Author Walter Donway has posted an enthusiastic review of The Magic Battery on the Savvy Street website. I love not just his praise, but his understanding of what I was aiming for.
Full disclosure: I recently posted a favorable review of Donway’s Retaking College Hill, but there was no tit-for-tat agreement between us. He emailed me a draft of the review last week, asking just for factual corrections.
Mark Twain talked about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Lying with statistics isn’t always intentional; sometimes a writer doesn’t understand their meaning or applicability.
Recently I saw a news article on the COVID-19 infection rate in northern New Hampshire. It reported a higher positivity rate than in previous weeks. That doesn’t tell us anything about whether infections are increasing or decreasing, though. If the positivity rate goes up, it could mean one of several things:
Irony is one of those things we know when we see it, but it’s hard to pin down if you’re asked to explain. Merriam-Webster gives two definitions: (1) the use of words that mean the opposite of what you really think especially in order to be funny. (2) a situation that is strange or funny because things happen in a way that seems to be the opposite of what you expected.
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Alexander James Adams has a song which is quite nice yet makes me grate my teeth. Its refrain is “There’s only the music between you and I.” An occasional grammatical violation in a song is OK, but one that occurs in every verse is painful. There are plenty of good rhymes for “me.”
When a pronoun follows a preposition, it has to be in the accusative case, also called the objective case. “With me.” “To them.” “Behind her.” The favorite grammatical error of snobs is to use the nominative case instead.
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In an alarming development, the US National Archives has slapped warnings of “harmful language” on the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. The source makes it especially disturbing; archivists should stand strongly against scaring people off from important documents.
Update: According to some sources, the National Archives stuck this warning label on all the documents in its online catalog, which is sloppy and makes the warning useless. As an analogy, if you rate all movies R, you might as well rate none of them R.
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Websites with an agenda to promote will claim that someone has “refuted” a claim when all the person has done is express a contrary view, with or without supporting evidence.
Refuting a claim or argument means showing that it’s invalid. It doesn’t require proving that the contrary position is true, but it requires thoroughly knocking the props out from under a claim. Here are some ways to refute an assertion:
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Charlottesville, Virginia tried to impose a business license tax on freelance writers. At the same time, magazines and newspapers were exempt from the tax. In January 2021, the 16th Judicial Court of Virginia declared this treatment a violation of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.
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In my last post, I noted that I’ve stopped writing for Verblio but didn’t want to discuss it further. In the light of a recent email from Madison Basch, though, I need to say a little. I had confirmed that I would not write any more for Verblio, because it had accepted a customer request which I regarded as deeply wrong, and because Basch had compounded the act with an evasive and incoherent attempt at justification. There are some lines I regard as unacceptable to cross, and Verblio crossed one of them. Giving full details would violate my confidentiality agreement. Update: After long consideration, I’ve decided I can and should add one important point: the issue was an overtly racially discriminatory request by a client which Verblio refused to remove.
Basch wrote to me after this that “Verblio is no longer in your opinion or your services as a writer.” It’s a game of “You can’t quit, you’re fired.” While it’s childish and basically harmless, Basch might present that spin to others, so I want it on record that I have not submitted any articles to Verblio for weeks and had clearly stated that I do not intend to resume.
Verblio was once a great company to write for.
Sorry it’s been so long since my last post. I’ve moved, and my cat Carl died.
I’ve noticed a lot of bad treatment of statistics on the Web, especially in connection with the COVID epidemic and vaccines. Sometimes writers make big errors even when trying to correct other people’s mistakes. It’s a huge and difficult subject, so I’ll approach it by linking to some good articles and commenting briefly on each one. It takes time to digest all the information, so you might want to bookmark some of the pieces you find interesting and come back to them later.
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It’s important that you use the present subjunctive properly.
The previous sentence is an example. It’s not an obvious one, since it’s hard to use it wrong in that case. The word “use” is in the present subjunctive, but it’s the same as the present indicative in this case. let’s get a little fancier:
It’s important that a writer use the present subjunctive properly.
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