subject, verb, object

“Ee,” he said, with an impish grin on his hairy German face, “equals em cee squared.”

http://elerussians.blogspot.ru/2013/05/mistakes-to-avoid-in-english-1-writing.html

Еще одна замечательная статья от Яна Митчелла, про ясность высказываний и мышления.

Во вступлении про то, что в мире науки необходимо владеть английским языком:

So English it is—if you want to get ahead in academia.

But this is not just a question of being able to write the language well, it is also a question of being able to think in an English-speaking way on paper. That means three main things: (1) subject, verb, object, generally in that order; (2) short sentences with as few subordinate clauses as possible; (3) a preference for practical examples over theoretical word-equation building.

…

и в основной части про то, на что похожи тексты русских профессоров (не всех, конечно). Их тексты, говорит Ян, могли бы называться Потемкинской прозой:

I read these two sentences to a Russian friend whose opinions I respect about many things, and his immediate reaction was: “That is the way my professor at MGU used to write. In fact, when I wrote the first draft of my PhD thesis, and I tried to put it in clear, simple language, he rejected it saying nobody will think you are worth reading if you write like that. These examples are exactly how he used to write. Every sentence was a paragraph.”

This is nothing to do with the Russian language, which is quite capable of being concise and clear when it wants to be. It is a problem that has resulted from a habit of thinking which is designed to conceal real thought—a combination of socialist deceit, imperialist bombast, and the sort of inferiority complex which, in a different context, provokes short men to drive big cars.

It could be called Potemkin prose, in that it gives the appearance of being the result of profound ratiocination, when in fact the writer has not been able to organise his or her thoughts with sufficient rigour to be able to say something which the averagely intelligent reader might be able to understand.

полностью тут http://elerussians.blogspot.ru/2013/05/mistakes-to-avoid-in-english-1-writing.html

И в заключении — постулат про необходимость выражаться четко и ясно. Как Энштейн.

original post http://vasnake.blogspot.com/2014/01/subject-verb-object.html