thereby

so anyway, authors have their favourite crutches that they lean on, and when you kick one away, sometimes they squeal. the guy who's written the book on the Japanese recession writes fairly well, but lapses here and there. one usage he is fond of is to use "such" where "this" or "these" is standard.

an example for you. the following is ugly:

"They paid the remittances to their mothers. Such remittances made up most of their mothers' income."

there are several ways to recast this, but the very least an editor should do is replace "such" with "these", which is the correct word to use for this type of reference. "such" should have very limited use in good writing.

the author also loves "thereby", so much so that he complains at my removing it in every instance, even though it never adds an iota of meaning. he claims that it indicates causality, and readers will not understand causality if it's omitted. he is wrong.

take the following:

"He paid his mother a remittance, thereby making her happy."

this is the sort of thing he writes, yet exactly the same meaning is conveyed by:

"He paid his mother a remittance, making her happy."


it is a convention of English that a second clause in a sentence is dependent on the previous clause, particularly when the second clause is introduced with an "-ing" word. it is one of the main uses of "-ing clauses" that they imply causality. it's close to impossible to parse the sentence i give as an example in any other way, and i do not believe any native speaker would have any problem with the sentence.

why does it mean this though? it seems hard to figure out but looking at a parallel structure makes it clear:

"Here are the soldiers, marching in the rain."

here there is no causality, rather a descriptive phrase. the participle describes the preceding noun. (compare "he looked at soldiers marching in the rain", where again "marching" is a participle, not a gerund.)

participles are adjectives. they generally describe nouns in one way or another. so in this example, "marching" describes the soldiers. but where is the noun that "making" describes? is it "remittances"? no, this doesn't make sense. nor does "they" or "mothers".

the noun is actually understood. you could call it an implicit noun, if you like. it is "paying". gerunds mean "the act of...", and here "paying" means "the act of paying", which is what the first clause describes.

this, it seems to me, is why this usage strikes me as so wrong, and why i'll fight the author all the way on it. the construction is elegant without "thereby"; it echoes the similar use of participles in Latin. "thereby" makes it lumber, thereby ruining the flow of the text.

do u c what i did there?

posted by Dr Zen @ 1:08 pm