Think about what you write

Sometimes you can cast a perfectly grammatical sentence that is still wrong. I call this the hard part of writing.

Here’s an example of a bad sentence I just got from The New York Times, on their Personal Tech page, in an article about speakers. The culprit is the second sentence.

The options with fuller sound — the kind I’m looking for — need to be plugged into the wall. Still, they do not need wires to connect to the source of the music, creating a permanent state of cord spaghetti.

Are you instantly sure what the writer is saying? You had to switch gears when you read about creating a tangle right after reading about not needing wires. Part of the problem is that it’s so far from the negative statement (they do not need) to the result (spaghetti). That big long clause between (wires to connect…music) happens to be a non-existent condition. The writer matched the non-existent part with the result. This sentence should have matched the negativity or lack of it in the beginning and end of the sentence. Here are two somewhat better ways to write it. I like the second one more, because now all three parts are positive.

Still, they do not need wires to connect to the source of the music, which helps prevent a permanent state of cord spaghetti.

Still, if they had wires connected to the source of the music, it would create a permanent state of cord spaghetti.

Now you don’t get that jolt from having to figure out what he meant. I’m surprised the editor didn’t catch it.

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My third! (The other two were a long time ago, from the Society for Technical Communication for some software manuals). The Writing Rag’s official address is Newark, Delaware, and I’ve seen plaques from this organization in assorted businesses over the years, and apparently the competition among restaurants for these awards is lively. So I think it’s legit. At least it’s not my name in a book that I have to buy if I want to see it. They do sell the plaques, but I have no place to put one, so I’ll pass.

Here’s the press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Writing Rag Receives 2013 Best of Newark Award

Newark Award Program Honors the Achievement

NEWARK December 4, 2013 — The Writing Rag has been selected for the 2013 Best of Newark Award in the Editing category by the Newark Award Program.

Each year, the Newark Award Program identifies companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and our community. These exceptional companies help make the Newark area a great place to live, work and play.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2013 Newark Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the Newark Award Program and data provided by third parties.

About Newark Award Program

The Newark Award Program is an annual awards program honoring the achievements and accomplishments of local businesses throughout the Newark area. Recognition is given to those companies that have shown the ability to use their best practices and implemented programs to generate competitive advantages and long-term value.

The Newark Award Program was established to recognize the best of local businesses in our community. Our organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations and other business advertising and marketing groups. Our mission is to recognize the small business community’s contributions to the U.S. economy.

SOURCE: Newark Award Program

I found two nits to pick: “those” where “the” will do, and a missing Oxford comma. Hey, if I’m such a good editor…

A recent article in The Register criticized Google’s Eric Schmidt for, among other things, his (lack of) ability as a technical writer. Since this blog is mainly about expository writing, of which technical writing is a subset, I feel a need to share. Here’s the passage I’m referring to:

…Schmidt goes on to show he’s not conversant with the gentle art of technical writing with procedures that use inconsistent verbs, fail to open each step of a procedure with an active verb and make assumptions that lead to user-befuddling ambiguities.

Gentle art, eh? I’m flattered. Eric’s instructions are too long to quote here (you can find a link them in the article), but the criticisms mentioned in the quote above are worth noting for your own writing.

Inconsistent verbs…active verb. I’m not sure what the writer is referring to here, but when you write instructions, you should use the imperative. Do not say “Please.” Give one instruction per step. Tell the result of following the instruction correctly. (Do not write the result as a separate step!)

User-befuddling ambiguities. Ambiguity is the bane of technical writing. You should write so your material is interpreted exactly one way. Have someone follow your instructions. If they get something wrong, fix the writing. Do not whack the person upside the head for being stupid.

Tech writing has a lot more features, and I saw several other tech writing mistakes in Eric’s material, but I won’t go into them here.

Now in Eric’s defense, he is not a technical writer. He’s an extremely successful businessman with lots of money. (Warning: shameless plug ahead) If his intent is to write a good set of instructions (and not a marketing piece disguised as tech writing) maybe he should hire (ahem) a good technical writer to write the instructions for him.

Eric Schmidt. Image credit: AP

For post 100, I copied a passage of some really fine writing from a comic strip named Pibgorn by Brooke McEldowney.  This is post 200, and I’ll descend to the other end of the continuum, pirate talk. Two days ago (Sept 19) was Talk Like a Pirate day, but I already had a post in the hopper for then, and besides, this is post 200.

First, then, a bit of linguistics. (We gotta be scholarly, y’know.) The traditional accent we all associate with the romance of 18th century pirates is roughly the brogue from Cornwall, or the southwest of England. I think this was most strongly promulgated by Disney’s version of Treasure Island several decades ago, but it might have appeared in some earlier movies, too. Be that as it may, to my mind the epitome of pirate talk is the strong “arr” sound and “be” and “me” instead of “is” and “my” as spoken by Long John Silver in the Disney movie. I read the book , by the way, and there’s quite a bit more adventure in the book than in the movie. But I digress.

Robert Newton as Long John Silver

Here’s a quote from a review (which gets the name of the day wrong):

He was deeply alcoholic and delivered a performance of such swivel-eyed, bizarrely-accented, scenery-chewing lunacy that he not only stole the entire film but also created a character that almost immediately defined the physical, sartorial and verbal attributes of a pirate.

Second, real pirates, especially modern ones, are bad people as far as we law-abiding folks go. Yes, the older version in the sailing ships had a decent civil structure on their ships, more egalitarian than most people realize, but they nonetheless did not conform to most of our cultural norms (read They were pretty bloodthirsty.). And there was a class of semi-legal pirate types called privateers, who had loyalty to a particular country and tended to concentrate on raiding their country’s enemies’ ships. Talk Like a Pirate day is all in fun, and has no more actual connection to real pirates than having  kids go trick-or-treating on Halloween has to do with Satanism and real demons.

Third, if you’re going to speak like a pirate, you should get it right. Women are “me beauty.” It’s “arr,” not “arg” and not “yarr.” And a friend is “matey,” pronounced “maitey.” If you want to look into it a bit more, here’s a link to the official TLAP site.

Fourth, pirate jokes. Of course my favorites are wordplay, that capitalize on the strong pirate “arr.” A pirate’s favorite vegetable is arrrrtichokes, and they fight best in the arrrmy. You get the idea. A fellow by the name of Doug Savage produced a couple comics about pirates that feature chickens. And you all know the joke about the pirate with a peg leg, a hook, and an eye patch. When asked for how he got them all, he described horrific battles for losing his leg and his hand, but lost his eye because of some seagull poop. It seems he wasn’t yet used to having the hook.

And that, me matey, be all I have to say about pirates.

Someone recently sent me a link to a grammar site. Here’s the link: http://smyword.com/2010/01/are-you-stupid-enough-to-use-leverage-as-a-verb/

The writer (I confess I have looked at only this page in the website) waxes vitriolic against the tendency of people to use adjectives and other parts of speech as verbs, in this case the adjective leverage. He (I think it’s a he) insists that you should use the verb lever instead.

English is a language that uses word order as a strong indicator of what part of speech you are using, and it has long used nouns and other parts of speech as verbs. We could use inflections, but those have fallen somewhat into disuse over the centuries. Back in the days of classical Greek, you could put the words in pretty much whatever order you wanted, and your reader could sort out the meaning of the sentence by looking at the word endings. But I digress. Remind me to tell you about chiasmus sometime.

So yes, the purists have a right to point out that we have a perfectly good verb in the word lever (which, ahem, also happens to be a noun) and hence using leverage as a verb shouldn’t be necessary.

Linguistics has a principle that every language is sufficient. That is, in every language you can say anything you need to say. A bushman language might not have any words for subatomic particles, but they don’t need to talk about subatomic particles. If their situation changed, the speakers of that language would figure out a way to say what they need regarding this new topic. The language would grow, and the language would remain complete. The French Academy hates this, by the way.

Back to leveraging. We English speakers needed a way to be more metaphorical about using a lever. To lever something as insubstantial as, say, a business environment, was too literal to feel right, so we stepped back a bit from the verb, and made the adjective into a verb. Viola! English grows a little, and remains sufficient.

On a slightly different topic, recently I ran into this use of a proper name as a verb. I get the meaning, and I don’t think we have a normal verb that contains the implications so succinctly set forth here:

You guys are going to Darwin yourselves out of the breeding pool soon enough, without my contribution, so enjoy your indignation while you’re still ambulatory and breathing.

So do you have a favorite neologism that you love to hate?