Michael Lewis Schneir

Contributions

Good Writing Practice - Volume 31, Issue 3

Contributors: Michael Lewis Schneir (author), Wendy Kingdom (section editor), Amy Wheareat (section editor) Syntactic grammar distraction usage or misusage: Definite article Michael Lewis Schneir Medical Writing. 2022;31(3)94-95.…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 31, Issue 2

The indefinite article a functions as a determiner before a singular count noun, either tangible (a human) or abstract (a trait). This determiner indicates that the noun is either being mentioned for the first time or is general (indefinite) in…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 31, Issue 1

The present participle using and the past participle based on, both traditionally adjectivals, ostensibly misfunction without a noun to modify (a modifee). The frequency of their usage and misusage in research writing justifies a separate article…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 30, Issue 4

Grammatical misagreement in function: Modifier to modifee Knowledge of the grammatical function of a modifying syntactic unit facilitates understanding a misfunctional distraction and, in turn, its revision option.

Good Writing Practice - Volume 30, Issue 3

The distinction between the active and passive voice is that the subject acts by means of the active voice verb, and the subject is acted on by means of the passive voice verb.

Good Writing Practice - Volume 30, Issue 2

Introduction In this regular feature, the misagreement in tense is extended from present and present perfect tense (discussed in the previous edition of MEW) to an analysis of the frequently used present participle (of the participial phrase) and…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 30, Issue 1

Grammatical misagreement in tense I – Present, present perfect Introduction Each of the sections of a journal article contains anticipated conceptual components, which can be expressed by a specific verb tense for the perspective of time and the…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 29, Issue 4

In addition to subject-verb misagreement in grammatical number, a misagreement in number is common between a subject and other sentence constituents, which appears in the experimental and contextual sections of a journal article.

Good Writing Practice - Volume 29, Issue 3

The misagreement in number (singular vs. plural) between subject and verb is caused by subject number ambiguity, either intrinsic (the subject itself) or extrinsic (the effect of subject modification).

Good Writing Practice - Volume 28, Issue 3

Excessive post-noun modification, usually as adjectival prepositional phrases, occurs fre - quently in research writing. Occurring less frequently, and less distracting, is excessive prenoun adjectival modification (i.e., stacked modifi cation). The…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 27, Issue 4

Nominalisation is the transformation of a precise verb into another sentence constituent, usually a noun (nominalisation), sometimes an adjective (adjectivalisation). This syntactic transformation elicits the grammatical necessity to add…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 27, Issue 3

Circumlocution is the usage of a multiword structure instead of a shorter syntactic unit, for example, usage of a clause instead of a phrase. The distraction consequence of circumlocution can be sentence pattern disruption and unintended…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 26, Issue 2

Introduction Dissonant nonparallelism occurs in two patterns of comparison: the typical adjective-based pattern (x is similar to y; there is more x than y) and the less common correlative conjunction-based pattern (the more x…the more y). In this…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 26, Issue 1

Adverb placement is complicated by the variety and abundance of syntactic units that are modifiable by an adverb, ranging from words to phrases to sentences. The most likely such modified units are verbs (and verbals), adjectives (and adjectivals),…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 25, Issue 4

Personalism results from a story-line narration rather than a thematic-focused description. This story-line narration is focused on agents as sentence (or clause) subjects and their actions as verbs, rather than themes represented by noun subjects…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 25, Issue 3

Coordination non parallelism is the lack of structural symmetry between coordinated sentence constituents that are intended to be equivalent in importance. A classic example of such non parallelism is “I love fishing, swimming, and to run.” In this…

English Grammar and Style - Volume 24, Issue 4

In this issue •  We continue Michael Schneir's fascinating series on distractions in medical and scientific writing, this time concentrating on non-pronoun-induced backtracking with adverbs, verbs, and nouns. This sounds a little…

English Grammar and Style: Revising medical writing Reasons not rules: Backtracking, pronoun-induced Part 3 - Double syntactic unit revision and syntactic position revision - Volume 24, Issue 2

This is the last of this series of three articles on pronouns that cause distraction by making the reader backtrack. In the first part of this article, we examine a technique for eliminating backtracking by making two changes to the construction of…

English Grammar and Style Revising medical writing Reasons not rules: Backtracking, pronoun-induced Part 2 – Single syntactic unit revision - Volume 24, Issue 1

This is the second of a series of three articles on pronouns that cause distraction by making the reader backtrack. In this article, we examine a technique for eliminating backtracking by making a single change to the construction of the sentence.…

English Grammar and Style - Volume 23, Issue 4

Pronouns are useful referents (i.e. the thing doing the referring) to avoid repetition of words (usually nouns). Although personal pronouns (he, she, and I, in particular) are infrequent in medical writing, the neutral ‘it’ and the demonstrative…