There is only one rule of grammar, and that is “Be Clear”. All the rest of what people think are hard and fast rules of grammar are really only guidelines in the service of the supreme rule, “Be Clear”. Placing a comma or period outside of quotation marks may violate the guideline for American usage (though not necessarily British usage), but if doing so serves logic, and therefore clarity, then there’s nothing wrong with the practice. If you’re writing a diary purely for your own eyes, then by all means write however you please. If you’re writing to be understood by other human beings, however, then it’s simple courtesy to convey your message to them clearly.
“I said it very loud and clear: I went and shouted in his ear.” Humpty Dumpty recites from his poem in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Illustration by John Tenniel.
Stop confusing “complement” with “compliment”, “affect” with “effect”, and “their” with “they’re”. There are many other examples of writers being lazy about the meanings of the words they use. Ignorance is not an excuse, not when a print dictionary can be had for a few dollars, and an online dictionary is usually free. A complimentary breakfast is free; a complementary breakfast is something else entirely, if it exists at all. Readers are affected by the effects of a writer’s word choices. They’re struggling to make sense of a lazy writer’s meanderings, and their poor understanding is all the fault of the lazy writer.
From the 1972 “Password” episode of the television series The Odd Couple, starring Tony Randall as Felix Ungar and Jack Klugman as Oscar Madison, with Betty White, Allen Ludden, and Abbey Greshler. Part of effective communication is keeping your listeners or readers in mind.
Dangle participles at your own peril, and don’t expect all readers to divine your meaning despite the muddled sentences you present to them. Some readers will find some of your dangling participles humorous because of the incongruous images they evoke. Convulsed with laughter, your writing will not be taken seriously by your readers. Your readers will also get a few laughs, along with your writing. Like other grammar guidelines, the one about not dangling participles is best understood as a logic problem, as a challenge to making meaning clear. There’s no magic involved. Look at what you have written. Read it aloud if that helps. Does it make sense? After doing your best to serve your readers by being clear, then if you wish you can add details and stylistic flourishes. Remember B.C. (Be Clear) before A.D. ( Add Details), and everything will be OK. — Ed.
A fanciful history of web design might start with scribes in an ancient Near East civilization, all of them dutifully impressing their clay tablets deeply enough to make the characters easily legible. One day, either intentionally or because of laziness or weariness, one scribe made shallow impressions for his characters, and instead of his fellow scribes rebuking him, they hailed his genius. They were probably hipsters, who seek conformity in their nonconformity, and for whom a new look is all the more appealing if it befuddles the masses. “I can barely read it,” exclaimed one hipster scribe, “and that’s what makes it brilliant!” “It hurts my eyes,” said another who was slow to catch the new wave. After noting the disapproving looks from the other scribes, he added “I mean, it hurt my eyes until I got used to it. Now I see it’s absolutely great!”
Like the fashion world it parallels, typography must endlessly reinvent itself around a practical matter. People need to wear clothes, and when they read, they need to be able to decipher characters, whether they are impressed on clay tablets, printed on a page, or delineated by tiny dots on a backlit screen. The reasons for reinvention have much to do with evolving tastes and the need for turnover in sales, and sometimes little to do with practicality. The trend of low contrast typography in web design is a case in point. Some designers and technology companies decided about ten years ago it would be nice to have gray text on a white or gray background, and soon the nonconformists were jumping on the bandwagon and conforming. Readers seeking information from grayed out websites have been straining their eyes in frustration ever since.
A theatrical presentation of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, a story by Hans Christian Andersen. Photo by Danand.
There is a difference in strain on a reader’s eyes between the black on white of a printed page and the black on white of a backlit screen, with the latter being harder to take. Most books were never printed on absolutely pure white paper, and the black ink, when reflecting light, was never utterly black. Backlit screens can achieve greater contrast than print, but it’s best that they don’t because staring at very high contrast type can be a strain. The solution for screens is to lower the tone of the background, as can be seen by adjusting screen brightness or by using an application to reduce eye strain (the applications available on the market typically also change the color temperature).
A scene from The Invisible Man, a 1933 film based on a novel by H.G. Wells, directed by James Whale, with Claude Rains in the title role.
Computer users adjusting the brightness of their screens or using web applications for reducing eye strain took web designers out of the picture, however, and it appears they would have none of that. To support their design trend of using varying shades of gray text, they claimed they were enhancing legibility and reducing eye strain. There’s no evidence it does, and common sense and feedback from readers who don’t care about trends points to the opposite result. Low contrast web design is too low, and it ignores the real solution, which is not to tone down the font, but to tone down the background. Go ahead and use gray fonts on a gray background if it seems cool, silly as that is, but don’t reel off nonsensical mumbo jumbo to support that decision, and don’t expect all readers to drop to their knees and kiss the hem of those faded fonts.
— Techly
Website headline writers like to insert the word “just” in their copy for the sense of immediacy it conveys. They have room to insert the word because website headlines are usually sentence length descriptions rather than the terse summations newspaper copy editors used. Longer descriptions can be good teasers and also boost the rank of a website post in search engine results because that’s the way Google has decided sites and posts should be ranked, and Google sets the bar for search engines and for the internet generally. Ask them why.
Search engines don’t like the short headlines common in newspapers. The reason many headlines on the internet read the way they do is because writers are responding as much to what search engines like as they are to what they believe their readers like. It’s not easy keeping up with the Kardashians, and the only way websites can do it is to couch everything in terms of immediacy, as if it were all breaking news worthy of readers’ attention. To generate clicks on their posts and get them ranked highly in search engine results, website writers must tease about the content using descriptive headlines, and then make sure to give whatever they’re describing a sense of happening moments ago by tossing in “just” at least once.
Residents of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, fill Jackson Square on August 14, 1945, to celebrate the surrender of Japan. Oak Ridge was one of three main sites of the Manhattan Project, and was responsible (though those working there did not know it) for refining uranium to be shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to be fashioned into atomic bombs. Photo by Ed Westcott, working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The newspaper headline “War Ends” might not fly with today’s internet and social media news headline writers, who would be tempted to write “War Just Ends”, even though it would be open to multiple interpretations.
The tendency is to hype everything, even inconsequential matters. Add news sharing on social media, and the hype gets amplified to 11, as a member of the fictional heavy metal band Spinal Tap observed. Trust and references build credibility on social media, even if common sense and a little digging into sources reveals there are no grounds for credibility. Google hones search results based on what they know about users, and Facebook and Twitter follow Google’s lead while juicing results further by adding the finer details they know about their users. Facebook and Twitter set the bar in social media for how posts get pushed to the front for sharing on their platforms, and as long as readers keep clicking the wheels keep rolling, no matter how worthless are the posts everyone shares.
This clip from Sesame Street could serve as a metaphor for what the internet and social media have become.
A word such as “just” is a fine, serviceable word in most cases. Unfortunately, once some influential writers, platform arbiters, and readers on the world wide web and in social media adopt it as a manipulative expression it gets overused, abused, and misused on its way to becoming trite and tiresome. Just sayin’.
— Ed.
Recently the news and commentary website Saloninstituted a policy of not allowing visitors using advertisement blockers to access their website without either or turning the blockers off or allowing Salon to use the visitors’ computers to mine the cryptocurrency Monero. In other words, when a visitor with an active ad blocker arrives at the Salon website, Salon detects the ad blocker and immediately pops up a notice about its new policy, giving the visitor the options of turning off the ad blocker and continuing to the rest of the site and viewing it for free, but with ads, or, for a visitor who chooses not to turn off the ad blocker, then that visitor must grant Salon permission to use their computer to mine Monero, which replaces the revenue Salon would otherwise lose to that visitor who wants to read articles without viewing any ads. The third option for the visitor is to leave the website.
It remains to be seen how well visitors to the Salon website will accept the new policy and whether Salon will see a return to revenue levels they had before ad blockers became much more widely used in the past few years. It’s commendable that the owner of Salon is being open about taking this step and giving visitors options. Some websites use the computers of visitors to mine cryptocurrency without notifying them, a practice known as cryptojacking. Sometimes the website owner is not aware this is happening because their website has been hacked, and in that case it is the hacker who gets the revenue, and both the website owner and the visitor lose out. What the owner of Salon is doing is not cryptojacking, a sneaky and disreputable practice.
Image of television personality Garry Moore and Kellogg’s cereal character Tony the Tiger taken from a 1955 Kellogg’s advertisement. There have always been tacky ads for products of dubious worth.
There are other ways for website owners to cope with replacing revenue lost to ad blockers. The website for The Atlantic magazine stops a visitor at the door when it detects an ad blocker and advises the visitor to turn it off, or whitelist The Atlantic in the ad blocker, or leave. Simple and straightforward. Other websites, such as the one for The New York Times, give a visitor a certain number of free articles each month before the visitor reaches a paywall that requires the visitor buy a subscription to read more articles. More lenient on the front end, but with a harder line on the back end. These models work reasonably well for very popular websites that can afford to lose a small percentage of visitors who absolutely refuse either to not use an ad blocker or to pay for content on the internet. The owners of less well known websites would have a harder time adopting those models without alienating visitors they can ill afford to lose.
Long before Joe DiMaggio plugged coffee makers, he did advertisements for cigarettes, as did many celebrities, including athletes like him.
The shame of it all is that ad blockers have increased in popularity because of the bad behavior of a few bad actors on the internet who push out ads that hide malware and trackers, or video ads that use autoplay, or ads with Flash Player code that makes them highly distracting, and because of that kind of activity internet users have quite reasonably installed ad blockers to avoid all that, and the effect has been to punish the good along with the bad. Unfortunately there are also too many internet users who think everything on the internet should be free, conveniently ignoring the obvious point that the producers of internet content have to eat and pay the rent just like anybody else.
Imagine picking up a newspaper from a kiosk, a newspaper from which someone has helpfully cut out every single advertisement, leaving only the articles. This would be a great boon to the reader, obviously, but how is the publisher supposed to pay the bills? The reader picked up the newspaper without paying for it, which is not a big deal because the selling price of a newspaper typically takes care of a small percentage of the cost of publishing it. Print newspapers, and now internet newspapers and other publications have always relied on the selling of advertising space for the greater part of their revenue. If readers can’t see the ads, why would advertisers continue to buy ad space?
In this early scene from the 1963 Stanley Kramer filmIt’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Jonathan Winters as Lennie Pike, third from the left, has some choice words for those who want something for free.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the state of internet advertising, from publishers and ad producers who put out obnoxious ads that distract from the visitor’s experience, to visitors who seem to think that internet publishers should make their content available free, and even better as far as they are concerned would be free without any visible means of support in the form of advertisements. That’s the “Big Rock Candy Mountain” pipe dream. More reasonable would be a compromise among publishers, advertisers, and visitors that would ask advertisers and publishers to show respect to visitors by not pushing obnoxious ads on them, and visitors to acknowledge the need for publishers to eat and pay the rent like anybody else, and to satisfy those needs by showing ads to visitors. Simple really, particularly considering the alternatives of working in the mines or paying for what you get.
— Techly
