Is The Internet Making Us Better Writers? (newyorker.com) 165
The New Yorker reviews linguist Gretchen McCulloch new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
For McCulloch, the primary feat of the digital writer has been to enlist typography to convey tone of voice. We've used technology to "restore our bodies to writing": to infuse language with extra-textual meaning, in the same way that we might wave our hands during a conversation. One general principle is that communication leans toward the efficient, so any extra markings (sarcastic tildes, for instance, or a period where a line break will do) telegraph that there's more to the message than its literal import. That's how the period, in text messaging, earned its passive-aggressive reputation, and why so many visual flourishes default to implying irony. Similarly, the expressive lengthening of words like "yayyyy" or "nooo" confers a friendly intimacy, and technical marks (like the forward slash that ends a command in a line of code) find new life as social in-jokes ("/rant"). Typography, McCulloch writes, does not simply conjure the author's mood. It instructs the reader about the purpose of the statement by gesturing toward the spirit in which the statement was conceived.
McCulloch's project is, at heart, a corrective: she wants to puncture the belief that the Internet de-civilizes discourse. She brandishes research that shows that we become more polite as we get better at typing. (As with online irony, online civility emerges from linguistic superfluity, the perception that an extra effort has been made, whether through hedges, honorifics, or more over-all words....) Through gifs, emojis, and the playful repurposing of standard punctuation, McCulloch insists, Internet natives are bringing an unprecedented delicacy and nuance to bear on their prose. To back up this (strong) claim, the book proposes that the Internet's informal English actually draws from a variety of registers, using tools old and new to create finely calibrated washes of meaning. Considering a real text from a teen-ager's phone -- "aaaaaaaaagh the show tonight shall rock some serious jam" -- McCulloch highlights the archaic "shall" next to the casual "aaaaaaaaagh." Such intermixing, she argues, makes Internet-ese "a distinct genre with its own goals. . . . to accomplish those goals successfully requires subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language..."
"We no longer accept," she writes, "that nuanced writing is the exclusive domain of professionals...." Her book's almost political thesis -- the more voices, the better -- rebukes both the elitism of traditional grammar snobs and the cliquishness of, say, Tumblr. It's a vision of language as one way to make room for one another.
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McCulloch's project is, at heart, a corrective: she wants to puncture the belief that the Internet de-civilizes discourse. She brandishes research that shows that we become more polite as we get better at typing. (As with online irony, online civility emerges from linguistic superfluity, the perception that an extra effort has been made, whether through hedges, honorifics, or more over-all words....) Through gifs, emojis, and the playful repurposing of standard punctuation, McCulloch insists, Internet natives are bringing an unprecedented delicacy and nuance to bear on their prose. To back up this (strong) claim, the book proposes that the Internet's informal English actually draws from a variety of registers, using tools old and new to create finely calibrated washes of meaning. Considering a real text from a teen-ager's phone -- "aaaaaaaaagh the show tonight shall rock some serious jam" -- McCulloch highlights the archaic "shall" next to the casual "aaaaaaaaagh." Such intermixing, she argues, makes Internet-ese "a distinct genre with its own goals. . . . to accomplish those goals successfully requires subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language..."
"We no longer accept," she writes, "that nuanced writing is the exclusive domain of professionals...." Her book's almost political thesis -- the more voices, the better -- rebukes both the elitism of traditional grammar snobs and the cliquishness of, say, Tumblr. It's a vision of language as one way to make room for one another.
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No (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Def not. Amirite?
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Seriously, what good is anything but prose? Is it to be sneaky? Non-prose has no nuance and all you can do is idiot things.
"Anything but prose" would include poetry. I hardly think it has "no nuance" nor is it constrained only to "idiot things." If you cannot think of a single line of poetry (or song lyric) that has not impressed or inspired you, then either you have failed to absorb the benefits of a liberal education, or you have a heart of stone.
Is it to be clever? It's much more clever to be clever within the rules of grammar and maintaining accuracy. I am not impressed.
Well okay, you do have a point. Creativity often prospers in the presence of a constraint. But art is not about following rules. It's about learning them, and then breaking them.
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"Anything but prose" would include poetry. I hardly think it has "no nuance" nor is it constrained only to "idiot things."
Poetry is stupid. The idea that words become more profound and meaningful because they rhyme is ridiculous.
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"Anything but prose" would include poetry. I hardly think it has "no nuance" nor is it constrained only to "idiot things."
Poetry is stupid. The idea that words become more profound and meaningful because they rhyme is ridiculous.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds -
and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of -
wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hovering there I've chased the shouting wind along
and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
where never lark, or even eagle, flew;
and, whi
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Not saying it's ridiculous, but I personally didn't particularly enjoy it. Seems a bit childish to me, something that a 15-year-old would concoct.
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You're obviously not a pilot.
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I am not a dead person either, but I thoroughly enjoy E. A. Poe.
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put out my hand and touched the face of God
High Flight
By John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Now, you tell me that this is ridiculous.
It is ridiculous.
He was a military pilot, trained to kill people at taxpayers' expense.
A bunch of rhyming words extolling the joy of flight and making it sound like a religious experience changes none of that.
Re: No (Score:4, Insightful)
ClickOnThis quoted High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., then demanded:
Now, you tell me that this is ridiculous.
Prompting ShanghaiBill to respond:
It is ridiculous.
He was a military pilot, trained to kill people at taxpayers' expense.
A bunch of rhyming words extolling the joy of flight and making it sound like a religious experience changes none of that.
People are not monolithic stereotypes. We are complex, multifaceted creatures, capable of both nuance and compartmentalization.
Have you ever listened to Jimmy Webb's song Wichitaw Lineman? It's about the fact that people we see (and think of) only in their workplace role have interior lives that are often much richer and more poetic than we imagine them to be in the limited context of seeing them doing their jobs.
Beyond that, it's critically important to be able to separate our feelings about the artist as a person from our appreciation of his or her work. Picasso was a misogynistic narcissist at the exact same time as he was a monumentally talented and groundbreaking artist. Kurt Cobain was a junkie - and, somehow, simultaneously the musical voice of a generation. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, but also designed and oversaw the construction of advanced weapons of war for his patron Lorenzo di Medici.
The list goes on and on and ON.
If you are not a pilot, Gillespie Magee's poem won't speak to you, because you lack the key experiences that would allow it to resonate with you. Those who have had those experiences - particularly those who have flown faster than the speed of sound at altitudes where the sky turns black and the stars are clearly visible - do, I assure you, relate to its words with soaring hearts.
Reductionism is for little minds. My experience has been that you're bigger than that - and certainly big enough to admit it when you realize you're wrong.
High Flight is, indeed, poetry of a (you'll have to excuse the obvious pun) very high order. Blank verse, to be sure, but real poetry, nonetheless ...
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
If you are not a pilot, Gillespie Magee's poem won't speak to you
I am a pilot, although I last flew a plane over 15 years ago.
particularly those who have flown faster than the speed of sound at altitudes where the sky turns black and the stars are clearly visible
Magee never did that. He died in 1941 in a midair collision. That was long before supersonic flight, and before the jet era. You are reading meaning into his poem that he never intended.
Reductionism is for little minds.
Look, I understand that Magee may have been a complex person, and had feelings to express and experiences to describe. I just don't think that expressing them in lines of rhyming stanzas makes them any more meaningful the expressing them in any other form.
I can
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The fact that he can do that makes it good, doesn't it?
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I wasn't aware that rhyming was a necessary or a sufficient condition for being poetry. Well, you're the expert, or so you claim.
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Poetry is stupid.
No, your opinion is stupid as illustrated by your following claim:
The idea that words become more profound and meaningful because they rhyme is ridiculous.
You might as well say songs are stupid because the idea that words become more profound and meaningful because they rhyme and have a tune is ridiculous.
There is good poetry and bad poetry out there, just like normal writing. Some is good, some is profound, some interesting, some funny. Most a pile of crap.
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Poetry is prose moron
No, you're the moron. [theodysseyonline.com]
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Personally, I enjoy prose poetry, so this particular nerd-fight is pretty laughable.
But that said; that link is the most awful attempt to explain that subject I could imagine.
Prose means it doesn't rhyme and isn't metrical. That is all it means. That doesn't tell you if it is poetry or not.
If it is prose is about if the method, the structure, the grammar, the syntax is straightforwards or not.
But if it is poetry has more to do if the semantics are literal or metaphorical.
If you're going to call people na
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No. You are correct. Before I tell everyone to get off my lawn I'll say that the quality of writing I see on the internet, from the silliest, most vulgar political screed, to some minimal word "article" from a professional "journalist" is horseshit. I don't expect people to write like Milton or Keats or whomever wrote speeches for Kennedy, but the level of English prose I see here in America is so bad I don't even think it's capable of conveying a thought of any real complexity. And that's the problem. And
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
While we're at it--and this is a really huge pet peeve of mine--in English, infinitives usually work better split. "To be or not to be" is total bullshit. It should've been "to be or to not be"--a more natural and emotionally resonant phrasing--but by the time of Shakespeare then the Romance-o-philes (maybe even the Norman aristocrats themselves, I dunno) had already done their damage.
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It should've been "to be or to not be"--a more natural and emotionally resonant phrasing--
As a non-English native speaker, I would disagree. The original phrasing flows better when spoken, through repetition of "to be" and better vowel-consonant interlacing. "to not be" is harder to speak than "not to be". To be honest, it sounds like something a developer would write ("not equal to") :)
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This is perhaps the most famous monologue in the English language and the word "not" suddenly makes it clear that he's talking about suicide. No reason whatsoever to prematurely rush past that word.
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This is perhaps the most famous monologue in the English language and the word "not" suddenly makes it clear that he's talking about suicide. No reason whatsoever to prematurely rush past that word.
"prematurely" as in by 0.2 seconds”? Come on!
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Also I just feel in general "not" feels less awkward when the infini
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I prefer a non-traditional analysis which says that the infinitive is one word (be in the phrase you quote from Hamlet) and therefore just as incapable of being split as in Latin.
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Right. Because English has declined nouns and everything else Latin has, and therefore allowing split infinitives would be inconsistent.
Oh wait, it doesn't.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
I prefer a non-traditional analysis which says that the infinitive is one word (be in the phrase you quote from Hamlet) and therefore just as incapable of being split as in Latin.
That's the traditional analysis, well traditional back to a certain point. The Victorians were obsessed with the idea it seems. It's also objectively wrong since infinitives in English are two words and are therefore capable of being split.
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The Victorians were obsessed with a lot of things, most of them unadulterated twaddle.
I sometimes wonder how we got from the middle ages to now with them in the way.
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You must be kidding. The first sentence of this post contains an infinitive which is objectively one word, and coordinating it with to would be ungrammatical.
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Your example is good but also compare the sentence: "To die would be a great adventure" to its gerund form "Dying would be a great adventure." The first one sounds "fancier" / more upper class than the other, sure (and this ma
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In brief, it makes no sense whatsoever to say "not" earlier in the sentence. I think it has significantly better tension and pacing if you split the infinitive. The non-split infinitive is a grammatical premature ejaculation.
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Bullshit. Or were you going for +5 Funny?
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Thus, "to be or not to be" fu
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I propose: "To be, or to be NOT!"
Really puts the oomph at the end.
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I do admit there's some subjectivity here. Putting adverbs before the "to" just feels less direct to me, like how most people say using the passive voice makes a sentence less impactful. We typically put adverbs before verbs in every other situation and that feels direct and impactful and all that. In English, in my subjective opinion, the "to" is not part of verb. It's a more indirect/passive way of saying something to put the adverb before the "to" instead of before the verb itself.
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QuasiYoda
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You're changing the meaning of the sentence.
"To be or not to be" is an existential consideration. Should I be? Or should I not be? Where as "to be or to not be", it's two sides of the same question - what do you want to do with your life? It's a plebian setting expectations for his limited existence. I want to be millionaire. I want to not be janitor. I want to be house owner. I want to not be in debt...
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And as I point out elsewhere, it's not just an idlely existential question but one that is actually actively contemplating suicide. The "not" is the fulcrum of the ent
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You might want to go read a few manuals of style, especially Chicago style. It's perfectly acceptable to begin a sentence with "and" or "but". It's an old wives tale that it isn't, and not backed up by any reputable sources.
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It's perfectly acceptable to begin a sentence with "and" or "but".
And a preposition is acceptable to end a sentence with.
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Shouldn't that read 'You started two sentences in a row with "And" ..."?
Neither are you, it would appear.
Leaving aside how shit you are and getting back to the point, have you read Jerusalem or listened to The Star Spangled Banner?
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The speeches are the (direct) object - they have something done to them. The writer is the subject, he does something to the speeches.
Therefore s/whomever/whoever/.
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no u lol
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Yes. /thread
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Parent is excellent. Succinct and to the point. And entertaining.
Nota bene: The majority of persons writing in English on the Internet have English as a second language. As English continues to evolve from one of many competing tongues to the dominant global tongue, it accepts into itself many foreign words, phrases, and non-traditional modes of expression. The ones that stick contribute new value; the others never gain much traction.
So too with the contractions and abbreviations that have come in from t
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tldr
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LOL >:-{ ROFLCOPTER
Sorry kid, you have to learn how to speak emoticon if you want to hook up around here. ----{---{@
Have you seen the average text message? (Score:1)
No. Hell no.
Nuanced writing. (Score:2)
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Writing never requires reading.
I knew somebody who got her English degree, and then set out to become a writer. But she kept writing short stories, and then burning them.
In the end she became a music composer instead of a writer. I never read her stories, but I still learned something from them.
The reality is... (Score:5, Insightful)
... like anything else human intelligence and communication is subject to entropy. AKA you want high quality thought and thinking then you need to hang around with people and communities who have put in the effort.
The reason why most communication on the internet is basically ignorant is because it takes huge amounts of time and resources the average and even educated person does not have to understand a wide variety of topics.
Most human beings argue from feelings not facts, this is especially apparent in videogaming. Where for the last 20 years the videogame industry has been literally stealing games out from under the computer illiterate public beginning with mmo's in the 90's... try to talk to kids, teens and 20 somethings about how bad they are getting screwed and watch the hate and downvotes pour in.
Our species is an idiocracy for the most part and those who rise above it are fully aware of the fact that they too are idiots who barely know anything. The more you know, the more aware you are of your own stupidity and lack thereof.
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"The reason why most communication on the internet is basically ignorant is because it takes huge amounts of time and resources the average and even educated person does not have to understand a wide variety of topics."
This is not true, however far too many people think this is the case and one of those oddities where as long as you think it is true, it will at least remain true for you individually, but not true "technically".
"Most human beings argue from feelings not facts,"
Now, THIS RIGHT HERE is the mea
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"Most human beings argue from feelings not facts,"
Now, THIS RIGHT HERE is the meat and potatoes of this argument. People just cannot get around their feelings being more important than facts.
Indeed. Most people do not even understand what a fact is and think they can discuss them away. As if them "winning" arguments suddenly changes reality. And since "feelings" are basically low-level non-rational base platform reflexes tuned for small-group nomadic lifestyles (and badly tuned even for that), most people cannot make good decisions. And it shows, both on individual levels, as well as on any aggregate level right up to the largest aggregates.
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Yeah well your and looser.
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You will get hated faster than anything when you show people they have been stupid.
You will also get hated pretty fast if you tell people their leisure activities are stupid and the things that you personally enjoy are objectively better.
That is what our emotions does to us. Right now PC culture is teaching us to let our own emotions reign unchecked and to lash out anytime we feel insulted.
As opposed to non-PC culture which taught it was fine for us to have unchecked emotions about people not like us and l
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Pretty much sums it up. The benefit knowing more gives you (some actual understanding what you have a reasonable chance to succeed at and what not and where you need more knowledge or experience) is negated by self-confident morons getting the opportunities instead. That they then mess it up is no impediment to their success.
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There, their, they're now. No sense in getting all worked up over grammar.
Based on the summary... (Score:1)
....the answer is no. Here is an except from her last Twitter post: "okay so it's really weird but since people have started to post snippets from because internet my brain is now going "yeah that was a good book, it's been a while, you should reread it"
BRAIN YOU LITERALLY WROTE THAT BOOK STAHP"
Idiocracy is real. And also: just because someone gives themselves a title (like linguist) doesn't make them one.
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It is like these people want to explain their bad writing away by claiming it is good writing. Nothing new, this has gone one since the invention of written language.
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technical marks (like the forward slash that ends a command in a line of code)
A command in a line of code in what programming language? None I've ever seen. She seems to think that HTML is a language you write commands in, and the end tag terminates the "command". Congratulations, not knowing the difference between markup and code proves the Internet gives a bigger platform to bullshit writers writing bullshit.
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The only thing I can come up with is indeed that end-tag. And HTML is not even line-oriented. This person must be a Dunning-Kruger far-left case.
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Do they have commands, in the sense of ls or puts or scanf()?
Sorry, that should be ls/ or puts/ or scanf()/, right?
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Markup is not a command. It's markup. You don't run markup as a command. And calling a slash a technical mark is ludicrous.
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How about the ability to put together a coherent sentence? Basically anyone can get a degree in literature or linguistics at this point in history. Colleges are just money making diploma mills. She is just some person writing a blog for Wired.
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Wired is what pinhead managers read "to keep up with tech".
In a word, no. (Score:1)
Internet, texting, whatever (Score:2)
Obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com]. More reading and writing can't be a bad thing, right?
Usenet made me a better writer (Score:1)
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Usenet was where most of the action was. It was when I started trying to communicate by text with strangers on all sorts of topics, and the feedback I got, as when people misunderstood me, trained me to be a better writer. There were plenty of jerks even then of course, but they weren't hard to ignore. I concentrated on exchanging views and arguments with the good, thoughtful, writers that were out there.
Usenet has changed of course. I don't get on it anymore. But people ar
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brevity is the soul of wit
you missed your own point
In the original speech (by Polonius in Hamlet) part of the humor of it is how Polonius prattles on and on despite saying that "Brevity is the soul of Wit."
Comment removed (Score:3)
Does not match my experience (Score:5, Insightful)
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It could be that the increase in communication makes it true that people are misunderstanding each other more frequently, and also understanding each other more frequently.
I see no reason to expect that you would have had a balanced experience, as it will vary by participant. And the internet is a big place. There are people who believe that youtube comments are a horrible cesspool; probably true for them. The videos I watch everybody is falling over themselves trying to figure out how to say something nice
Re:Does not match my experience (Score:5, Funny)
I've been a professional writer and editor in the past, so communicating clearly is important to me. My experience is that this woman's thesis is pure nonsense. I have no interest in trying to speak to the research she claims backs her up. I just know that I see people misunderstanding each other more and more frequently â" and much of that tendency toward misunderstanding comes from the growing inability to write clearly. It's actually worse than that, because most people on social media communicate simplistic and shallow ideas with the equivalent of digital grunts â"and then they have no idea why people misunderstand them.
huh no your wrong
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OK, so I swore never to complain about this but seriously slashdot, fix your fucking unicode! I copy/pasted that text from slashdot itself to quote it so that should be clean. How hard is that to get right?
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The text of your comment backs you up: grammatically correct sentences, clearly written and easily understood.
On the other hand, there is a difference between formal and informal communication. With the advent of the Internet, there is a lot more informal communication in written form, and it is natural that this information communication takes on a different form. Colleagues gossiping at the water cooler speak differently than they do when giving a presentation to the boss.
On the gripping hand, I regret th
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"the ball has been throwed"
It's interesting. On one hand, I do think that one of the main properties of english and other germanic language is the irregularity of many verbs. On the other hand, from a more distant point of view, these irregularities just add complication without any benefit. Maybe it's better that they'll disappear, maybe in the future will call our current language "messy and irrelevant".
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s/maybe in the future/maybe in the future, people/ :(
The not-too-distant past (Score:1)
In the not-too-distant past, most communiques were verbal; face-to-face or through telephone. The written word was a formal record (which strangely, wasn't taught) of important messages. Now, most communiques are written and informal. It's normal to extend punctuation usage to provide auditory context.
It's not all good news: She doesn't mention that only a few dozen emojis (eg. turd, smiling, crying, love-heart, aubergine / eggplant) have a word-based meaning, making those little pictures depend on, a p
Yup -- Emoji more important than punctuation (Score:2)
Look, I grew up on punch-cards and for many years I thought smileys were just an affectation. But I learned they are not -- they can be an important indicator of tone in the modern telegraphic [short] writing style on many media. Arguably more important than punctuation.
Emoji etal might not be necessary when writing at length and perhaps that is the real complaint here. But people have a right to express themselves in whatever manner they wish, not as the receiver might prefer.
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redelm opined:
But people have a right to express themselves in whatever manner they wish, not as the receiver might prefer.
While that's true, people whose concern is to express themselves "in whatever manner they wish," rather than striving to do so clearly and effectively have to abide by the consequences of that choice. One of the most predictable of those consequences is that "the receiver" may, quite understandably, choose to classify their "expression" as empty noise, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Or, in other words, "a tale told by an idiot," and utterly unworthy of their attention ...
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Certainly the receiver may depracate a msg on style, for some other reason or for no reason at all. That is their choice. As an engineer, mine is to value function over form. I am willing to take some effort to decipher whether there is anything to learn. In this respect, a flamey post is easier to parse than a dressy NYT editurd.
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people have a right to express themselves in whatever manner they wish
I find an enormous number of people fail to understand that the right to express their opinion, perhaps in poorly-worded form, is a very different thing from everything they say automatically constituting a persuasive argument.
Consider the number of people who express a political opinion and believe everyone with a contrary idea is either wilfully ignorant or outright evil, rather than simply disagreeing. You have the right to your opinion; you don't have the right to mine - you'll have to work for it if y
Parrot based language (Score:2)
On Slack, I mostly communicate using parrot emojis. I'm not sure I'd describe that as elevating my writing.
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OK seriously what is it with the parrot emojis on slack? I know (well assume) you're joking but there people who pretty much seem to communicate on slack with nothing but that colourful dancing parrot thing. At work. Why why why?I don't even know what it means!
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Re: Parrot based language (Score:2)
I'm not joking at all.
"acknowledged; ok" - fast-parrot
"thank you" - ultra-fast-parrot
"that sucks; disappointed" - sad-parrot
"I'm confused" - ceiling-parrot
"I'm looking into it" - slow-parrot
"I've working on a solution" - fast-parrot
"I have released the fix" - ultra-fast-parrot
etc.
Pretty clear really.
The first line of the summary says the opposite (Score:2)
FTFY.
Using a spellchecker helps as well (Score:2)
Especially for a linguist.
You could have moved the '-' from 'teen-ager' to 'forward slash' where it belongs.
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Especially for a linguist
Especially especially for a cunning linguist.
Better? (Score:2)
If one defines better as much worse, sure.
backquote (Score:2)
`
What did he mean by that?
Omg yes. (Score:1)
Absolutely! (Score:2)
No. (Score:2)
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This is a matter of how you define writing. Most of us can't write with a quill, yet, does it hamper our writing in any way? With a letter-set as complicated as Kanji, it makes sense that this will happen, and as long as people write legible text, it doesn't matter much. If for some reason computers will disappear, people that already know how to write most Kanji will relearn the few they don't know.