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Here is my sentence.

In our work, this is accomplished by identifying a feature line as a step-edge and the orthogonal residuals of the edge points to the fitted line.

My question is whether the term identifying is referring to both feature line and orthogonal residuals? Because I am not sure whether this tells my real idea and I want to say;

.... by identifying a feature line as a step-edge and identifying (finding) the orthogonal residuals of the edge ....

In this case, can I omit the second identifying?.

Comments are most welcome

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  • Without the second identifying, I must think carefully what is (or are) the result(s) of identifying. This might be a burden for your readers, especially if they don't know about your project before and just jump right into the page. So, why punish the readers?
    – Damkerng T.
    Jan 23, 2014 at 22:38
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    You might omit the second identifying; but as the sentence stands you should not use that verb. The English expression identify A to B means tell B who A is, as in He identified the President to me.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Jan 23, 2014 at 22:57
  • @StoneyB: that mean, I should use another word for second case like finding. Is that you are telling or remove identifying from the whole sentence and use a word e.g. finding once only?
    – gnp
    Jan 23, 2014 at 23:13
  • I don't really understand what you mean by "identifying (or finding) the residuals ... to the fitted line." There are too many technical details here for me to advise you what you should do.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Jan 24, 2014 at 0:02
  • @StoneyB: actually, I work with point data. so, after identifying an edge, we are computing orthogonal distance between each point to the line passing through the edge points (say fitted line).
    – gnp
    Jan 24, 2014 at 0:18

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What seems natural to me is "In our work, this is accomplished by identifying both a feature line as a step-edge and the orthogonal residuals of the edge points to the fitted line." The "both" makes it clear that the reader or listener should expect two objects to relate to "identifying".

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