Abstract
The disastrous charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in the Crimean War was made because of a carelessly worded order to ‘charge for the guns’—meaning that some British guns which were in an exposed position should be hauled out of reach of the enemy, not that the Russian batteries should be charged.
The disastrous charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in the Crimean War was made because of a carelessly worded order to ‘charge for the guns’—meaning that some British guns which were in an exposed position should be hauled out of reach of the enemy, not that the Russian batteries should be charged. But even in the calmest times it is often difficult to compose an English sentence that cannot possibly be misunderstood [1].
—Robert Graves and Alan Hodge
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References
Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Use and Abuse of the English Language (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1995), p. 95.
e. e. cummings, “Buffalo Bill’s,” Complete Poems: 1904–1962, ed. by George J. Firmage, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).
Luis García [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Robert F. Gunning, “The Fog Index after Twenty Years,” Journal of Business Communication, vol. 6, no. 2 (1969), pp. 3–13.
H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).
Theodore Bernstein, The Careful Writer, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1995).
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Alley, M. (2018). Avoiding Ambiguity. In: The Craft of Scientific Writing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8288-9_3
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