There is great advice in this thread. Thank you to everyone who is posting in it.
“pounds”! I commend your verb!
Yah, I’m probably a bad editing partner for anyone paid by the word. Send them to Zylon instead.
Twain is great stuff, a wonderful model, I think, and his essays are enormously entertaining. He’s my favorite American author as regards literary quality. I doubt you’ll see much passive voice in his work, but he does sometimes like long sentences, especially in his essays.
No one wrote insults like Twain. Its a shame he didn’t live long enough to participate in Politics and Religion forum threads.
He had his own forum.
I’m reading through a final draft of a calc book I wrote. I searched for “be” and in almost every case eradicated it. I love the results. I also nearly genocided the words “very” and “really”. Yay, Qt3!
You can also remove many instances of the conjunction “that”.
When I wrote my dissertation, my advisor inserted “that” many times. I got the idea that I removed it too much.
Here’s part of a sentence from my book:
Leave the factors behind for now and imagine that we have 5 identical poker chips.
Would you suggest removing such a “that”?
I think that that is ok in that sentence, but that is just the sort of mistake that I am prone to make.
On the other hand “the factors”, taken out of context in the paragraph, is really odd, and the two separate clauses linked by the “and” is not so good. I would rewrite to something like “Setting aside [the factors], imagine [that] we have 5 identical poker chips”, but that’s not perfect either.
I don’t know about that, but the answer is 1/3.
What color are the poker chips?
Abandon the factors. They were only holding you back. Unlock your potential through the power of your mind: visualize 5 identical poker chips falling through a haze of Dominican tobacco onto a green felt table.
“$10000? I call.”
They could be red or blue because they were drawn out of a closed pouch originally containing 12 red and 32 blue chips; but we know they are identical, so they are all either red or blue. Given that you have drawn 8 blue chips previously, what are the odds that your draw of 5 identical chips are all red?
The “factors” refer to choosing a binomial factor from the expanded version of (a+b)^5. I took your advice and rewrote; happily, I killed off the “that” in the process! The result:
Replace the factors with 5 identical poker chips and count the number of ways we may choose 3 of them.
Aw crap… do I need “that” after all?
Replace the factors with 5 identical poker chips and count the number of ways that we may choose 3 of them.
Um. I think so. But now I’m not sure at all. Sigh.
But as regards the underlying meaning, there’s really only one way to choose three from a set of five identical chips, as there is no way to distinguish any of the resulting triples from one another. But why emphasize that they’re identical anyway?
I’m trying to explain the formula
The chips are identical, but they are not all one chip.
Yeah, I understand, but there’s no need for the chips to be identical, so it is very slightly confusing. If they were 5 differently colored chips and you didn’t care which colors you wound up with, the formula would work just the same, wouldn’t it? The thing about choosing is you don’t care about the order, as I vaguely recall, unlike permutations, right?
But this is a trivial point made just to annoy you. The sentence you wound up with is fine I think including that that that you just inserted.
The Perkins takes off.