Hyphens! Please, hyphens! Or something!
Some things just cry out for hyphens. Like this, in a post dealing with how the "easiest way to clean all the white males out of your parallel session is to title it "Diversity" and to schedule talks on" various topics, the first of which was:
The responsibility to share women in engineering research with women in engineering studentsI don't know about you, but the notion of sharing women, even with other women, seems something that guys might attend a talk on... maybe even especially sharing women with other women. But then that "students" at the end just brings the whole thing to a screaming halt and sends you back over the clause, trying to parse it out.
You shouldn't make your readers work that hard.
Try some hyphens: "share women-in-engineering research with women-in-engineering students", say.
Better probably, would have been "share research on women in engineering with those studying women in engineering".
But something.
Update:
It occurs to me that this might even have actually meant "share women-in-engineering research with women engineering students" - in which case, it's worse than I thought.
2 Comments:
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At 2:09 PM, October 31, 2006
Anonymous had this to say...
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At 7:05 PM, October 31, 2006
The Ridger, FCD had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->Two things:
1. As to your update: What do you think of the use of "women" attributively, in place of the adjective "female". Somehow, "women engineering students" would bother me a bit, rather like "Jew lawyer" would, whereas "female engineering students" seems fine.
2. There's a sentence in Isak Dinesen's book "Out of Africa", in which she refers to "a pile of green and yellow striped pumpkins" (a fitting phrase to quote on this quintessential pumpkin day). Tell me, in other words, what the pumpkins (which, here, refers to gourds in general) look like. Note the difference among the following:
a. a pile of green and yellow striped pumpkins
b. a pile of green-and-yellow striped pumpkins
c. a pile of green and yellow-striped pumpkins
d. a pile of green- and yellow-striped pumpkins
e, f, g, etc......
I wasn't sure to take Ms Dinesen at her unhyphenated word, or to wonder where the hyphens ought to have gone.
This is very interesting, and I don't know the source of the dichotomy - but for me, "female" when applied to people sounds coarse. "Female students" is much less preferable than "women students", for me. I've worked with people who say "female" as a noun instead of "woman", too, and that just bugs me all to pieces. But I'm well aware that for many others, it's just the opposite. I just take the words at face value anymore.
As for 2, I don't know, but I'd guess she meant pumpkins that are some of them green and some of them yellow but all of them striped. But they could be green with yellow stripes, or possibly yellow with green stripes, or some of them green and some of them striped...
Hypens. They get no respect, and they do so much for us.
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