Sunday, January 03, 2010
Listening to Braille
The New York Times has a long article about how technology is changing the lives of the blind and how they read. In particularly many blind and visually impaired people no longer feel the need to learn Braille. However, is this having an effect on their literacy as learning a language by reading it and listening to it are very different?
A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report. The figures are controversial because there is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight” for Braille and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because of premature births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report has inspired a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and illiterate,” Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our nation’s blind children how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to learn the beauty and shape and structure of language.”
Labels: language, technology
Friday, January 01, 2010
Banished words for 2010
The English department at Lake Superior State University in Sault Michigan continues its tradition of publishing a list of words that should be banned from the language. Among them are shovel-ready, transparent, app, and friend (as a verb).
Labels: language
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Financial Times glossary
Here's a good glossary of financial terms from London's Financial Times. I'll be bookmarking this at work.
Labels: economics and finance, language
Monday, October 05, 2009
What happened here?
Here's a good example of an editor who fell asleep at the keyboard, or perhaps they were too cheap to hire an editor. "HP's
ultrathin laptop sheds hazardous material". The first thing I thought when I read that headline was that they'd come up with an asbestos-coated laptop and it was shedding bits of asbestos all over the environment. Of course, what they meant was that HP eliminated hazardous materials when they designed the laptop.
ultrathin laptop sheds hazardous material". The first thing I thought when I read that headline was that they'd come up with an asbestos-coated laptop and it was shedding bits of asbestos all over the environment. Of course, what they meant was that HP eliminated hazardous materials when they designed the laptop.
Labels: language
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Harlan Ellison reading "I will not read your fuckking script"
Recently, the Village Voice published an article by Josh Olson called "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script", explaining, in precise and explicit detail, why he won't read other writer's scripts. Steve Jarrett was inspired to turn it into a poem, and a twisted homage to Dr. Suess. Here it's read, with glee and delightful emphasis by Harlan Ellison. Obviously NSFW if you are listening on speakers. It's also one of the funniest things I've heard in months.
Update: I've fixed the link to Ellison't reading. Sorry.
I will not read your fucking script
I will not read it in a car
I will not read it in a bar
I will not have it in my house
I will not click it with my mouse
I will not read it here or there
I will not read it anywhere
I'd rather be tied up and whipped
Than have to read your fucking script
Update: I've fixed the link to Ellison't reading. Sorry.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Analysing a car manual
Here's a very funny lexical analysis of a car manual - just what is the writer of the manual really telling us and what can we learn from his or her word choices?
The Knee Impact Bolsters help protect the knees and position you for the
best interaction with the airbag.
You don't know it, but all the time you're sitting there staring into space
you're being positioned for an "interaction" with the airbag. In
anticipation of this explosive event, the Knee Impact Bolster performs a
kind of foreplay on you, whispering intimately, "Move your leg a little
bit. No, higher. There. That's better."
The manual goes on about airbags, rightly sensing that their recent mention
in the news calls for reassurance. Airbags can abrade you when they
inflate, and the language on this subject hits just the right tone:
The abrasions are similar to friction rope burns or those you might get
sliding along a carpet or gymnasium floor.
The chumminess disarms us, taking us right back to our school days. It
seems to say, "Remember the time big-mouth Sally dared you to slide down
the rope in the gym and you were still mad about what she told Judy at the
party so you slid down fast just to show her? Remember the rope burn you
got? That's what an airbag abrasion feels like."
Labels: language, technical communication, usability
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Everybody needs an editor
As David Farbey points out, everybody needs an editor - especially if you're Sarah Palin. Farbey's post is a good overview of the different types of editing, and why they're necessary.
Many people think that all an editor needs to do is to proofread their otherwise perfect prose. This sort of work, checking spelling and punctuation, and checking that a manuscript conforms to house styles and conventions, is the work of the copy-editor. A different function is performed by a researcher or fact-checker. In the Vanity Fair example, someone has checked which President had said, or not said, something memorable, which clearly hadn’t been done by Ms. Palin or her staff. Not checking facts can get writers into serious trouble, particularly if they mis-quote someone, give an incorrect attribution, or get facts wrong.
The most obvious corrections in the Vanity Fair are not copy-editing or fact checking, but are more substantive edits. Someone has taken the trouble to improve the style, clarity and vocabulary of the original speech while doing their best to maintain the meaning and intention of the original author. This is the most difficult and perhaps the most important type of editing, which helps an author express their ideas in a clear and unambiguous way. The editor can also ensure that the resulting article is written in a way that is most suitable for the intended audience.
Labels: language, technical communication
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
User interface style guides
Here's a compreshensive list of user interface style guides, including guides from Apple, Microsoft, and Sun, as well as guides for various operating systems and classes of devices (such as mobile phones).
Labels: language, technical communication, usability
Thursday, August 06, 2009
IBM Style Guide 2009
Back in my first full-time technical writing job, I worked for a company called SEI that mostly did work for IBM. As a consequence, I got a copy of the IBM Style Guide, which I still have (mostly for sentimental value). IBM has changed it's writing technology and writing style since them (think DITA), and their style guide has been updated as a result. If you want a copy, you can download the PDF from the The Writer's Rough Guide to Everything Flare blog.
If you'd rather have a web-based style guide for reference, the blog also has links to the Economist's and Guardian's style guides.
If you'd rather have a web-based style guide for reference, the blog also has links to the Economist's and Guardian's style guides.
Labels: language, technical communication
Friday, July 31, 2009
Using Wolfram Alpha as a writing tool
Wolfram Alpha many unique features, but one of the more interesting is its ability to work with words. For example, type in "words ending in ology" and you'll get a list of 122 words, including aetiology, auxology, and campanology, to name just three that I'd never heard of.
The Wolfram Alpha blog has an article about what Wolfram Alpha knows about words. It looks like we have another handy tool for writers.
The Wolfram Alpha blog has an article about what Wolfram Alpha knows about words. It looks like we have another handy tool for writers.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Wordnik - a useful language resource
Research Buzz points out a useful new language resource called WordNik. For any word you enter, it gives definitions, examples, related words, images, and usage statistics, and more - all on one neat page. This is going into my Links bar.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
World Wide Words
World Wide Words is a web site collecting article about words and language written by Michael Quinion - more than 2100 in all. If you like words for their own sake, then you'll love this site. I could spend hours browsing through this - it's the most interesting language site I've come across in a long time and every bit as interesting as my current standard in language books - Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, but Quinion, being British, has a rather different slant on language than the American editor's of Merriam's. Just to give you a taste, here's part of the entry for blatherskate:
This is actually a Scots word, really a pair of words, known from the seventeenth century on. These days, though, it’s more American than either British or Scots. That came about through one of those curious accidents of linguistic history that make the study of etymology such fun.
Both halves of the word seem to be from Old Norse. Blether is a Scots word meaning loquacious claptrap, which comes from Old Norse blathra, to talk nonsense; it exists in various forms now, such as blather or blither (if you call someone a blithering idiot, as people in Britain often did in my youth, you’re using the same word, though most of the meaning had by then been leached out of it). Skate (skite, as Australians and New Zealanders will know it) is more problematic, but is the Scots word for a person held in contempt because of his boasting, which may derive from an Old Norse word meaning to shoot (and, if true, is probably the origin of the American skeet, as in skeet shooting, so that phrase actually means “shoot shooting”).
Labels: language
Friday, June 05, 2009
Plain language suggestions
There have been several US government initiatives to ensure that plain language is used in legislation, on web sites, and in government documents. There's a good web site devoted to plain language in government. One of the more useful resources is a long list words and phrases with their suggested replacements. I've been compiling my own list over the years (now posted on our corporate wiki), but this is more comprehensive.
Labels: language
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Trimestigus
Here's a poem, Trimestigus, by Richard Wilbur that appeared recently in the New Yorker. Hermes Trimestigus was the messenger of the Egyptian gods. Here's the first stanza:
Trismegistus
Oh Egypt, Egypt — so the great lament
Of thrice-great Hermes went —
Nothing of thy religion shall remain
Save fables, which thy children shall disdain.
His grieving eye foresaw
The world’s bright fabric overthrown
Which married star to stone
And charged all things with awe.
Labels: language
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Tech writers and presscriptive grammar
Bruce Byfield has a long article about the history of prescriptive grammar and what it means for technical writers.
Some are afraid to break the rules of grammar and risk being denounced as incompetent. A handful, smugly sure that they know the rules, use their rote learning of the rules as an ad hominem attack, nitpicking at typos and small errors to discredit writers without disproving their viewpoints. Most sit in the middle, haunted by the ghosts of childhood grammar classes until they can hardly tell on their own authority whether they are writing well or not. But underlying all these reactions is an attitude that rules are rules, and cannot be broken.
This attitude is usually known as a prescriptive approach to grammar. It assumes that grammar exists mainly to tell us how to speak or write properly--not well. It is an attitude that tech writers share with almost everybody in the English-speaking world. It is a form of conditioning that begins in kindergarten and continues through high school and even into college and university. It undermines nearly everyone's confidence in their ability to communicate, especially on paper. Yet it is especially harmful to professional writers for at least three reasons:
* It grotesquely exaggerates the importance of grammar. Although competence in grammar is sometimes proof of other writing skills, it stresses presentation over content. Even worse, it stresses correctness over precision, conciseness, or clarity.
* It binds writers to viewpoints that are not only arbitrary and obsolete, but, in some cases, far from their own opinions.
* It undermines writers' confidence and their ability to make decisions about how to communicate effectively.
Labels: language
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Facebook affair and clear English
There's been a lot of controversy recently about Facebook's attempt to redefine its terms of service to something closely approximating "we own you, your children, and your childrens' children for now and forever". Now maybe that's not what they meant to say, but that's more or less what a lot of people thought they were saying.
As this article points out, perhaps some clearer language in their user agreement could have saved everyone a lot of grief.
As this article points out, perhaps some clearer language in their user agreement could have saved everyone a lot of grief.
But Facebook’s about-face might well be a significant victory for the English language, which has been losing a long running battle with the legal profession. Lawyers are trained to give their clients the greatest protection against claims, so they write agreements to grant broad privileges and impose narrow limitations. This came up last week too when the Federal Trade Commission chastised Internet companies for cryptic privacy policies.
Similarly, Facebook’s user agreement didn’t really reflect what it did and didn’t do or plan to do with the information from its users.
“We think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote today. The new version, he promised, “will be written clearly in language everyone can understand.”
Labels: language
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Analysing Obama's sentrence structure
President Obama is certainly one of the best orators of our time. He's blessed with a great voice, but more than that, he understands how to put words and sentences together for maximum effect. It turns out that you can subject his speeches to formal grammatical analysis, with fascinating results.
This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine... or rather, it may be one facet of a larger gift: what Zadie Smith calls "having more than one voice in your ear." Notice the canny way that the sentence above turns on the fulcrum of what may be Obama's favorite word: "but." What appears to be a hard line - "My view is... that nobody is above the law" - turns out to have been a qualifier for a vaguer but more inspiring motto: "I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back." The most controversial part of the sentence - "people should be prosecuted" - gets tucked away, almost parenthetically, in the middle.
It is possible - mistaken, I think, but certainly possible - to dismiss this sentence as a platitudinous non-answer, and if comedians ever overcome their Obama anxiety, this may be his Achilles heel: "The beef, assuming it's in a port wine reduction, sounds, uh, amazing, but on the other hand, given that the chicken is, ah, locally grown, I'd be eager to try it." But to underrate the subtlety and appeal of Obama the communicator is to be out of touch with Americans' hunger to be addressed as adults. Indeed, after "You're with us or you're against us" and "Putin rears his head," such thoughtfulness seems positively worth celebrating.
Friday, February 06, 2009
Tech writer's glossary
Here's a glossary of technical writing terms prepared by docDownload, a site that offers templates in various disciplines. The glossary is very extensive. While most terms will be familiar to writers who have been working in the field for a while, there are quite a few that were new to me. It'll be an invaluable resource for students and beginning writers.
Labels: language, technical communication
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Name the most common English words
Here's a nifty time waster - a web game in which you have 12 minutes to name the 100 most common words in the English language. It's harder than you might think. I'm ashamed to admit that I got a score of only 57.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Style guides for science and engineering
The CyberText Newsletter recently posted a list of links to style guides for science and engineering. These are areas where you really do need a style guide -- the standards for certain types of documents can be very specific and rigorous.
Labels: language, technical communication
Sunday, January 18, 2009
LSSU banished words for 2009
Every year, the English department at Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan publishes a list of words that should be banished from our speech. This year's list includes green, maverick, and bailout.
Labels: language
Saturday, January 17, 2009
The the impotence of proofreading
This video from poet Taylor Mali is hilarious. Don't try drinking coffee or any other liquid while watching this. You have been warned.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
When your spell checker bites back
The problem of a spell checker mistakenly replacing a word you don't want replaced (most often caused by operator error) apparently has a name - a Cupertino, after a tendency of the spell checker in early versions of Microsoft Word to replace cooperation with Cupertino.
Cupertino, the city in California, is best known for hosting the headquarters of Apple Computers. But the term doesn’t come from the firm. The real source is spelling checkers that helpfully include the names of places as well as lists of words. In a notorious case documented by Ms Muller, European writers who omitted the hyphen from co-operation (the standard form in British English) found that their automated checkers were turning it into Cupertino. Being way behind the computing curve, I’m writing this text using Microsoft Word 97, which seems to be the offending software (more recent editions have corrected the error); in that, if you set the language to British English, cooperation does get automatically changed to Cupertino, the first spelling suggestion in the list. For reasons known only to God and to Word’s programmers, the obvious co-operation comes second.
Hence Cupertino effect for the phenomenon and Cupertino for a word or phrase that has been involuntarily transmogrified through ill-programmed computer software unmediated by common sense or timely proofreading.http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/olwy.htm#N5
Labels: language, Microsoft Word
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Tech terms to avoid
David Pogue, the technology writer for the New York Times has assembled a list of technical terms to avoid in your writing. As always, he's worth reading. The list includes several of my pet peeves (functionality, device, user, to name a few).
Functionality. WOW, do I despise this pretentious word. Five syllables--ooh, what a knowledgeable person you must be!
It means "feature." Say "feature."
Labels: language, technology
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
How to write bad
There are many articles on how to write well, but not very many that show you how to write badly. This article, with its examples of bad writing, will help you to avoid elitism in your documentation.
Labels: language, technical communication
Thursday, August 28, 2008
The case for a dynamic English
The Boston Globe has an article presenting the case for English as a dynamic language:
Funner. Impactful. Blowiest. Territorialism. Multifunctionality. Dialoguey. Dancey. Thrifting. Chillaxing. Anonymized. Interestinger. Wackaloon. Updatelette. Noirish. Huger. Domainless. Delegator. Photocentric. Relationshippy. Bestest. Zoomable.
What do all these words have in common? Someone, somewhere, is using them with a disclaimer like "I know it's not a real word..."
There's no good reason for the "not a real word" stigma. They all look like English words: they're written in the roman alphabet, without numbers or funny symbols. They're all easily pronounced -- not a qwrtlg or a gxrch in the group. From a purely functional point of view, they act like words: relationshippy in the sentence "Just come to the conclusion that boys don't like talking about relationshippy things" behaves in exactly the same way that an adjective like girly would. And funner in the sentence "I don't know a better person or a funner person to be around -- I love you, Mom," hinders the understanding of the reader not a jot. We all get that the writer really, really loves her mom, and changing funner to "more fun" wouldn't improve their relationship -- or that heartfelt tribute -- one bit.
Labels: language
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Words the Internet killed
Language is always evolving, but the Internet seems to have hastened this evolution. Many common words now have new meanings.
Word: Friend
Old meaning: Someone you knew, had a personal relationship with, occasionally spoke to, and frequently drank beers with.
New Meaning: Someone who found your email address and typed it into Facebook and/or LinkedIN. You may have met said person at a conference once, and possibly even conversed with for 5 or more minutes.
The Apostrophe Protection Society
I get to correct a lot of grammar and punctuation mistakes in documents (some of which are my own), and one of the more common is apostrophe abuse; for example, using "it's" as a possessive instead of a contraction. It seems I'm not the only one upset by this. The Apostrophe Protection Society exists "with the specific aim of preserving the correct use of this currently much abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the English language." It's clear from their Examples pages that the Society exists to fill a real need by explaining the proper use of this misunderstood punctuation mark.
Labels: language
Friday, August 08, 2008
New York Times corrects its grammar
As a major newspaper, the New York Times has a style manual and an editor in charge of seeing that it's followed. Philip Corbett also writes a weekly column pointing out grammar errors in the newspaper and this article contains excerpts from that column.
It's also worth noting that the NYT online site has a Grammar and Usage page which collects both articles and columns from the newspaper and useful links and resources.
It's also worth noting that the NYT online site has a Grammar and Usage page which collects both articles and columns from the newspaper and useful links and resources.
Labels: language
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
100 new words for Merriam-Webster
Merriam-Webster's has released its list of 100 new words for 2007. As you might expect, technology and geek culture are heavily represented in the list. The word of the year is "wOOt".
John Morse, Merriam-Webster's president and publisher, said the cleverness of many Web-related terms makes them easy to grasp and gives them staying power. Webinar (an online meeting) is new, along with netroots (political grassroots activists who communicate online, especially in blogs).
"There's a kind of collective genius on the part of the people developing this technology, using vocabulary that is immediately accessible to all of us," he said. "It's sometimes absolutely poetic."
Labels: language
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
How English is evolving
English is a very malleable language and over the course of its history has picked up words and grammatical structures from many languages. According to this article from Wired, the next frontier for English will be China.
English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: "How many informations can your flash drive hold?" In Mandarin, Cantonese, and other tongues, sentences don't require subjects, which leads to phrases like this: "Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?"
One noted feature of Singlish is the use of words like ah, lah, or wah at the end of a sentence to indicate a question or get a listener to agree with you. They're each pronounced with tone — the linguistic feature that gives spoken Mandarin its musical quality — adding a specific pitch to words to alter their meaning. (If you say "xin" with an even tone, it means "heart"; with a descending tone it means "honest.") According to linguists, such words may introduce tone into other Asian-English hybrids.
Given the number of people involved, Chinglish is destined to take on a life of its own. Advertisers will play with it, as they already do in Taiwan. It will be celebrated as a form of cultural identity, as the Hong Kong Museum of Art did in a Chinglish exhibition last year. It will be used widely online and in movies, music, games, and books, as it is in Singapore. Someday, it may even be taught in schools. Ultimately, it's not that speakers will slide along a continuum, with "proper" language at one end and local English dialects on the other, as in countries where creoles are spoken. Nor will Chinglish replace native languages, as creoles sometimes do. It's that Chinglish will be just as proper as any other English on the planet.
Labels: language
Sunday, July 06, 2008
The fight against crapspeak
Anyone who's had to read or edit business-press articles is quite familiar with crapspeak - the mangling of the language by marketing professionals. Just think of the terms: stakeholder engagement, going forward, leveraging, stepping up to the plate.
But some people are fighting back.
But some people are fighting back.
More evidence that the worm turns: A positive rebellion is under way in Britain against the worst excesses of crapspeak, that cleverly metaphorical slang that corporate types and bureaucrats like to speak. (You know the guy who must always say “challenges” instead of problems, or “stakeholders” instead of customers; he's proficient in crapspeak.)
Recently, a decree went around to local authorities in England and Wales – town and county councils, mostly – from the body that governs them, forbidding use of a long list of popular crapspeak terms. The Local Government Association sent out a list last week of 100 “non-words” for councils to avoid.
According to The Associated Press, the list exhorted government officials to replace “revenue stream” with income and to avoid cryptic code words such as “coterminosity,” meaning an overlap of administrations.
“Stakeholder engagement” can easily be replaced by “talking to people,” the chairman of the association said.
Labels: language
Monday, March 24, 2008
Simple English Wikipedia
I know a bit about Simplified English and I use Wikipedia quite a bit, but I didn't know that there is a Simple English Wikipedia. Even if you don't use the articles (and there aren't as many as on the main Wikipedia), this article on how to write in simple English may be useful.
Monday, February 11, 2008
What he said
There's been a lot of controversy in the UK in the last few days about comments made by the Archbishop of Canterbury in which he is said to advocate that Britain introduce elements of sharia law. Language Log has taken a look at exactly what he said. Like the poster at Language Log, I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out just what he was saying. This is part of his speech.
From Language Log:
I haven't seen this level of analysis in any of the press articles I've read and the folks at Language Log are to be commended for it.
It is uncomfortably true that this introduces into our thinking about law what some would see as a 'market' element, a competition for loyalty... But if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it seems unavoidable.
From Language Log:
This is the only place that word (unavoidable) appears in the lecture. It is in an adjectival predicative complement to the verb seems (he never said that anything is unavoidable); and it is in a clause preceded by a conditional adjunct ("if what we want..."); and the subject is the anaphoric pronoun "it", which crucially needs an antecedent for its interpretation. He said, for a certain X and Y, "If we want X, then Y seems unavoidable." What is the X, and what is the Y?
Dr Williams' text is intensely complex and difficult on such points; I don't regard it as a model of clarity. But it is crucial to read enough of the context to see that the whole second half of the lecture expounds an idea due to a Jewish legal theorist, Ayelet Shachar, in what he describes as her "highly original and significant monograph", Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2001). The value for Y, the antecedent for the Archbishop's pronoun "it", seems in context to be Shachar's "scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters, so that 'power-holders are forced to compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents'" (the Archbishop cites page 122 of Shachar's book at the point where he gives this characterization). He is following Shachar in envisaging voluntary recourse to quasi-religious tribunals to resolve delimited matters: he mentions marital matters, regulation of financial transactions, and mediation and conflict resolution.
I haven't seen this level of analysis in any of the press articles I've read and the folks at Language Log are to be commended for it.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Examples of unnecessary quotation marks
Having recently struggled to help my daughter with the intricacies of quotation marks and punctuation in a short story, I'm grateful to Tom Johnson for posting the link to The Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks. It's a collection of pictures and doesn't provide rules or guidance, but it's "fun" to look at.
Labels: language
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Another perspective on the LSSU list
Not everyone likes the list of "banned words" compiled by Lake Superior State University. Here's a contrarian perspective from tbe Language Log, inspired by the word, webinar.
What we get from the commenters on the LSSU list (and the characters in Unshelved) is visceral cringe reactions, hostility towards inventiveness and playfulness, disdain for the Internet (as the enemy of thought), and cries to make it all go away. As blogger Grammdaemonium puts it,
Once more Lake Superior State University has released its annual list of words to be banished, and once more it is written in the same drab, condescending tone we find so common among our inferiors.
But it gets publicity for LSSU.
Labels: language
Thursday, January 03, 2008
2008's banned words
Lake Superior State University (perched on a hill across the river from my home town of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario), has issued it's annual list of words that should be banished. For 2008, we should lose perfect storm, organic, and surge, among others.
It's definitely a list to print off and send to your corporate communications department, in a plain brown envelope of course.
It's definitely a list to print off and send to your corporate communications department, in a plain brown envelope of course.
Labels: language
Monday, November 26, 2007
Quotation mark usage in non-English languages
There was an interesting discussion today on the word-pc mailing list about problems with quotation mark usage when working with non-English languages, specifically German. I've never given it much thought, but quotation mark usage is quite different in other languages, (even the characters used can be different) and just changing the language setting in Word may not give the proper results. There's quite a lot more about it in this article on Wikipedia. The article is worth bookmarking if you think you might have to deal with localization or translation at some time in the future.
Labels: language
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
A push for plain English
There's yet another bill in Congress to mandate the use of plain language in government legislation. It doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of passing, but maybe it'll get a few people thinking.
US legislators may want to take a look at the Plain English Manual published by the Australian Government Office of the General Counsel. I'm going to send this one to a few people at work. Chapter 4 is particularly worth reading if you have to deal with anything written by your company's legal department.
To avoid imposing a crushing paperwork burden on agencies, Braley's bill would apply to future documents and would not require agencies to rewrite old forms, letters, publications, notices and instructions.
The bill would not apply to federal regulations, which have been widely criticized through the years for using muddled language. But previous efforts to improve regulation writing have only partially succeeded, because many regulations deal with politically sensitive issues and sometimes are shaped by high-stakes lobbying in Congress and at the White House. Backers may not want them to be too clear.
US legislators may want to take a look at the Plain English Manual published by the Australian Government Office of the General Counsel. I'm going to send this one to a few people at work. Chapter 4 is particularly worth reading if you have to deal with anything written by your company's legal department.
Labels: language
Friday, August 24, 2007
Business dictionary
BusinessDictionary.com has over 20,000 business-related definitions online in over 40 categories. I find it interesting that the category that I'd probably use the most is "Investing and Speculating". Maybe that makes my documentation speculative fiction.
Labels: language
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
How to use English punctutation correctly
Here's yet another guide to English punctuation. It's part of WikiHow, which has several other language-related articles.
Labels: language
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Some new words
Merriam Webster has added some 100 new words to the 2007 edition of the Collegiate dictionary, and some of them are listed on the M-W web site. I knew most of them, but a few, like crunk and chaebol had me baffled.
Labels: language
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Wikipedia style guide list
Most technical writers will own and use at least one style guide and there are quite a few to choose from. Wikipedia has a large list, which groups the guides both by country and industry. The only Canadian-specific guide listed is the York University Style Guide, although there are others - I'll blog my list one of these days.
Despite its academic focus, most writers I know use Chicago Manual of Style
, possibly because it's one of the most comprehensive guides around. I also like Sun's Read Me First! because of its focus on the computer industry. I particularly like IBM's Developing Quality Technical Information because of its focus on minimalism and wealth of examples -- if following the guidelines in this book doesn't improve your writing, nothing will. (It's not on the Wikipedia list - perhaps the authors don't consider it a real style guide).
Despite its academic focus, most writers I know use Chicago Manual of Style
, possibly because it's one of the most comprehensive guides around. I also like Sun's Read Me First! because of its focus on the computer industry. I particularly like IBM's Developing Quality Technical Information because of its focus on minimalism and wealth of examples -- if following the guidelines in this book doesn't improve your writing, nothing will. (It's not on the Wikipedia list - perhaps the authors don't consider it a real style guide).Labels: language, technical communication
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Passive voice
A common mantra among technical writers is that passive voice is to be avoided, but it's use is appropriate in some situations. The use (and misuse) of the passive voice is covered in this article from The Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Labels: language, technical communication
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Another dictionary search engine
MetaGlossary is a web site that offers over two million definitions for words, phrases, and acronyms by crawling other web sites. For words that have multiple meanings (I used "association" as a test), it groups the definitions by meaning (relationship, classes; organization, profit; community, together). This looks like another one worth bookmarking. ResearchBuzz has more about it.
