Rebecca L's Profile

that's because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent

What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't.

The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar.

The bossiness is unnecessary because the split infinitive has always been grammatical and does not need to be avoided.

Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage

the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.

"however" at the beginnings of sentences

White not only added the anti-"which" rule to the book but also revised away the counterexamples that were present in his old professor's original text!

to create an ecology of change rather than a precise and often
illusory process

It is for such reasons we must learn
to stand outside of history.

personal witness as guided by conscience

the witness need not be verbal. The Quakers say "let
your life speak," echoing St. Francis of Assisi's' advice
that one should preach the gospel at all times and "if necessary,
use words."

Quakers
today in America as there were in the 18th century, around 100,000.

In part because they have been willing to fail year after
year between those great moments. Because they have been willing
in good times and bad -- in the instructions of their early leader
George Fox -- "to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth
answering that of God in every one "

The system that envelopes us becomes normal
by its mere mass, its ubiquitous messages, its sheer noise.

Matthew
Arnold put it, trapped between two worlds, one dead, the other
unable to be born

shared neural populations encode nonsymbolic quantities and symbolic stimuli.

at least in the adult brain, numerical symbols and nonnumerical numerosities converge onto shared neural representations

the two hemispheres of the parietal lobe function differently in processing numbers

left lobe harbors abstract numerical representations, the right shows a dependence on the notation used for a number

the adaptation phenomenon, that the brain adapts to stimuli by reducing its initial activity

Developmental studies should focus on tracing the emergence of numerical representation in the brain, investigating in particular at which stage such a representational divergence appears

Studies yield insight into the numerical brain

"This new study challenges the notion that children must undergo a qualitative shift in order to understand fractions and use them in calculations. The findings instead suggest that fractions are built upon the system that is employed to represent basic numerical magnitude in the brain,

living in a critical family environment increases rates of relapse in depression, and so use of criticism in this study is particularly important and applicable to real life