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Which with No Comma Most Common in Academia?

6/2/2013

2 Comments

 
Okay, so I thought I was done, but curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to know if the behavior in academic writing was atypical or the same as other writing like newspaper, magazine, and fiction. For the basis of comparison, I looked at each of the domains in the COCA:

Academic
Comma which: 82,741
[noun] which: 31,585
(2.6 to 1 ratio)

Fiction
Comma which: 42305
[noun] which: 10810
(3.9 to 1 ratio)

Magazine
Comma which: 95265
[noun] which: 7773
(12.3 to 1 ratio)

Newspaper
Comma which: 92,741
[noun] which: 5,392
(17.2 to 1 ratio)

So it looks like academic writing is the most common place to find people using which without a comma. This is very counter-intuitive and very interesting.

-Bill
2 Comments
Jonathon Owen link
6/5/2013 10:33:08 am

One of my classmates found the same thing in a project she did for a corpus linguistics class we had (<a href="https://sites.google.com/site/akfronk/home/that-or-which">link</a>). I think it's because academic style guides generally don't care about regulating usage like that, while the AP Stylebook in particular is pretty strict about a lot of things. I wonder if it's also because "which" somehow sounds a little more educated.

Reply
Bill
6/9/2013 04:12:31 am

Do you think it's also a matter of, "well, I know the rules, so it's okay to break them"? I find academics will sometimes recognize that it is necessary to "break the rules" in order to say something in a better way. For example, some acknowledge that it is necessary to do things like splitting an infinitive or else the sentence could be very awkward (Swales and Feak discuss this in Academic Writing for Graduate Students). In any case, I think Academic English is a very different animal, for sure.

I never thought about it, but I think you're right about "which." It does have a certain air about it, doesn't it? Maybe it's from people avoiding ending on a preposition? ("to which college are you going?")

Reply



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