As for all the “rules” articles, this paper contains much useful advice. However, what we really need is a “rules” paper with this title:

“Ten simple rules for avoiding the noun-train plague.”

This “plague” has absolutely blossomed in scientific writing this century.

Two-element noun trains (e.g. “water temperature”) don’t generate parsing challenges. But the title of this paper has a 4-element noun train (“career development award proposal”). There can be only one real noun here, viz. “proposal”, so as one reads this lengthy noun train, the mental parsing algorithm keeps having to backtrack to change what appeared to be nouns into adjectives. This can be a challenging parsing exercise for native-English speakers … it must be much more difficult for scientists whose first language is not English.

Why not put the real noun right up front, following the verb (where it belongs) and hyphenate the remaining noun train … the hyphen is a valuable clue that states “these two nouns are really adjectives). We’d then have:

“Ten simple rules for writing a proposal for a career-development award.”

No parsing miscues such as “writing career” or “writing development” … the verb “writing” is followed immediately by the real noun … proposal.

Scientific writing would be much more intelligible if noun trains of length >2 were banned and if authors would resurrect the valuable preposition “of”.

Steve Smith
Biology
University of Waterloo