To me, few things are more annoying than someone who nitpicks about grammar. Grammar is important, to be sure, but how much does it really matter if your sentences are grammatically “correct,” as long as your message is communicated clearly?
Michael Bach recently emailed me lamenting that often reviewers comment that “the English could be improved” in his papers. That comment could be made about at least 99 percent of all papers published, but what does it help? If a reviewer can’t point to a specific instance where the language is unclear, why make the observation in the first place?
But even when comments are specific, they’re often not useful at all. Case in point: “data.” Is “data” a singular or a plural noun? Purists say that data is the plural of datum, but Mike Kellerman questions that notion:
There are a couple of problems with the “data is the plural of datum” story. (These have been discussed widely on the web, and I’m drawing freely on those discussions). First, it is not quite right even in Latin to say that “data” is the plural of the singular count noun “datum”; both are conjugations of the verb dare, to give. Second, in English, we hardly ever refer to one piece of data as a datum; at least in political science it is an observation, a case, or perhaps a data point. When the word datum is used, it usually has a specialized meaning and takes the plural form “datums.”
But here’s the killer example:
The bigger problem, from my perspective, is that fully adhering to “data” as a plural count noun forces you into constructions like “How many data are enough?” instead of “How much data is enough?” The first of these, “How many data are…” is correct for a plural count noun, while the second, “How much data is…” is appropriate for a mass noun such as “gold” or “water.” The second sentence sounds much better to me. It also wins on a Google Scholar search by a margin of 10 to 1 (2120 to 198).
So even though people claim that data is plural, they actually use it as a singular “mass noun.” What’s “correct”? The “proper” form, or the way the word is actually used by people? More importantly, either form is perfectly comprehensible by anyone reading it. It just doesn’t matter.
Getting back to Michael Bach’s complaint, I can certainly empathize with him. I can speak a little French and Italian, but I can’t imagine putting together much more than a paragraph or two in either language, much less an entire scientific paper (Michael has published over 150!).
That’s not to say that papers written by non-native speakers aren’t sometimes a little more difficult to understand for us native speakers. However, generally, I find, criticizing grammar for the sake of “correctness” rather than understanding, is condescending at best and counterproductive at worst. Native English speakers are at a tremendous advantage in the scientific community today since nearly all “serious” science is published in English.
Bach has a modest proposal for native English-speaking scientists: All U.S. and U.K. scientists should pay into a fund to support English language tutoring for the remainder of the world’s scientific community. It would be a small price to pay for the convenience of having everyone else adapt to our language.