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SF State MATH 880 - Outline 29

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2008-04-10 10:41MATH 880 PROSEMINAR JT SMITHOUTLINE 29 SPRING 20081. Assignmenta. Are there further questions about the social organization of mathematics?b. Another paper is posted on the website for discussion, with the link Struikterm paper. It was written for a senior-level course on history of mathematics.I copyedited it and returned it to the student with comments after making aphotocopy. It was hard to scan that and make it legible. Moreover, it wouldbe redundant to discuss the whole paper, so I only posted its first two pages.This student’s native language was also not English. The paper received anA grade. Please read those pages; we’ll discuss my comments on them inclass.2. Gillman 1987 chapter 6.a. Ms. Afaga continued the discussion of this. Here are some additional com-ments.b. Fowler 1958 is a wonderful and amusing source of lore on this subject. c. Passive voice is overused as a way of avoiding writer’s responsibility. That’sthe mark of a bureaucrat-in-training.d. I can never remember what comprise means, so I don’t use it. Same thing formany other impressive words.e. My copyeditor just caught me mixing up insure and ensure.f. You need to decide how to render x 0 Y and X f Y in text. Whatever youdo, do it consistently.g . Which versus thati. With oils I painted the clouds, which were grey. An inessential phraseuses which and is set off with commas.ii. With oils I painted the clouds that were grey. An essential phrase usesthat but no commas.h. Last year we had a heated discussion about the order of terminal quotationmarks and other punctuation. Someone said that something about logic. Thefollowing two sentences are punctuated according to some mathematicians’logic.I asked, “Did you say ‘This is logic.’?”. Later a student asked infrustration, “How should we do it?”. I replied, “Did you really ask,‘How should we do it?’?”!I hope you can follow the logic. Should you admire it, think then of VictorBorge’s famous comic routine about phonetic punctuation! Don’t invitederision: it’s counterproductive. Grammar books and copyeditors insist onillogical punctuation. Surprisingly, standards differ between here and Europe.American editors require that other punctuation marks come inside quotes.They’d remove the second and third periods in the displayed text. OK, I don’tmind. But an insensitive one would also remove the first period and put thePage 2 MATH 880 SPRING 2008 OUTLINE 292008-04-10 10:41first quotation mark inside the single quotes. That changes the meaning: itsuggests that the student was questioning whether something was reallylogical. The third sentence seems to me to demonstrate that the standardAmerican rule makes it impossible to render some nuances. When thathappens, rephrase—it won’t help to argue with the editor! Should I write,“Should I say ‘Amen!’?” No: rephrasing that last sentence would make it atonce unobjectionable and more forceful: I should merely say “Amen!”i. Almost everyone says different than frequently and wrongly. Moreover, thecorrect different from often sounds awkward. When that happens in yourwriting, rephrase to avoid the problem. Often, more words are necessary.j. Direct objects of verbs and objects of prepositions must be in the objective(sometimes called accusative) case:I led him to her.k. Similarly, for indirect objects of verbs and subjects of infinitives:I gave him a present for her to admire.l. Clauses with gerunds can often be parsed more than one way. Sometimes agerund must have a subject, and that must be in the genitive case:I appreciated his quickly displaying it.m. I’m no expert in such things and can’t be definitive. I want to point out thatthere are such rules, and when in doubt or when criticized for their misuse,you should be able to find them somewhere.n. These distinctions are confusing in part because English has lost many of itsinflections. The genitive her and objective her are identical, for example. It’sprobably easiest to learn them in Latin, where all the inflections are different.English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish all work in comparableways, so that consciousness of these matters pays off when you need to readthe other languages.o. Multiply hyphenated words such as Gillman’s non-PhD-granting institutionare unfortunate. For one thing, they’re apt to be mangled by hyphenationsoftware, becoming non-PhD-grant-ing. In such situations, use more wordsand rephrase: institutions that do not grant the PhD!p. It is well known that many hyphenations in English are unnecessary, particu-larly well-known unless you have to distinguish a well-known liar, an obscurebut well known liar, and a sickly known liar.q. In mathematical discourse we write about well-ordered sets because theoriginal term was wohlgeordnete Mengen. In logic we write about well-formedformulas. (Wohlformulierte Formeln is intelligible German, but I don’t recallever seeing it.)3. I discussed briefly a book review I wrote recently for Mathesis, a Mexican journal(really international) for the history and philosophy of mathematics. It has beenaccepted as is, and will be published very soon. The review indicates that the bookMATH 880 SPRING 2008 OUTLINE 29 Page 32008-04-10 10:41is a good one. But I stressed the last pages of the review, which indicate that thebook had extremely poor editing. You’ll see that its errors are so serious as to invitederision, and detract from the book’s overall effectiveness. There’s a link to thereview on the course’s home webpage.4. One comment in that review deserves repetition with special emphasis:a . Use your spelling checker!b . Don’t trust it, though!c. It will object to the unusual words and names that occur in mathematics, andto a zillion symbolic expressions. But it makes you think about your spelling.d. It will not object to your use of an incorrect but properly spelled word in placeof the correct one.e. You can add new, correctly spelled, words to you spelling checker’s dictionary,so that it will not repeatedly object to them. Careful: if you add an incorrectlyspelled word,...f. I don’t use a spelling checker routinely. But one of the very last steps beforemy submitting a document for publication is spell-checking. First, I emptythe part of spelling checker’s dictionary that I had entered in the past, toinsure that I don’t perpetuate any blunders of that sort.


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