Noun-string Pre-modification in Technical English Writing
Duan Ping · Chinese Science & Technology Translators Journal · 2010
Owing to a huge amount of information in modern science and technology,technical writers should write in a way that is made easy for readers to understand in order to improve reading efficiency.Noun-string pre-modification may cause ambiguous relationship between the words in a phrase,and apparent confusion among pre-modifying nouns and the modified subject,object or predicative,which may cause our brain to repeatedly adjust the process of word-group recognition and thus reduce the reading speed.These problems,however,can be solved by inserting a hyphen between related pre-modifiers and by changing pre-modifiers into post modifiers.