Monthly Archives: May 2004

Email messages should be treated as personal letters. You wouldn’t write a handwritten letter with misspellings, would you? Or a typewritten letter in which you didn’t bother to use the shift key? Then you shouldn’t do that in an email. … Continue reading →

To recurse is to curse again, not an activity that an academic, or an algorithm for that matter, should engage in. When a process is repeated or is subject to recursion, it is said to recur.

The use of the pronoun “he” as a bound pronoun of neutral gender is problematic on two grounds. First, its use is blatantly sexist (although the sexism is of a historical nature, so that those who continue to use “he” … Continue reading →

Pat Winston in his lecture on How to Speak notes that covering up parts of overhead transparencies and revealing them slowly like a strip-tease artist is a technique that drives 10 per cent of your audience nuts. I am in that 10 … Continue reading →

A citation is not a first-class participant in a sentence; it cannot serve as a noun phrase. Rather it is a parenthetical — that is why it appears in parentheses — and like all parentheticals should be removable without changing … Continue reading →