

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Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)

#51

Post by bjornasm »

3pt14159 wrote: post #5

I'm a little perplexed as to why professors and other academic staff have routinely hard to read websites. Yes I'm aware I can bump up the font size, but especially on mobile that gets annoying. It's one thing if they don't have a stylesheet what so ever, it's a fully another thing to intentionally make things hard to read: font-family: arial,verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small; From an article that expressly advoca…

I have grown to like it. I found it really perplexing like you but now I view it as they just want to present their information in the rawest, most simple way possible. I was been inspired by it when I made my personal website, however I added some responsiveness etc to increase the usability a bit.

Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)

#52

Post by Solvency »

Solvency wrote: post #39
3pt14159 wrote: post #5

I'm a little perplexed as to why professors and other academic staff have routinely hard to read websites. Yes I'm aware I can bump up the font size, but especially on mobile that gets annoying. It's one thing if they don't have a stylesheet what so ever, it's a fully another thing to intentionally make things hard to read: font-family: arial,verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small; From an article that expressly advoca…

You're saying this on a website that I need to manually zoom in to 200% in order to remotely read the text.

- Too small on a 13" MacBook Pro (2019) - Too small on a 15" MBP (2019) - Too small on a 32" 4K BenQ desktop monitor on Windows.

Verdict: too small.

Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)

#53

Post by Errancer »

brookst wrote: post #46
Errancer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, often I write first sentence in technical language to introduce the reader to the existing discussion and then say "In other words" to paraphrase the technical language into more familiar but less precise vocabulary.

I agree, but even in those cases, “in other words” is just throat-clearing. Like “simply put” or “that is to say”, these are noise words that only hurt the clarity of writing. If two examples help, use two examples. There’s no need to call out that the second one is another example; people will get that. At least that’s how I see it after a lifetime of trying to stamp out this kind of filler language in my own writin…

I agree with your description that this is a throat-clearing but I don't see why it hurts the clarity of writing. Dense texts packed with information can often benefit from such breaks. In general I find text which uses artefacts from spoken language more readable. There are limits to this of course but if we remove all redundancy we end up with dry text which sometimes is expected but I am unsure if it is the most readable or clear way to write. One side note is that it might be culture dependent. English speaking countries and Poland, where I am from, expect and teach much different writing style than France or Germany.

Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)

#54

Post by dmckeon »

xdavidliu wrote: post #13

One of my pet peeves is when the writer uses a pronoun immediately after a sentence with multiple proper nouns. For example, something like "Biden ran against Trump in 2020, and he raised a lot of money".

Or, "the packet is sent from the client to the server, and it ...." I see this a lot in technical writing where the writer is explaining a flow of code or data, and is very well aware of the antecedent of it - but the reader now has to guess, read ahead, perhaps discover they were wrong, revert their mental model, and make a different guess. JRY - Just repeat yourself. Be unambiguous. Use whatever word would have been the antecedent of the pronoun, and let clarity shine thru.

Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)

#55

Post by cratermoon »

layer8 wrote: post #22
3pt14159 wrote: post #5

I'm a little perplexed as to why professors and other academic staff have routinely hard to read websites. Yes I'm aware I can bump up the font size, but especially on mobile that gets annoying. It's one thing if they don't have a stylesheet what so ever, it's a fully another thing to intentionally make things hard to read: font-family: arial,verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small; From an article that expressly advoca…

"Internet Explorer is a popular web browser. The current version number is 5.0." might explain it.

Yes and the doctype is "", and there's inline style at "". Even though the footer says "last updated 2021" and there are links dated 2015, I suspect the page is otherwise unchanged from its initial late-90s/early 2000s design.

Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)

#56

Post by cratermoon »

Jhsto wrote: post #33
Lacerda69 wrote: post #4

Vale is an OSS tool that you can use as a "prose linter" with many of these rules. You can also write your own rules. Together with a spellchecker its a good replacement for proprietary tools like grammarly. - https://github.com/errata-ai/vale

This is interesting, I integrated it into my blog straight away, thanks! Are you aware of any academic writing focused extensions for Vale? In specific, I would need different "style" as it's called on Grammarly.

All the styles I've been able to find are geared towards technical writers creating software documentation. Is there a particular academic style guide you have in mind, perhaps it would be possible to create a vale style for it.

Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)

#57

Post by cratermoon »

luispauloml wrote: post #48

>14. Use until instead of the colloquial till. I remember reading somewhere that "till" is actually older then "until", and that they are perfectly interchangeable, although I do see "until" way more often than the other.

Many archaic forms are still perfectly valid English, and some of them don't even seem all that odd. Modern English Usage is always changing, though, and unless you're writing period-appropriate dialog, it's best to avoid archaisms.

Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)

#58

Post by jasonlotito »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #8

> If you find yourself saying "In other words," it means you didn't say it clearly enough the first time. Go back and rewrite the first attempt. Sometimes, particularly in didactic material, it helps to explain things in more than one way, as different people may find different explanations helpful.

This is a good example of why the list of rules is prefaced with this:

> Like almost all rules, there are cases where breaking them is a good idea and seasoned writers may well object with "but" responses for some of these. Thus, consider the rules below as mental rumble strips - you should probably slow down and think if you encounter these cases.

Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)

#60

Post by adrianmsmith »

MengerSponge wrote: post #3

This is a funny mixture of "things that are easily fixed with a LaTeX library" and "things that are challenging because good writing is hard" If you write in LaTeX, check out {SIunitX} and {cleveref}. Also, it's not on this list, but a pet peeve of mine: math mode (italics) should be used for variables and indices. Abbreviations or names shouldn't be set in math mode. For example, the probability of hacker news P sub…

> Relatedly, differentials shouldn't be italicized. Its \int\mathrm{d}x, not \int dx.

Interesting. I went to school in the late 80s in the UK. As an adult, I was convinced I'd been taught as a child that the d of dx should not be italicised, as only variables like x should be italicised. But when I checked that belief, I couldn't really find any evidence that that was, or ever had been, the case. I had assumed until I read your comment that I'd misremembered it.

If I google for "integration" or "differential equations", and click on the images tab, every result without exception has the d italicised (at least for me).

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