There you go, the entire post is in the title. You can stop reading now if you want.

Some people still use data as the plural of datum (which is technically true), but then write something like “The data were crazy.” I believe that syntax like this makes the writer sound crazy, not the data–even if it is mandated by a house publishing style.

I think of “data” as a count noun; yes, there are multitudes of data points but they can be treated as one entity. Something more along the lines of “data set” rather than “chickens.”

“The chickens were crazy” totally works, you know.

To make sure that I’m not crazy, I ran a dictionary-check to be sure.

Mirriam Webster agrees that it’s “the data is plentiful,” not “the data are plentiful.”

This distinction has come up in my professional life a few times in the past few weeks, as some of the academic administrators who write about my job area love the make themselves sound smart. Apparently one strategy is to use data as plural when it doesn’t work.

Now I have ammo to fight against it, and so do you.

#PromoteSanity