Hello Everyone,

Thank you very much for your “coronavirus words and phrases. This is the biggest burst of activity on the mailing list that I’ve seen. However, academic writing is so much more than words and phrases.

Indeed, I’d like to shock you all here and say that actually I’m not very interested in a corpus of academic words. I’m primarily interested in what things mean.

For example, conceptually, the doubling time of the number of cases of coronavirus has close similarities with compound interest, the halving time of the number of cases of coronavirus follows the same pattern as the half-life of radioactive elements, and the distance we stand from each other to prevent infection is just another form of Isaac Newton’s gravitational inverse square law.

These distinctly numerical, non-linguistic concepts do not depend on words and phrases but stream out from economics and science into the natural world, through people’s everyday lives and then, beyond the stratosphere, into space.

The famous British World War I poet Wilfred Owen put this non-linguistic otherness very well. He did not say of his poetry that the poetry was in the words. He said that the poetry was in the pity, and by this he meant the pity for all the humanity that was lost in the Great War.

He himself died a few days before the end of the War and did not live to experience the influenza pandemic that occurred soon afterwards. If he had been alive today he might have said that the poetry might well be in the pity, but that the pity is in the numbers. For us, the pity is not in politicians’ speeches, media reports, journalistic essays or even the words used to describe the Lockdown or social/physical distancing. It is in the fact that every single number we hear about represents a person and a significant proportion of people represented by those numbers have lost their lives.

So rather than sending you words and phrases I’m sending you something else.

I’ve attached an Excel spreadsheet of the COVID-19 case numbers that I have forced myself to collect while in Lockdown and the mathematics that (as a non-mathematician) I’ve forced myself to understand.

I have chosen to collect case numbers rather than deaths because such numbers allow us to predict ahead and decide on good strategies to prevent further outbreaks or future pandemics. It will be these things that will influence the academic writing advice that I will give to any academics studying how to prevent and control pandemics in the future. This is because that without the numbers and an understanding of what those numbers mean, even a vast corpus of words will not be enough.

Please feel free to look at the attached Excel File and then maybe we can talk about the meaning and how it might influence academic writing. I’ve left the file as an Excel File rather than a pdf so that you can include your own numbers* if you wish. If you would like me to explain any aspect of the mathematics then I would be happy to do so.

Stay safe and well.

With very best wishes,

Susan Mitchell

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