Lilienfeld, Scott O wrote:
Hi All ..out of town right now but will send along some info over the
weekend or early next week at the latest, In the meantime, I'd like to
voice a concern. I find the tone of some of your postings, Mike, to be
needlessly snarky and obnoxious. What gives? Is there any reason why
you can't merely disagree with others without finding some gratuitous
way of putting them down?
Apologies to listserv members for being grumpy about this, but the
older I get the more I tire of less than respectful discourse...Scott
Sent from my iPhone
Of course, I can not speak for Mike P but I will leap in with a
comment at this point.
We all know the formula for writing an empirical research report.
They can be pretty dusty and most of us try to sneak in at
least one interesting turn of phrase. When we are freed of those
strictures and are writing commentaries (or blogs or ms. reviews
or other such pieces) then the temptation is to go for the
literary.
I was once asked to write a commentary and I passed on a
preliminary version to a mentor. His single written comment was
"you have committed the sin of being literary." I was stunned
after all my work on catchy phrases but after some thought
realized that he was correct. I had been reaching for felicitous
phrases to impress my audience when I should have been
concentrating on the logic of my argument.
The issue with TIPS is that we don't have crusty editors to chop
away adjectives, adverbs, and other sparklies which sound good to
my ears but may sound extreme to others.
Ken
PS - "felicitous phrases" ... "sparklies" (too literary; it's a
disease, my friends) ... "my friends" (someone get a red pen, for
the love of Ford) ... "love of Ford" (please update your literary
references to the current century and then cross them out) ...
---------------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [email protected]
Professor
Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
USA
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