Techniques

More linguistic griping

This entry was posted in Commentary Techniques and tagged grammar language usage on by

Just some more miscellaneous complaints about how people abuse the English language. I’ll avoid ones I’ve already written about, and hopefully the items here aren’t the ones you usually see. To vary things a bit, I’ll include some alleged corrections which I disagree with.

“Free reign.” The term “free rein” means lack of restriction, letting someone do what they want. If it’s applied to a government official or agency running wild, “free reign” could make sense, but in general it’s wrong.

“LOL.” Laughing out loud is appropriate when something is funny or ridiculous, but too many people on the Internet stick it onto everything they say. For some, it’s a cheap way to score a point. Some people seem to think it softens what they say. It doesn’t.

“Illegal” as a noun. People do illegal things. There is no such thing, at least in the United States, as a person whose existence is illegal.

“Begging the question.” I’m losing this battle, but I’ll keep fighting it. Begging the question is the fallacy of assuming the point which is to be proven. Example: “The Bible is true because it says so in the Bible.” People often use it to mean something like “leading to the question.” Granted, expressions shift in meaning, but “begging the question” as a term for a fallacy conveys a precise, useful meaning that shouldn’t be watered down.

“Ad hominem.” While we’re on the subject of logical fallacies, here’s another one whose name is often misused. An ad hominem argument attacks the person making a statement rather than its facts or reasoning. We often see it used for insults in general. An ad hominem argument doesn’t have to be insulting; an example of an ad hominem argument could be “X isn’t European and has never been to Europe, therefore his statement about Europe is wrong.” (Technically, this item is about abusing the Latin language.)
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Six blunders to avoid when writing about computers 1

This entry was posted in Commentary Techniques Writing and tagged computers research writing on by

Computers are everywhere, yet writers of scripts for movies and TV constantly get them wrong. Ludicrously wrong. Good written fiction, especially science fiction, does better, but writers of all kinds need to be careful. You can depart from the real world if you like, but you have to know what you’re doing. Make sure the reader knows it’s intentional.

Here are six ways writers can mess up. Not all of them are completely impossible, but if you use any of them, you at least need to make the scenario plausible.
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Writing German words in English text

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged German language technology writing on by

English-language articles sometimes need to use foreign words. Most languages require more characters than the 26 letters of the English-language alphabet that ASCII supports. This shouldn’t be hard, since Unicode provides characters for almost every important language in the world. When you sit down to enter foreign words at your computer, though, you run into issues.

I’ll talk here about German text, since it’s the language I know best next to English.
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Dissecting clickbait stories

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged Internet research technology writing on by

When you report or comment on a news story, the first step is to understand what it says. Low-quality websites have ways of appearing to say more than they do. They aim to create a panic and attract links. A careful reading may show there isn’t much substance to what happened.

Let’s look at a Daily Mail article claiming that an application called “New Profile Pic” “hoovers up your details.” A careful reading shows that doesn’t mean much.
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Spotting fake videos 1

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged fact checking research video on by

Writing about the Russian invasion of Ukraine means taking arms against a sea of misinformation. The Russian government is lying on an astonishing scale, but we can’t always trust information from the Ukrainian side either. In war, there’s always a tendency to paint the enemy in the worst light possible, and sometimes that includes making up facts. In the modern era, it includes faking videos.

Distinguishing authentic videos, which present what they claim they do, from fakes isn’t easy. These are some of the fakers’ tricks:
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