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Matthew Bin is <<... wondering about the use of hyphens in
medical/scientific writing. I tend to overuse them but that's because they
don't tend to need the overuse in my usual writing.>>
"Overuse" is a loaded term with hyphens. Szechuan cooks overuse pepper from
the Western perspective, but it wouldn't be Szechaun cooking without all
that pepper. Yum! As a HARPy (charter member of Hyphens Are Readers' Pals
<g>), I'm obviously in favor of hyphens that clarify the meaning of a
phrase. But in scientific writing, it's easy to run into so many frontloaded
stacks of nouns and adjectives that the sentence would require more hyphens
than words for clarity... kinda like using habanero or Scotch bonnets when
the recipe calls for paprika.
<<So what's a useful rule of thumb for phrases like cholesterol
loaded/cholestorol-loaded? I remember the scientific community (well one
Ph.D. student) disliking my liberal use of the hyphen; am I justified?>>
As a compound adjective, it's clear that the hyphen is helpful; it's
possibly unnecessary, but it can't hurt, and following the Hippocratic
principle of hyphenation (first, do no harm), I'd almost certainly use it..
As an adverb (x is cholesterol-loaded), the situation is more equivocal, but
given that the two words are clearly acting as a single word, it makes sense
to join them with a hyphen; that's a standard English convention.
Your PhD student, like many scientist writers, has almost certainly absorbed
certain standard wordings to the point that they don't even notice when
something is awkward anymore. Alternatively, if s/he is like most
scientists, writing is on their top 5 "most hated" tasks, and they've
probably spent the minimum possible time honing their writing skills; that
makes them a little hypersensitive at times about being corrected. In my
experience, though, most scientists (by no means all) happily accept a
better way of writing something once they see it. So it's generally worth
trying.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite
of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."--Niels Bohr,
physicist (1885-1962)
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