Capital letter: Stand down!

Two of the classes I teach are Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology.  As a result, we inevitably deal with brain areas in both courses and with diseases and syndromes in Neuropsychology.  Generally I assign some sort of paper in each class, and one of the recurring errors that I haven't yet commented on in this blog is a tendency for students to capitalize words that don't require capitalization.

For example, I might get a sentence such as the following:

Surgeons removed H.M.'s Hippocampus, which unexpectedly caused Anterograde Amnesia.

I would then slash through the H in hippocampus, and both As in anterograde amnesia.  My usual margin note would be "Only capitalize proper nouns," though I suspect many students don't know what a proper noun is, or more likely, assume that the names of syndromes, diseases, and brain regions are proper nouns.

On one hand, I get the confusion.  I remember very well being confused about what should be capitalized when I was younger.  On the other hand, we did capitalize more when I was younger because we didn't have easy access to typographic tricks like italics.  Additionally, there's really no excuse for this mistake - one just needs to examine the text book for the course, or my lecture slides, to learn from the template that you do not capitalize these words.

That's probably what bothers me the most about this error - it is so easy to avoid.  In my experience, though, more than half of my students don't naturally use published work as templates for the rules that should guide their own writing.  That's unfortunate, because checking how others do it is a great way to avoid mistakes.

Finally, it should be noted that there is one exception to this rule: when the syndrome, disease, or brain area is named for a person.  That's an unfortunate oddity of our language, I suppose, but in those instances the syndrome, disease, or brain area "inherits" the proper noun status of the person's name.  Thus we have Down's syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, and Heschl's gyrus.  We have Korsakoff's syndrome, Parkinson's disease, and Purkinje cells.  Even in those cases, however, it is only the first word - the eponym - which receives the capital letter, not the word syndrome, disease, gyrus, or cell.  And without an eponym, use lower case - for generalized seizures, encephalitis lethargica, amygdala, cerebral achromatopsia, influenza, nucleus of the solitary tract, And So On And So On.
 

Here's "looking at" you, kid

Just a short post today on the issue of colloquialisms.

It should be obvious, I think, but when writing virtually any kind of college-level paper, and particularly a technical paper such as a report of an experiment - avoid colloquialisms.

There's one in particular that shows up again and again in student papers, and that's "look at" or "looked at".  Here's an example:

In another study, Kahn and Wansink (2004) looked at how variety of food influences consumption in children and adults.

Normally I'm in favor of using plain language rather than going for the $20 word, but in this case the plain language is imprecise and does a disservice to the scientists you are citing.  The proper way to write this sentence is:

In another study, Kahn and Wansink (2004) tested the effect of food variety on food consumption in children and adults.

I've cleaned up the second half of the sentence here, but the important change is replacing "looked at" with tested.  Other replacements for "looked at" include examined or studied.  Although one definition of examined is pretty close to "looked at", examined at least implies looking at something closely.  It implies that some form of analysis is taking place, a process that is not implied by the verb phrase "look at".

Even better are studied or tested.  These verbs correctly imply that the scientists are setting up special conditions that allow inferences to be made about how variables influence one another.  Any one can "look at" something, but it takes special care to examine something, and it takes a very particular arrangement to study something or to test an idea.

And in this case, the more precise word also provided economy.  "Look at" is a two-word phrase and requires an ugly and cognitively demanding preposition.  Test, examine, and study are clean, precise, single-word active verbs that do the job better.

It is true that one should write as naturally as possible, reduce complexity in long sentences, and avoid unnecessary jargon.  But in following such advice, one must also avoid colloquialisms and choose the most precise word or phrase. 

When? Not then!

Here's a pretty specific comment, though it's related to my empty phrases post of a couple of years ago.  I have noticed that students have a habit of starting a sentence with the word "When" in instances where the word does not apply.

The error occurs most commonly in a Results section of a lab report.  Here's an example:

When we looked at the data, the control group remembered twice as many words as the experimental group.

There are variations on this theme ("When looking at Figure 2...," "When a t-test was conducted...").  In the example quoted above, the control group remembered twice as many words as the experimental group.  When did they do this?  Not "when" the researchers "looked at the data", but rather "when" the experiment was conducted.

So the first sin in this sentence is that it's inaccurate.  Now let's make it accurate:

When the experiment was conducted, the control group remembered twice as many words as the experimental group.

Now it's accurate, but the second sin becomes apparent: that information is irrelevant.  Of course that's "when" the the groups did the remembering, but did you really think you had to tell me that?  Is there any possibility of misunderstanding this timing of events?  The answer is no - and so the entire clause becomes an "empty phrase" that lends no information to the sentence which isn't already strongly implied by the context.

In other cases, there's simply no "when" involved at all.  Imagine this comment relevant to an image comparing the brain sizes of several different primates:

When looking at the brain sizes of various primates (Figure 1), humans have a much larger brain proportionate to their body than their nearest relatives.

Again, the statement is inaccurate, since it implies that humans didn't have a larger proportionate brain size until someone looked at a figure.  But worse, it isn't even possible to rewrite the sentence using the word "when" that is in any way accurate.  The brain size phenomenon isn't a thing that occurred at some instant in time, it is a thing that is true of the world.

In many cases, the psychology experiments we conduct - even if they must obviously occur on some specific days on the calendar - are nonetheless attempting to describe things that are true of the world.  Thus, returning to the original example above, crafting a sentence using the word "when" at least tacitly implies that the result being described is limited to a particular moment in time.  If the "experimental group" was denied sleep for 48 hours, then hopefully the result of the experiment is teaching us a fact about the world - sleep deprivation is bad for memory - not just describing what happened to some participants at one instant in time that has no relevance to other people at other moments in time.  The word "when" trivializes the process.