vocabulary

You aren’t a virtual person

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged usage vocabulary on by

You don’t lose reality by communicating at a distance. You don’t become a “virtual” person. I wrote about this a year ago, but the silliness hasn’t abated, so I want to make the point again.

An online gathering of people can appropriately be called a “virtual” gathering. They aren’t really coming together; they get the effect of it through technology. The people participating, though, remain real. You’d think that after over a century of telephones, everyone would grasp that people can be real without being in the same room.
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How to impress people with the word “algorithm” 1

This entry was posted in Satire Writing and tagged algorithms pretentiousness usage vocabulary on by

If you want to come across as a writer who really understands computers, the best way is to learn about them. Read technical books and blogs. Learn how HTML and HTTP work. Find out what the common security fallacies are.

But that’s a lot of work. A quicker way is to use the word “algorithm” a lot.

An algorithm is a precise but abstract description of a computational process. “Precise” means laying out each step mathematically, so that any implementation should produce the same results. “Abstract” means it’s independent of a particular programming language or operating system. You can implement an algorithm in C, PHP, Java, or any other language. Some algorithms work more easily in some languages than in others, but there’s no inherent requirement to use specific technology.
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British English for American writers

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged international spelling vocabulary on by

Ghostwriters have to write in a voice different from their normal one, and sometimes even in a different dialect. When writing for a Canadian, British, or Australian site, you want to look like a native writer. It’s tricky to get it really right.

Each nation’s treatment of English is different. British, Australian, and New Zealand English are fairly close to one another (in spelling, not pronunciation!). Canadians use a version that’s somewhere between American and British English. I’ll focus mostly on the American and British versions here, for the sake of brevity.
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The right word 4

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

Of all the crimes against good writing, the worst is using the wrong word. A grammatical error looks sloppy, but as long as it doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence, people will get what you mean. Use the wrong word, though, and you fail to convey what you’re trying to say. That amounts to failing as a writer.

Usage errors fall into several categories. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it includes the types of errors that annoy me the most.
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