Overuse of "respectively"?

[Pamela]

It is not unusual to see "respectively" used as follows:

"production due to the relative contributions of amino acids,
lipids and gut microbiota is estimated to be 50%, 25%, and
25%, respectively"

It often doesn't seem necessary as there's no ambiguity without it. Is
the sentence above an example of its overuse or must it be there?

[Paul Wolff]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2021, at 13:06:39, Pamela posted:

If it's not there, the sentence is capable of more than one
interpretation. I would always have used 'respectively' in that sentence
when I was writing technical/legal documents. We don't want to invite
expensive litigation when one extra word can prevent it from the start.
--
Paul

[Lewis]

In message <XnsAD12855...@144.76.35.252> Pamela <pamela.priv...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It is not unusual to see "respectively" used as follows:

> "production due to the relative contributions of amino acids,
> lipids and gut microbiota is estimated to be 50%, 25%, and
> 25%, respectively"

Makes perfect sense to me.

> It often doesn't seem necessary as there's no ambiguity without it. Is
> the sentence above an example of its overuse or must it be there?

It makes it clear that the order of the first list matches the order of
the second list. I think it is common to make that explicit in technical
writing.


--
I think we need to send some time apart so we know what's real and what's fox.

[Pamela]

That sentence would have to be written very perversely if the
numbers were not in the right order.

In fact I have never come across an instance when the figures were not
in the same order as the list of items they describe.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

I guess you've never checked drafts written (in English) by French people.


--
Athel -- British, living in France for 34 years

[Paul Wolff]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2021, at 16:06:43, Pamela
<pamela.priv...@gmail.com> posted:

If you're an expert witness who has been called in the law suit, you may
give that last sentence in your evidence. You'd need to expand on your
grounds as to the opinion you expressed in your first sentence - and why
you as an expert think you know the "right" order.

The sentence doesn't explicitly say what the contributions of amino
acids, lipids and microbiota are relative to, nor how many independent
estimates were made to give the three values for their joint
contributions, nor...

--
Paul

[Quinn C]

* Paul Wolff:

> If you're an expert witness who has been called in the law suit, you may
> give that last sentence in your evidence.

"Law suit" is about as expected as "fire arm". For a short moment, I
wondered if it's an item of clothing worn in court.

Wiktionary labels it "archaic". Do you actively used this spelling, or
was that an accident?

--
Canada is not the United States. We can't just thump the table
and demand things, and expect everyone to fall in line. We have
to work with other people.
-- Jeffrey Lewis

[Paul Wolff]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2021, at 12:41:17, Quinn C
<lispa...@crommatograph.info> posted:

>* Paul Wolff:
>
>> If you're an expert witness who has been called in the law suit, you may
>> give that last sentence in your evidence.
>
>"Law suit" is about as expected as "fire arm". For a short moment, I
>wondered if it's an item of clothing worn in court.
>
>Wiktionary labels it "archaic". Do you actively used this spelling, or
>was that an accident?
>

I didn't give it any thought. 'Law suit' was shorter than 'litigation'
and I'm not sure that 'lawsuit' is very British. I've never needed it in
practice. "We shall file proceedings forthwith" is more the sort of
thing I'm used to.
--
Paul

[semir...@my-deja.com]

In my opinion it is not strictly necessary, neither is it overuse.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

If there are only two items I often omit "respectively" if it's
obvious. With more than two I prefer to rephrase the sentence so that
it's not needed. Native speakers don't usually try to use
"respectively" to set up a one-to-one correspondence between a list of
six items with one of seven items.

[Peter T. Daniels]

There must be a widely used English textbook in Germany that tells
them to translate "bzw." with "respectively." It's almost always wrong,
and it's astonishingly hard to break them of the habit.