MPH 599 Week 1 Writing Habit Post Example

Week 1 Discussion: Initial Post

"It Was Observed That": Six Years of Restaurant Inspection Reports and the Sentence Habit I Am Bringing Into Graduate Writing

Initial Post

The habit, named as an object. For six years I inspected restaurants as an environmental health specialist in Larkin County, an invented county standing in for the real one. My writing habit is the sentence that hides its actor behind a passive verb and a stack of nouns: "It was observed that hand sink accessibility was obstructed by food storage containers." No one does anything in that sentence. The inspector observed, the cook stacked boxes, the sink was blocked, but the grammar says none of it. When I went through the two papers I wrote last term, I found the frame "it was observed that" or "it was noted that" 23 times in about 4,000 words, and many sentences with three or four nouns in a row, such as "employee illness reporting policy documentation."

The setting that trained it. Inspection reports are legal documents. They may be read by an owner's lawyer or quoted at a hearing, so we were trained to write in a way that sounds neutral and avoids saying who did what. Passive voice protected us: "was observed" put the inspector out of the sentence, and "was obstructed" put the cook out of it too. That style served the job. It does not serve a graduate paper, where the reader needs to know who acted and what happened.

What It Costs at Graduate Level

The cost is clarity and length. Williams and Bizup (2017) argue that readers understand a sentence most easily when its characters appear as subjects and their actions appear as verbs; my habit turns actions into nouns and removes the characters. In my last paper, a sentence about restaurant inspections read: "Inconsistency in inspector scoring practices was identified as a factor in reduced reliability of inspection outcomes." A clearer version would be: "Inspectors scored restaurants differently, so a score depended partly on who did the inspection." The second is shorter, and it says what the first only gestures at. The point matters in my subject area: a Tennessee study of more than 167,000 inspections found that individual inspectors' mean scores ranged from 69 to 92 (Jones et al., 2004), a finding I would want to state plainly, not bury.

The Change, Stated So It Can Be Checked

This term I will cut "it was observed that" and its relatives to zero in graded work, and I will keep noun stacks to two nouns in a row. Anyone can check both by searching my papers. I will report the counts in my week 8 revision memo.

A Question for the Group

Which habits did your last job train into your writing? I suspect nurses, case managers and lab staff all have their own report language, and I would like to know whether others found theirs as hard to see as I did.

Reply to Jasmine

Jasmine, you wrote that your writing is "too wordy." Could you find one construction that causes it? You mention that your nursing notes always began with "Patient states that." If your papers begin many sentences with "Research states that," that would be a pattern you could count and change, which "wordy" is not.

Reply to Omar

Omar, I like that you named a specific habit: starting paragraphs with a long background clause before the main point. You say it comes from writing grant reports. Did those reports reward the background-first order? If so, your change might be to move one sentence, the claim, to the start of each paragraph, which would be easy to check.

References

Jones, T. F., Pavlin, B. I., LaFleur, B. J., Ingram, L. A., & Schaffner, W. (2004). Restaurant inspection scores and foodborne disease. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 10(4), 688-692. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid1004.030343

Williams, J. M., & Bizup, J. (2017). Style: Lessons in clarity and grace (12th ed.). Pearson.