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Grammar, Spelling, Style These pointers have
occurred to me while marking, mainly.
The more important points for undergraduate essays (more important
because they concern more frequent or more serious errors) are indicated in
red. See also here
for Gary Kemp’s advice. ------------------------------------- SPELLING · There are worse sins than misspelling, and I am
myself not a great speller, but the following reflect increasingly common
mistakes in undergraduate essays: —It
is argument,
not arguEment —It
is independent,
not independAnt. ------------------------------------- GRAMMAR,
MEANING, AND STYLE · Argue.
Speaking of Smith’s arguing a
claim leaves it unclear whether Smith is arguing for or against the
claim. Use argue for or argue against. · Begging the question. Though it is coming to mean raising or posing the question in ordinary discourse, begging the question should be used in philosophical writing only
to mean assuming that which is being
argued for, i.e. using as a premise of an argument either its conclusion
or a proposition whose justification involves its conclusion. Question-begging reasoning is, in other
words, circular, e.g. there is an
infallible god, whose spokesman on Earth is the Pope; so the Pope is
infallible; the Pope says God exists; therefore God exists. This is question-begging, since the
premise that the Pope is infallible is justified by the premise that there
exists a god, which is just what the overall argument is supposed to give us
reason to believe. (Question-begging
arguments are, incidentally, valid: All Glasgow philosophers are geniuses;
therefore all Glasgow philosophers are geniuses is valid, though
question-begging—valid because it is impossible for its premise to be true
while its conclusion is false.) · Colon (:) and Semi-colon (;) —One
role of the semi-colon is to be a soft full-stop. When used that way, the semi-colon
separates sentences, as full-stops do, but it separates sentences that are so
closely related that a full-stop would be too abrupt, e.g. Many are uninterested in politics; few are
disinterested. Or, it was the best of times; it was the worst
of times (though, I confess, Dickens in fact uses a comma).
Semi-colons can also be used as hard
commas, when, for example, one item on a list is described by a phrase
which itself uses commas. For example:
He argued that the invasion of Iraq was
morally unjustified; that it was illegal, as many have pointed out; and that
it was imprudent. Because of the
comma within the second item of the list, the items themselves are in this
instance best separated using semi-colons rather than commas. —Colons are used to indicate delivery of the goods invoked by the
words preceding the colon, as in She
studied the three most famous empiricists:
Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, or She
argued as follows: if determinism is
true, then our actions were predictable before we were born; determinism is
true; therefore, our actions are unfree.
(Note too the use of the semi-colons.) ·
Compare with and compare to. There is a convention, admittedly not deep
rooted, according to which if I compare
you with a summer’s day I leave it open that you might be gloomy and
stormy, but not if I compare you to a
summer’s day. Comparing with, but not
comparing to, is a matter of identifying both similarities and differences. · Disinterested
and uninterested. Many are uninterested in politics; few are disinterested. Politics
bores them, in other words, but it nevertheless affects their interests or
welfare. · Forward an argument?
You forward letters or
emails, but you advance (or put
forward) arguments or
objections. · Momentarily
and presently. Worry if your pilot tells you the plane
will be airborne momentarily, but
not if he tells you it will be airborne presently. Momentarily (at least in British English) means for a moment, not in a moment; presently means in a moment, not currently. · “Only”. Place “only” next to the word you want
to qualify. Contrast the following: —I eat only chocolate. As
opposed to other food stuffs. —I
only eat chocolate.
As opposed to sticking
it up my nose. —Only I eat chocolate. As
opposed to anyone else. —I eat chocolate only if I
am bored. My being bored is a necessary condition of my
eating chocolate. (A
useful rule: only if introduces a necessary condition, e.g. You are in Glasgow only if you are in the
UK.) —I only eat chocolate if I
am bored. Interpreted according to the convention,
this means that my being bored is a sufficient condition of my only eating chocolate, as opposed to doing
something else with it, e.g. sticking it up my nose. An odd claim, to be sure. Do I do something else with chocolate when
not bored? Hence one might naturally
interpret this sentence instead as saying what its predecessor says. But to guarantee
that interpretation, place the only next
to the if to indicate that a
necessary condition is being stated.
(This doesn’t matter much when talking about chocolate; in philosophy,
it can sometimes matter a lot.) (A
useful rule: an if not linked to an only introduces a sufficient condition, e.g. If
it rains, the pavement will be wet.) · Quotation marks, inverted commas. Inverted
commas are used not only to quote the words of others. They have two other important uses. —Use and mention. In the philosophical senses of use and mention, one uses a word when one deploys it to speak of its
referent; one mentions it when one
speaks of the word itself. In philosophical contexts, the best way
to mention a word or phrase is to put it in inverted commas, hence “Trees” has five letters is a coherent
(and, as it happens, true) sentence; Trees has five letters, by contrast, is either senseless or false, since
trees have branches and leaves but they are certainly not the sort of things
that have letters. If this seems
pedantic, notice there will be cases where, without a use/mention convention,
the author’s intentions will be unclear.
Without such a convention, for example, Fred refers to a physical object would be ambiguous between
saying that Fred, the person, refers to a physical object and saying that Fred, the proper name, refers to a
physical object. There are other
devices used to mention words and phrases.
Instead of using inverted commas, journalists often preface the word
or phrase they want to mention with the
word or the words or the phrase, e.g. The phrase begging the question is often misused. That technique is ok, I suppose, but it’s
less clear, particularly when mentioning more than one word. Does The
words clear and sunny are amongst my favourites mention clear and sunny only, or clear, sunny, and and? Another way of
mentioning words and phrases is to use italics, as I am doing in this document
(in order to avoid a proliferation of inverted commas), but the downsides of
italics are that they are also used to emphasise
words and phrases, and that they are difficult to reproduce in handwriting. —Scare quotes. Inverted commas can also be used to enjoin
caution in your reader, perhaps
because you’re using an expression in an unusual sense, or perhaps because
you don’t mean to endorse every aspect of its conventional meaning or all of
its implicatures. If you have doubts
about the electoral process in Zimbabwe, for example, you might speak of
Mugabe as the “elected” President,
enclosing elected in scare quotes
in order to avoid any entailment or implicature that he was fairly
elected. Increasingly, students are
enclosing true, false, right, and wrong in scare quotes, presumably to
indicate they feel some disquiet about the notions of truth, falsity,
rightness, and wrongness. But it is
not obvious that there is anything suspect about these concepts, or precisely
what aspect of the meaning of those terms the author would want to prescind
from. So my advice is: don’t use scare quotes for those four
words, unless you have clearly explained why you’re doing so. · Reject and refute. Creationists reject the theory of evolution, but
they haven’t refuted it (though
they may think they have). To reject p
is to claim that p is false; it is
to deny that p. To refute p is to succeed in showing that p is false. While no one can refute a true claim, people reject
true claims all the time (though not knowingly, if they are sincere). When journalists talk of a politician’s
refuting an opponent’s claim, they are not being neutral about p, though
often they are trying to be. · That and
which.
Some, particularly Americans, recommend introducing a clause with that when the clause is part of the
referring term, but using which when
it is not. According to this
convention, the house that Jack built
picks out a house in terms of its being the one that Jack built whereas the house which Jack built says parenthetically of a house
already picked out that Jack built it.
I agree it is good not to use that
when the clause is not part of
the referring term (so avoid the house,
that Jack built), but, even when it is, I sometimes find it helpful to
use which. For example, the view that the General advanced is ambiguous between the view which the General advanced
and the view to the effect that the
General advanced. So, if you want
to pick out a view in terms other than those expressing its content, then
using which rather than that has the advantage that, as soon
as they encounter which, readers
know that what follows is not an expression of the view’s content. Anyway, where which is not part of the referring term, commas make this clear,
e.g. the view, which the General
advanced. · Use and
utilise. Why use utilise when you can use use?
The former sounds more technical somehow, but is longer and uglier. |