Noun piles

This is a "Tip of the Day" I sent to my research group yesterday on the topic of noun piles. That is, the sometimes undesirability of using nouns as adjectives.

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Dear Group,

As many of you know, I believe that the overuse of nouns to modify other nouns (noun piles) makes prose difficult to read. I’ve taken an excerpt from one of our recent articles and artificially loaded one version with noun piles of the type I often see in inexperienced writing. The other version is the published original which passed my test for readability. Before I say which is which, please decide for yourself which one is easier to understand. Then, go through your own writing, look for noun piles, and sort them all out. (It’s not a noun pile if the brain reads it as a single word, e.g., flow rate, pepperoni pizza. Those are okay.)

Cheers,

Darren 

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Example 1

The glass transition temperature (Tg) is a second-order phase transition that ultimately describes the thermally activated chain reorganization in the polymer specimen amorphous domains. A density vs temperature plot exhibits a slope change in the vicinity of Tg (Figure 6). Similarly, a heat flow vs temperature plot measured by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) reveals a heat capacity increase. Below Tg, a polymer is said to be glassy; above the Tg, it is rubbery. In a purely amorphous sample (e.g., atactic polystyrene), the material flows readily above its Tg. A semicrystalline sample above its Tg, but below crystalline domain melting temperature (Tm), exists as an ordinary time scale solid and is said to be in its elastomeric state. The position of the polymer Tg relative to its operating temperature is thus an important polymer mechanical property predictor. The Tg also influences the polymer solid state morphological stability, which can be problematic if the most conducive to device performance morphology is not the most thermodynamically stable one. Composite system devices, e.g., bulk heterojunction solar cells, can phase separate with deleterious consequences if operated above their Tg. The requirement that a bulk heterojunction solar cell have a morphologically stable high Tg and a mechanically stable low Tg is another competing criterion. For an account of the Tg role in photovoltaic device operation and stability, see the comprehensive review by Muller.

Example 2

The glass transition temperature (Tg ) is a second-order phase transition that ultimately describes the thermally activated reorganization of chains in the amorphous domains of a polymer specimen. A plot of density vs temperature exhibits a change in slope in the vicinity of Tg  (Figure 6). Similarly, a plot of heat flow vs temperature measured by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) reveals an increase in heat capacity. Below Tg , a polymer is said to be glassy; above the Tg , it is rubbery. In a purely amorphous sample (e.g., atactic polystyrene), the material flows readily above its Tg. A semicrystalline sample above its Tg, but below the temperature at which its crystalline domains melt (Tm), exists as a solid at ordinary time scales and is said to be in its elastomeric state. The position of the Tg of a polymer relative to its operating temperature is thus an important predictor of the mechanical properties of a polymer. The Tg also influences the morphological stability of the solid state of the polymer, which can be problematic if the morphology that is most conducive to device performance is not the most thermodynamically stable one. Devices based on composite systems, e.g., bulk heterojunction solar cells, can phase separate with deleterious consequences if operated above their Tg. The requirement that a bulk heterojunction solar cell have a high Tg for morphological stability and a low Tg  for mechanical stability is another competing criterion. For an account of the role of Tg in the operation and stability of organic photovoltaic devices, see the comprehensive review by Muller.