Making them up as I go (2)

1. Tell the truth.
2. Entice, or fail.
3. To emphasize, summarize.
4. If it ain't short, it don't work.
5. Be clear.


And so I don't forget:
Don't explain. Just tell a story.
Don't argue. Just say things that make sense.
Expect people to be bored by the writing, and shorten it.
Make the wording easy to take.

Remove Loose Ends -- the interesting one-liners that go nowhere.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

"Hardly anything is known of it except its fame"


Via Orange Crate Art, two wonderful paragraphs by Alberto Manguel at the New York Times.

Plato, in the “Timaeus,” says that when one of the wisest men of Greece, the statesman Solon, visited Egypt, he was told by an old priest that the Greeks were like mere children because they possessed no truly ancient traditions or notions “gray with time.” In Egypt, the priest continued proudly, “there is nothing great or beautiful or remarkable that is done here, or in your country, or in any other land that has not been long since put into writing and preserved in our temples.”

Such colossal ambition coalesced under the Ptolemaic dynasty. In the third century B.C., more than half a century after Plato wrote his dialogues, the kings ordered that every book in the known world be collected and placed in the great library they had founded in Alexandria. Hardly anything is known of it except its fame: neither its site (it was perhaps a section of the House of the Muses) nor how it was used, nor even how it came to its end. Yet, as one of history’s most distinguished ghosts, the Library of Alexandria became the archetype of all libraries.

Hardly anything is known of it except its fame: neither its site, nor how it was used, nor how it came to its end.

Calls this to mind:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains.

Monday, October 12, 2015

We protect your clarity, your illiteracy, and write blog posts


The comma is often used to present a list of items. Here is an example from my Google Search screen this morning:


How we understand the list depends on the context; the context is provided primarily by the words that come before the list. When I read that blurb on my screen, this is how it came into my brain:

"We protect your privacy, we protect your data, and we protect put you in control. No that's not right. I think they mean 'We protect your privacy and your data, and put you in control.'"

I don't know what they mean, really, since they didn't say it clearly.

//

The problem is that the context, the "We protect", as presented, applies to the whole list. That means the words "we protect" are used with each element on the list. Even the third element. That's how I got "we protect put you in control" which is obviously incorrect.

To make the correction, I changed their ONE list of THREE things to TWO lists of TWO things each. My one list is a list of things that they protect ("your privacy and your data"). My other list is things they do ("We protect [you] ... and put you in control").

Am I making a mountain of a mole hill? I don't know. Does it matter to say what you mean?

//

I hope you find the title of this post objectionable.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

"One of our viewers are in Bermuda"


That's what the news anchor said just now: "One of our viewers are in Bermuda".

IS, you illiterate bitch. ONE IS.

Errors in English reflect errors in reasoning. Not always, of course. But the difference between ONE and MORE THAN ONE is pretty simple, really.

Maybe all of their viewers are in Bermuda, I don't know. Well, I'm not in Bermuda. Maybe most of their viewers are in Bermuda. That's fine. But if the bitch knows about ONE of them, then it is ONE viewer IS in Bermuda.

Which viewer? One of our viewers. One of our viewers is in Bermuda.

Why should I listen to any of the news the bitch reports, if she cannot properly express the difference between "one" and "more than one"?