Grammar

[Simon]

For anything grammatical, including appropriate word choice.

[Simon]

Less versus fewer

The traditional answer is that fewer is for countable things (sheep, people, days, apples,…) and less is for things you can’t count (water, excitement, pain, work, …). That is still my default answer and is the safe choice.

Grammar Girl is usually a good source for this sort of writing information, and there you’ll find some useful exceptions to the ‘is it countable?’ rule.

In reality, the distinction between less and fewer is not quite so clear and you can argue either way.

A general rule

When writing scientifically, the last thing you want is your reader fixating on your English usage instead of the actual content that you are trying to communicate. So, play it safe and follow conventions. If in doubt, find another construction that avoids tricky word choices that you might get wrong.

[Simon]

That versus which

Examples:

1. The bicycle that I saw yesterday was red.
2. The bicycle, which I saw yesterday, was red.

This one is simple. If the part starting with ‘that‘ or ‘which‘ can be deleted and you still have a sentence that means the same thing, then it’s optional and you should use ‘which‘. If you can’t delete it, then it’s obligatory and you should use ‘that‘.

In Example 1, I am distinguishing between the bicycle that I saw yesterday and some other possible bicycles (perhaps one that I saw today). In Example 2, there is only one possible bicycle that I could be talking about. I could have not told you about seeing it yesterday and would still have communicated the same meaning: that it is red.

Another way to make the distinction is that clauses with ‘that’ are restrictive: they narrow down the scope of what you are talking about. Clauses with ‘which’ just add optional extra information without doing that: they are ‘nonrestrictive’.

Because the ‘which’ version is optional information, you will usually want to put some commas around it, as in the second example above.

As usual, Grammar Girl explains it well.

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