Telling Mortals Apart

[okosut]

I was just reading a draft of a paper my adviser sent to me. This is a paper that we're in the process of writing. It has four authors, but the vast majority is actually written by him and me. A week or two ago I wrote up a quick version with what I thought were the most important parts, sent that to him, then he filled in a bit more, and sent it

Comments

[slartucker]

I can't tell which is which but here's my analysis of the differences that jump out at me.

#2 has more wrinkles. That is to say, it isn't necessarily more complex grammatically, but it has more repetitions of certain structures: LOTS of conjunctions and other coordinating words (therefore, if, both...and, when, that, and) vs (if...then, that) and accordingly, it has many smaller predicates. #1 is mostly one predicate that is built up by phrase upon phrase.

Correspondingly, #2 feels more akin to a purely symbolic representation (approaching an equation) whereas #1 is closer to a analogical representation. For me personally, I find #1 much easier to read.

#1 also seems more vague.

[bluefaith]

For me, when reading a technical paper, I find vagueness off-putting.

Also of note: Oliver's statement is passive whereas his adviser's is active.

[slartucker]

Maybe you're using "passive" and "active" in a different way than I expect, but it seems to me both sentences are active.

[okosut]

There are some interesting observations there. I wonder if some of this is because I'm a native English speaker and my adviser isn't. Is a native speaker more likely to write a sentence with fewer wrinkles, as you say?

[slartucker]

I dunno. Maybe. It's an issue of personal style. Personal style is definitely influenced by language knowledge, but it can derive from lots of other things too. I'd have to guess that your adviser's lifetime of writing these papers has more to do with it. What's his native language?

[okosut]

Chinese (Mandarin, I think). But his English is very good now, and yes, he's written lots of technical papers over the years. I can't usually detect his non-native speaking in his technical writing, even though it's quite evident in his speaking, and even his informal (e.g. email) writing.

[slartucker]

Sounds like it isn't the language then. I don't know much about Chinese lects but some quick googling turned up a few comments like this one:

"Chinese writers depend more on the meaning of sentences for coherence of passages than on explicit conjunctions to connect sentences or paragraphs. Hence, Chinese writers are not used to using conjunctions in writing; additionally, the usage of conjunctions in Chinese is different from that in English. As Chinese is a paratactic language, Chinese writers use lexical devices more than conjunctions to make their writing coherent. A passage is connected through the internal semantic structures (Kirkpatrick & Xu, 2002)."
Source: http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/a1.html