Running on howevers

People seem to fall prey to adverbials like "however" and "rather" seducing them into running on sentences.

This type of approach has been used in previous models, however, the presented algorithm adopts a different foundation.

But these words are not conjunctions, subordinating or otherwise. They are adverbs, like "on the other hand" or "unfortunately". The following is, presumably, clearly infelicitous.

This type of approach has been used in previous models, unfortunately, the presented algorithm adopts a different foundation.

By the same token, so is the sentence with "however". It is easily corrected:

This type of approach has been used in previous models; however, the presented algorithm adopts a different foundation.

or

This type of approach has been used in previous models. The presented algorithm, however, adopts a different foundation.

In email, neatness counts

Email messages should be treated as personal letters. You wouldn't write a handwritten letter with misspellings, would you? Or a typewritten letter in which you didn't bother to use the shift key? Then you shouldn't do that in an email. Doing so implies to many readers that you don't respect them enough to bother with such "niceties".

On a related topic, by convention, words in all caps in email messages are to be read as if the author were shouting them. This is typically not the intended interpretation. According to RFC 1855:

Use symbols for emphasis. That *is* what I meant. Use underscores for underlining. _War and Peace_ is my favorite book.

Recursion

To recurse is to curse again, not an activity that an academic, or an algorithm for that matter, should engage in. When a process is repeated or is subject to recursion, it is said to recur.

Epicene pronouns

The use of the pronoun "he" as a bound pronoun of neutral gender is problematic on two grounds. First, its use is blatantly sexist (although the sexism is of a historical nature, so that those who continue to use "he" in this way have a defensible position). Second, and more importantly, many readers confronted with such a use of "he", including myself, tend to find that it causes a jarring effect as they stop to wonder whether or not the writer intended to imply that the referent of the pronoun is male. Anything that causes a jarring effect like this on a substantial portion of your readers should be avoided, as it serves only to distract them from the important substance of your writing.

Now, I turn to a more recent variant of the same problem. The use of the pronoun "she" as a bound pronoun of neutral gender is problematic on two grounds. First, its use is blatantly sexist (although the sexism is of an anti-historical nature, so that those who continue to use "she" in this way have a defensible position). Second, and more importantly, many readers confronted with such a use of "she", including myself, tend to find that it causes a jarring effect as they stop to wonder whether or not the writer intended to imply that the referent of the pronoun is female. Anything that causes a jarring effect like this on a substantial portion of your readers should be avoided, as it serves only to distract them from the important substance of your writing.

But what alternatives are there? In everyday speech, "they" or "them" is used for this purpose, but this disturbs the sensibilities of prescriptivists, who, I should remind you, are a substantial portion of your readers. And anything that causes a jarring effect like this on a substantial portion of your readers....

Rewriting the sentence is the only practicable alternative. Do it and be done with it.

Covering overhead slides

Pat Winston in his lecture on How to Speak notes that covering up parts of overhead transparencies and revealing them slowly like a strip-tease artist is a technique that drives 10 per cent of your audience nuts. I am in that 10 per cent. The desire to use this technique means only one thing: There is too much information on the slide. Split it into multiple slides. Winston recommends using overlays instead, but overlays are really a different and specialized overhead technique, and are not typically necessary for remedying this problem.

By the way, if you make slides using computerized means and want to use an overlay, consider "implicit" overlays instead. An implicit overlay is a series of separate slides each of which includes the contents of a different prefix of the overlay slides. Implicit overlays have the advantage that no Scotch taping of slide material is required, and no fumbling with the overlay pieces is needed. One just continues placing single sheets on the projector as usual, but each one in the overlay series has some additional material added to the previous one.

Citations are parentheticals

A citation is not a first-class participant in a sentence; it cannot serve as a noun phrase. Rather it is a parenthetical -- that is why it appears in parentheses -- and like all parentheticals should be removable without changing the well-formedness of the sentence in which it appears. Thus, the following sentences are ill-formed. (Try reading them without the material in parentheses.)

1. The reader is referred to (Dewey et al., 1756) for further details.
2. (Dewey et al., 1756) describes the bizarre climatic conditions of northern South Nordland.
3. In (Farmer, 1987), it is shown how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
4. (Farmer, 1987) describes how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
5. Many researchers have followed the research methodology described in (Farmer, 1987) for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.

The following versions should be used instead:

1. The reader is referred to the early work of Dewey et al. (1756) for further details.
2. Dewey et al. (1756) describe the bizarre climatic conditions of northern South Nordland.
3. Farmer (1987) describes how to do all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
4. Many researchers have followed the research methodology described by Farmer (1987) for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment.
5. Many researchers have followed a research methodology for doing all of natural-language processing using only excess farm equipment (Farmer, 1987).

(Note that "Dewey et al." serves as a plural noun phrase.) The BibTeX fullname style file and associated TeX style provide support for generating references like these. They are available with accompanying documentation at URL ftp://ftp.das.harvard.edu/pub/shieber/fullname/.