Technical English:Fewer is better!

John MorrisFaculty of Engineering,Mahasarakham University

Computer Science/Electrical and Computer Engineering,The University of Auckland

Iolanthe II leaves the Hauraki Gulf under full sail –Auckland-Tauranga Race, 2007

GOAL OF TECHNICAL ENGLISH

Goal

• Your goal is communication– Concise– Precise– Efficient

• You are not writing– a novel– a literary masterpiece– haiku (日本话十七音节诗）– 成语 These two literary forms

try to extract maximum meaning

from minimum words!

17 syllables

4 syllables!

Although we aim to be concise,We should not make our reader

work hard to understand us!

Scientific writers have a clear responsibility -To write clearly

Making your mark

• Your work will be remembered for its– Clarity

• Your ideas are clearly expressed– Conciseness

• You have used as few words as possible• ‘Style’ does matter

– But only to the extent that your work is easy to read– Some variation in expression and structure

• Desirable but Not essential• A clear but boring article is superior to a stylish

but incomprehensible one!!

English is not your first language?• Possibly an advantage!!• You can write a perfectly good scientific paper using the

grammar you learnt in your first few English lessons!• Native speakers have to study the great works of English

literature– Shakespeare, Chaucer, Blake, …

• These authors aim to make it hard to understand • They hide meaning in metaphors, allusions, ..

– Using them as models for good technical writing is a potential disaster!!

– Similarly, using many of the papers in the scientific literature as models is equally bad!There are many very badly written published works!

Recurring theme

• Good technical English is simple!• Sentence structure is simple

– You can certainly write an excellent paper with sentences with no more than two clauses each

– It’s probably possible to write a good paper entirely in sentences with only one clause

• Disclaimer: I have not tested this assertion!• Sentences are short and concise• Recommended:

– Use only present and simple past tense– More on tenses later …

First Rule

• Direct active sentences– Verbs not nouns!

• Example:We made a measurement of the velocity

– Grammatically correct, but …– Better

We measured the velocity– Statistics

• We said exactly the same thingbut used four words instead of seven!!

First Rule- Direct active sentences

• Verbs not nouns!• What did we do to transform

We made a measurement of the velocityto

We measured the velocity• We took the noun ‘measurement’ and an

auxillary verb ‘make’ and– Replaced both with the verb form of the noun– “Made a measurement” “measured”

Active sentences

• Verb is the important word• Remove all the meaningless verbs• More examples

This experiment produced the result that We observed that …

This trial resulted in … We observed that …

We made an assertion that .. We asserted that ..

We conducted an examination of the product …

We examined the product ..

An extensive analysis of the results showed ..

We analyzed the data carefully ..

Active sentences• Verb is the important word• Remove all those meaningless verbs• More examples

We formed a hypothesis that .. We hypothesized that …An annotation was made on the text .. The text was annotated ..We made a summary of the data .. We summarized the data ..An observation of the … behaviour was made ..

We observed how … behaved

A filter was used to smooth the data … The data was filtered ..We used dynamic programming to compute ..

We computed with dynamic programming ..

We acquired more knowledge .. We learnt .... methods that allow exploitation of .. .. methods that exploit ..This section presents the accuracy evaluation of …

This section evaluates the accuracy of …

Adjectives also• Convert ‘is + adjective’ to a verb

Similarly, for other feature points this constraint is also applicable.

• is applicable applies :This constraint also applies to other feature points.

• Note that I removed ‘similarly’ because ‘also’ makes it redundant

Useless words• Some words you can almost always do without ….

– Gave– Produced– Did– Formed– Used– Made

• Some more that can often be removed– Acquire– Allow

• Remove them and turn the following noun into a verb!

More examples ..

• Most taken from real papers ….Relatively early, some scholars made researches on motion estimation .. Some scholars studied motion estimation …

• I’ve removed ‘relatively early’ also because it doesn’t add much ..

• Verb is ‘studied’ (past tense) – unless it’s really important that it was a long time ago, it probably doesn’t matter how long ago …

• Remove irrelevant detail to keep things short!!

Score:9 words 5 words (44% less!)

More examples ..

• Most taken from real papers ….Although there are some related works are available in the references [15]-[23] Although, there is additional related work [15]-[23]

• Verb is ‘is’• ‘available’ is not needed: if it exists, one can assume

it is available!

Score:11 words 6 words (45% less!)

More examples ..

• Most taken from real papers ….In these works, local search is performed with local small search window .. We searched a small local window …

• Verb is ‘searched’• I’ve removed ‘In these works’ as completely obvious

and therefore redundant .. • It’s not necessary to repeat ‘search’ – in this context,

‘window’ is a search window …• Remove irrelevant detail to keep things short!!

Score:12 words 6 words (50% less!)

More examples ..

• Most taken from real papers ….The sand cone test is one of the most widely used methods for determination of .. The sand cone test is widely used to determine the …

• Verbs are ‘used’ and ‘determine’• I’ve removed ‘most’ as unlikely to be really necessary

• ‘widely used’ is sufficient and safer• See comments about superlatives later

Score:15 words 10 words (33% less!)

More examples ..

• Taken from real papers ….First, full search is done at level ..

First, we searched at level …

• Verb is ‘searched’• ‘done’ is rarely actually needed .. • Maybe the most common of the useless words!

Score:7 words 5 words (29% less!)

More examples ..

• Taken from real papers …... four-way parallel searches are employed using ....

.. a four-fold parallel search used …

• Verb is ‘used’• ‘four-fold’ (= four times) is better than ‘four-way’ , but

‘four-way’ is acceptable

Score:6 words 5 words (16% less!)

More examples ..

• Taken from real papers ….Second, motion vector refinement at level L1 is performed ... Second, motion vectors are refined at level L1 …

• Verb is ‘refined’• ‘vector’ ‘vectors’ (proper subject of ‘refined’)

Score:9 words 8 words (11% less!)

More examples ..

• Taken from real papers ….This section gives analysis on ..

This section analyzes …

• Verb is ‘analyzes’

Score:5 words 3 words (40% less!)

More examples ..The last step is to correct the pose of the scans to frontal view, which is performed by using a pose correction algorithm which was proposed in our previous work [12]. The last step corrects the pose of the scans to frontal view using a pose correction algorithm proposed by us [12].

• Verb is ‘corrects’• ‘performed’ is just not needed• ‘in our previous work’ ‘by us’• ‘previous’ not needed because ‘proposed’ is past tense

Score:30 words 20 words (33% less!)

More examples ..

• Taken from real papers ….In order to support four-way parallel search, the 9x5 register array structure is employed. The 9x5 register array structure enables four-fold parallel search.orWe search four times in parallel using the 9x5 register array structure.

• Verb is ‘enables’ or ‘search’• ‘In order to support ..’ is not needed!

Score:14 words 9 words (36% less) or12 words (14% less)

More examples ..

• Taken from real papers …... and variable block size motion estimation is not adopted here. .. and we do not estimate motion with varying block

sizes.• Verb is ‘estimate’• We didn’t achieve any word saving,

but the sentence is direct .. ‘estimate’ instead of ‘estimation is adopted’

Score:10 words 10 words ()

More examples ..We propose a novel histogram generation technique using the HSV color space. The histogram retains a perceptually smooth color transition that enables us to do a window-based comparison of feature vectors for the purpose of effective retrieval of similar images from very large databases. During retrieval, we use a vector cosine distance measure for the ordering of image feature vectors. This distance measure shows an improvement in the retrieval result over the traditional Euclidean distance.

Our histogram generation technique using the HSV colour space retains a perceptually smooth colour transition that enables us to compare feature vectors in windows and effectively retrieve similar images from very large databases. During retrieval, we order feature vectors with a vector cosine distance measure. This measure retrieves results better than the traditional Euclidean distance.

• Verbs ‘compare, retrieve, order’• Redundancies

• ‘propose’ (almost all papers propose something!)• ‘novel’ (of course it is! Why are you publishing it if it isn’t?)• ‘image’ (the whole paper is about images)

Score:75 words 55 words (26% less)

This was actually an abstract for a paper:it fails an important test for a good abstract – see later!

More examples ..

Saturation gives an idea about the depth of color and human eye is less sensitive to such a variation as compared to color or intensity variation.

Saturation indicates the depth of colour: the human eye responds to colour or intensity variations more strongly.

• !!! ‘gives an idea about’• Reword to emphasize positive

Score:26 words 17 words (34% less)

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