Responding to reader input, we are changing Web site to website. — Associated Press Stylebook Similar:Ambiguous language in journalism: Monkey Pox and Camel Privates Amazing lead: A veterinarian prescr…AmusingGoogling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google.When I ask my students to use the librar…AcademiaNASA reconnects with Voyager 1 (after months of confusion) NASA…
Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and…
From the U.S. Government’s Plain Language website, a satirical guide by Kathy McGinty. Are you tired of short, direct, and simple sentences that seem to take forever to fill up a page? Are you paid by the word? In either case you can benefit by increasing the number of words in your sentences and the…
It’s not really a grading tool, but it might be worth introducing into the writing process. I’m running a paper workshop tomorrow… I might give it a shot. PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help…
“We’ve become a close-knit unit you might say. Some of us, we always come back to talk about the year, what happened,” one visitor told Channel 4 Action News’ Tara Edwards. The malformed possessive in the above quotation is a mistake — we all make mistakes like that. But I blogged this web version of…
On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory. Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined…
Rhetorician and ethicist Stephen E. Toulmin has died. While I haven’t been able to fit his full system into my freshman writing courses, I did create a brief handout on the Toulmin method. Arguing against the absolute truth advocated in Plato’s idealized formal logic, Toulmin said that truth can be relative. Historical and cultural contexts,…
I can’t say I understand, but someone invented every symbol and bit of notation that we use from emoticons to the alphabet. It’s cool to see the story of the need to invent new symbols. via Wired. Similar:Into the depths of code. Algorithmic archaeologies and cave fantasies in video gamesThe full article (by Angelo Careriis)…
Pittsburgh teachers said that in 2005 they noticed an alarming trend: Students stopped using Roethilsberger’s last name in essays and papers, instead referring to the quarterback by his easy-to-spell nickname, “Big Ben.” That summer, the Pittsburgh school board took action, eliminating various art courses, American history, and Advanced Placement calculus in favor of a rigorous…
unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.” “It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking…
Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2×2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?” And I’ll pass it, because I know exactly which piece…
A man and a wife saw what happened and the man ran with the baby’s mother to help her pick the child up from the ground, police said. CBS Chicago I presume this was the level of detail in the police report, so the journalist is just echoing what’s in the report. But “husband and…
In California, the governor’s office reacts to hearing of a vulgar message hidden vertically in the first row of letters in this gubernatorial veto. As The Swamp puts it: “My goodness. What a coincidence,” a shocked, shocked Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear is quoted by the Associated Press as saying. “I suppose when you do so…
I am not too happy about the way wild conclusions drawn from this self-published research periodically pop up in the media. Kudos to Liberman, from Language Log, who tries (yet again) to explain. The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like: In the…
If language is as instinctive to humans as dam-building is to beavers, if every 3-year-old is a grammatical genius, if the design of syntax is coded in our DNA and wired into our brains, why, you might wonder, is the English language in such a mess? Why does the average American sound like a gibbering fool every time he opens his mouth or puts pen…
Wonderful stuff from Steven Krause. Representing the world champion, the “going to hell in a hand-basket,” the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish’s “What Should Colleges Teach?” on his…
Older words also making their debut as a result of renewed interest online: sock puppet (a false identity used to manipulate opinions in online forums) and fan fiction. (Via Guardian) Similar:Explore – Laconic history of the world in a typographic map…Explore – Laconic history of the world i…AestheticsConsciousness: Where Are Words?Words, words, words. With the…
Here’s a surprising statement I found in a news article, quoting a Yale psychology professor. “Moms vary markedly in their roles as breadwinners from no income at all to really helping dads,” The language implies that money-making is the father’s responsibility, and the best rating on the scale that a woman can achieve is “helping”…
Text-message shorthand conventions arose from the users, because the need to type quickly on a tiny keyboard was greater than the need to spell correctly and preserve the subtleties of punctuation. But as users find more ways to hash and remix their social networking, a new set of technical needs may give rise to new…
To protect itself from millions of dollars worth of taxes, Proctor & Gamble UK tried to defend a lower court’s ruling that a Pringle is not a potato chip. At some point, a potato-chip-like item is so different from a potato chip that it can no longer be called one — but when?– Adam Cohen,…