Damage control PR is the art of saying “Shit happens” in a form that church bulletins would feel comfortable publishing.
2 Likes
Dickey’s article has at least a half-dozen serious errors in his own writing. Consider, for example, his parenthetical sentence “(In the ABC and Fox headlines, it’s even clear if the person killed was a cop or civilian.)”. It’s likely that he intended to write “it’s not even clear …” An editor would have caught that, and the several other errors of expression and grammar in the article. How in the world could you write an article about writing and not have it proofread?
He also fails to point out errors of syntax and semantics in the bureaucratic writing that he quotes and analyzes. Given his own failures in those areas, I have to wonder if he was unaware of them. One would think that Longreads would be embarrassed to publish prose that a seventh-grade English teacher would return covered in red marks. Have they no red (or blue) pencils of their own?
Not so fictitious even then; around 1970 I myself implemented the HCF instruction in the virtual microcode of the CP-67/CMS virtual machine system for the IBM/360 Model 67. There was no way for running code actually to ignite a fire (though I could have opened all the powered drawers of the $250,000 disk storage unit and caused it to tip over), so the instruction only triggered a hex dump and shut down the virtual machine.
5 Likes
I have to teach my sophomore chemistry students to write in passive voice. As a former English major, it kills me to do that. But WHY? Because it removes agency. I tell them to “pretend they are cops, writing an incident report”_ We do it in science because they are, in theory, addressing Truths about Nature which should be universal, and independent of the person(s) conducting the experiment/observation._In advanced classes we can break out of that a little.
Still kills me though.
4 Likes
Missing a word in a blog post is a “serious” error? Maybe you should focus more on the substance instead of the form. Probably keep your blood pressure a lot lower if you’re going to be spending any time on this new fangled “internet” thing.
3 Likes
That’s the point, the real error is purposefully hidden from the user as it may be used to guess the inner workings of the service and a malicious actor could potentially use this information to find and exploit a flaw.
But yeah, that would be nice.
That was a single example from among a number of errors. And, yes, an error that completely inverts the meaning of the sentence (assuming that my suggestion was correct) is a serious error, an error of substance and not of form.
“spending any time on this new fangled “internet” thing.”
I first logged onto the Internet (ARPANet) in the fall of 1972, when I was on the faculty at Brown.
1 Like
Right, I assumed you quoted the most significant error, and it wasn’t very significant. It would “completely invert the meaning of the sentence” except for the fact that it is in the middle of a larger piece and the context makes the meaning clear. That’s probably how you figured out it was missing in the first place, right? That and the fact that the faulty grammar of the sentence implies the missing word as well.
Calling that an “error of substance” is a bit of a reach. It’s obvious in context that he “accidentally a word” as the saying goes. It’s an incredibly common typographical error, but it is a typographical error, not a problem with the guy’s knowledge or research.
It’s cute that you think bragging about this will impress anyone or make any kind of point.
My point is that there is so much published on the internet every day that unless 2/3rds of everyone became copy editors there are bound to be a large number of typographical errors in material published on the internet. This is just a commonly understood fact about the internet. Complaining about it makes one sound like a stereotypical “old timer” complaining about those damned kids and their FaceSpace.
1 Like
Settle down, friend. Disagreement doesn’t require attack formation.
Although in the context of the original discussion, I’ll compliment you on being direct! No avoidance of agency in your text, eh?
1 Like
“Forget the content of this 10,000 word piece – there’s a typo!” is a pet peeve of mine – especially when it comes to prose on the internet which is bound to have more errors than stuff published on paper for reasons I already noted.
I don’t think I was being especially rude – I was giving sincere advice to not worry so much about typos, tried to do so while making a joke, joke got misinterpreted and I tried to clarify. I guess “it’s cute that you think bragging” was a little rude, but he really did brag and it really was cute!
1 Like
Would you be comforted if you remembered that the passive is really common in naturally occurring conversation? It’s so common I think it’s rarely even noticed.
1 Like
[quote=“wysinwyg, post:28, topic:99026”]It’s cute that you think …[/quote]It’s cute that you think that calling me a newbie and then an old-timer somehow supports your point.
[quote]there is so much published on the internet every day[/quote]I’m not talking about writings on the Internet in general, but rather this specific article on the “syntax, grammar, and diction” of a particular style of writing. I would expect the author of an article on punctuation would take particular pains to have proper punctuation in that article, and likewise would expect Mr. Dickey to make a similar effort here. He is writing on a site devoted to the written word and is, apparently, a professional writer.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
