5 5.0 Language and Style
Some writers feel that for an instructional text the language must be ponderous, the words complicated, and the meaning hidden in long sentences. Others believe the text should resemble a lecture: bright, breezy, and full of anecdotes. A balance between these extremes would be the better approach.
Anecdotal material in a course book should be avoided. In time (years or even months) the anecdote will probably be irrelevant. In any case, it will most likely be of no interest to many of the students.
Following are a few suggested guidelines:
• Write in the active voice: e.g., ‘Spend some time studying charts’ instead of ‘Time should be spent studyingcharts’.
• Avoid pronouns that indicate gender; e.g., ‘he, his, him’. Sometimes this cannot be done without making the sentence sound awkward and contrived. Try rewriting the sentence.
• Write in the third person. Avoid personal pronouns such as ‘you, your, yours’. Occasionally, they are very properly used for emphasis.
• Keep the sentences fairly short. One or two ideas per sentence are sufficient.
• Vary the length of sentences, within reason. It makes the text livelier to read.
• Try to keep the paragraphs short. Each paragraph should express a complete thought, which may require one or two sentences, or several. Variety in the size of paragraphs also helps to hold reader interest.
• Confine the use of technical terms to those the student needs to know. Italicize a technical term the first time it is used. Use regular font thereafter. Do not put technical terms within quotation marks. Be sure they are defined either in the text or, preferably, in the glossary. (Refer to Section 6.4.1 Italics.)
• Keep technical discussion to a minimum. Use everyday terminology, rather than technical terms, if it is sufficiently precise to explain the subject.
• In general, avoid long words if simpler ones will do. Authors should be aware of the fact that many of the students enrolling in our courses speak English as a second language. Careful word selection will help such students.
• Keep statements clear and concise. Avoid ‘wordy’ statements. For example, compare:
‘The marine sextant is a very accurate angle measuring instrument in that it is capable of resolving altitude measurements to tenths of a minute of arc. To accomplish this, two mirrors are employed which are termed the index mirror and the horizon glass.’
with:
‘The marine sextant is an accurate instrument for measuring angles. It can give the altitude of a star to tenths of a minute of arc. This is done with two mirrors—an index mirror and a horizon mirror.’
- Avoid obsolete terms and ideas. Students interested in nautical history will learn it by themselves.
- Do not use slang, jargon, or overworked expressions, and then excuse their use by putting them in quotation marks; e.g., He was an ‘old salt’ who knew what to expect ‘beyond the horizon’. This is an example of poor writing.
5.1 Dangling Modifiers
Occasionally, a phrase or clause modifies the wrong part of the sentence—avoid this with careful sentence structure.
Example: Do not write, ‘sailing down the coast, a Coast Guard cutter hailed us …’ We, not the Coast Guard cutter, were sailing down the coast.
It would be better to write, ‘As we sailed down the coast, a Coast Guard cutter hailed us…’
5.2 Grammatical Correctness
Ensure that the subject matches the verb; e.g., ‘The accuracy of the results is dependent…’ is correct, and ‘The accuracy of the results are dependent…’ is not. The verb ‘is’ refers to ‘accuracy’ and not to ‘results’, and therefore should not be ‘are’.
Ensure that pronouns agree with their antecedent in both number and gender. Remember that the antecedent is the nearest noun.
Example:
‘If light strikes a mirror, it will be reflected at the same angle at which it arrived’, is poorly written, as it refers to light in both cases, and not to mirror or angle. A better statement would be, ‘Light that strikes a mirror will be reflected at the same angle at which the light arrived’.
Ensure that the same tense is used throughout a statement.