Techniques

What does “Trust science” mean for writers?

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged science writing on by

Writing about science is hard. To start with, it’s complicated. Scientists deal in concepts which most people outside their field don’t understand. Most of us have no more than a vague idea of what a boson is (my spell checker doesn’t even recognize the word) or what the difference is between a brontosaurus and an apatosaurus (they’re the same beast).

An even bigger complication is the way science works. Scientists accumulate information, form hypotheses, and try to find out if their hypotheses explain the data. If they do, hypotheses build up into a theory. The term “theory” doesn’t mean a tentative guess, as it does in ordinary speech; it means a set of ideas which is the best explanation available.
(more…)

Language shifts: “Social engineering”

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged etymology language social engineering on by

This was going to be an article on how writers on computer security misuse the term “social engineering.” However, my research quickly showed that the tech usage has almost completely displaced the original meaning. When that happens, it’s useless to say it’s wrong.

An example of the original usage can be found on encyclopedia.com under “Large Scale Social Engineering”:
(more…)

Links, URLs, and embeds

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged HTML writing on by

It surprises me how many writers don’t understand how links work. Here’s a brief guide on some technical (but not too technical) points.

The structure of a URL

Understanding HTML isn’t essential to writing an article. Usually you work in an editor that takes care of those details. But you can’t get around understanding links. A link uses a uniform resource locator or URL. Here’s what it looks like:

https://www.example.com/path/file

(more…)

Virtually absurd

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

When you don’t see people face to face and all your interactions are by phone or over the Internet, life can take on an unreal quality. It feels as if we’re living virtual lives, not real ones. Maybe that’s why writers put the adjective “virtual” on virtually everything. Instead of real learning, we have “virtual learning.” There was talk of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates having a “virtual debate,” apparently in lieu of actually debating. Yet perversely, people we barely know on Facebook are “friends,” not “virtual friends.”

We need to hang on to the reality of life. The term “virtual” means being not quite something or being simulated. If something is “virtually impossible,” it still has a glimmer of possibility.

Many things are now simulated on the Internet because we can’t do them in real life; there are virtual meetings, virtual classrooms, virtual attendance, etc. That’s legitimate. But the outcomes ought to be real. Virtual classrooms should result in real learning, or what’s the point? Distance doesn’t make things less real. People have debated by correspondence for thousands of years; why does distance suddenly make debates “virtual”?

The word “virtual” is an antonym of “literal.” Maybe the long history of abusing “literal” has made the abuse of its opposite inevitable. If you can say someone “literally exploded” when there was no explosion, then why not say you “virtually learned” when you actually learned?

“Virtual,” like “algorithm,” is a trendy word to stick everywhere because it makes the writer sound computer-smart. But it’s virtual smartness, just the appearance of it. Let’s hold on to what’s real in life and not dismiss everything we do at a distance as “virtual.”