Reviewing the basics of English grammar

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For the past few days, I've been reviewing English grammar. No, I'm not prepping for a language exam. Rather, I was working on a side project about natural language processing. This project involved reading about different parts of speech (POS)... nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, interjections, and conjunctions. In calculating the importance of individual words from over 5000 summaries of scientific articles, I learned that I could actually choose which POS I could include in the analyses. For example, I could remove many conjunctions and prepositions because they appear too often in text, thereby not important (at least in the context of determining what the article is all about). For the purposes of my little side project, I opted to keep nouns only; after all, I was looking for popular keywords from a relatively big body of work on a specific topic. Singular and plural forms of nouns introduce sparsity in the analyses; I could minimise sparsity by normalising the word form... like converting plural forms to singular forms.

I thought I was done with grammar rules and parts of speech when I finished processing the scientific articles. However, I was wrong: I found myself reading articles on writing styles, punctuations, cadence of paragraphs—it's still grammar but in the context of conveying messages—because I was revising a galley proof of a scientific article I co-wrote. The things I read led me to answers to the question, "In what situations do I use 'while', 'although', and 'whereas'?" Copy editors called me out multiple times because I'd used 'while' in subordinate clauses that connoted 'in spite of'. Then there's the 'that' and 'which' confusion, which Melissa and Bob had to get me out of while I was writing my PhD manuscript. 'To' and 'with' are confusing as well. Reviewing when to use these words helped a lot while I was editing the galley proof.

In developing narratives we aim to convey pieces of information, to evoke emotions, to trigger reactions. This is why grammar is essential. The best politicians, church leaders, and scriptwriters know this really well and derive power from it.

Messaging matters.

Words matter.

Punctuations matter.

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