Ideapad

Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Category: Observed (Page 8 of 24)

Grammar police: 5 things everyone does wrong (that you shouldn’t)

May 6, 2009 /

One of my great personal skills–and, by extension, a continual pet peeve–is near-perfect grammar, and the ability to spot grammatical errors. I always took proper grammar to be a de facto requirement for smart writing, and I look for the things I read to have an appropriate level of accuracy.

On the Internet, where I’m soaking up thousands of sentences daily, errors inevitably pop up. A few of them happen far more than others, a result of either misinformation, Microsoft Word preformatting or pure naiveté.

But none of those reasons excuses you from making any of the following mistakes, all of which are universal, and easy to get right.

  1. Smart apostrophes. Listen up! Just because MS Word auto-styles the apostrophe before your graduation year as an open-apostrophe doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s not.
    This is correct: ‘09
    This is not: ‘09
    You have to squint a bit to read it in the Ideapad font, so here: wrong, wrong, right.
  2. Quotation marks and periods. American grammar is universal: commas and periods always come before an endquote.
    “Pathetic,” he said, “that the Yankees can’t beat the Red Sox.”
    Question marks and exclamation points can break this rule, as do colons and semicolons. But at the end of a declarative sentence or phrase, the quotation marks come on the outside.
  3. Starting quotations. Grammatically speaking, you don’t have to note an artificial capitalization at the start of a sentence. This is unnecessary:
    [H]is velocity is off by a couple MPH this year on all pitches, not just his fastball.
    It’s perfectly acceptable to truncate a quote and not identify it at the start of a sentence. Don’t bother putting the first letter in brackets. It just slows down the reading.
  4. Ending quotations. This one’s a little more wonky, but since I just did the starting quotes, we should cover this, too. It’s actually three rules in one. Let’s start with the following quote:
    Netherland — a double play-on-words evoking the mythic underworld and
    the city’s Dutch origins — feels rather post-apocalyptic. Which, truth
    be told, the city did feel like, and perhaps still does.
    Here is how to properly cite shortened versions of the quote.
    1. If you end your quote cleanly, at the end of a sentence, you stop with a period.
      “Netherland — a double play-on-words evoking the mythic underworld and
      the city’s Dutch origins — feels rather post-apocalyptic.”
    2. If you truncate your quote mid-sentence, then resume the quote in the same sentence, you use three periods: an ellipsis.
      “Netherland … feels rather post-apocalyptic.”
      The proper typeset way to do an ellipsis, by the way, is period-space-period-space-period, but that gets wonky online, so no one does it. I personally go space-period-period-period-space … it’s a kludge for the web browser’s sake. (Which you cannot claim for the other grammar rules in this post.)
    3. If you truncate a quote mid-sentence, then resume at a point after that sentence ends, you now need four periods: the ellipsis plus a period to mark the end of the sentence.
      Netherland — a double play-on-words evoking the mythic underworld and
      the city’s Dutch origins. … Which, truth
      be told, the city did feel like, and perhaps still does.
      (Okay, so this quote doesn’t read well this way, but the ellipsis usage above is correct.)
  5. Parentheses and brackets. Unlike the parens in Excel formulas, nested parenthetical citations are supposed to alternate between parentheses (these guys) and brackets (which look like this [when nested properly]). See how that works? The brackets look different from the parentheses, which allow the reader to parse each phrase appropriately. If you do it wrong (and I don’t encourage it (because it makes such a mess (seriously)) and isn’t proper) like I just did, you may confuse the heck out of people. Just be sure to use the brackets second, for the internal phrase. And don’t get me started on sticking a colon in front of a close-parenthesis to make a smiley, then using the same close-parens to actually close the aside. Oy.

Got all that? Go forth and impress. English teachers nationwide–and I–will thank you.

The machines, they’re smarter than we know

May 4, 2009 /

So Nate has this little toy, the LeapFrog Spin and Sing Alphabet Zoo. It’s a pretty neat little toy, if a bit mind-numbing: spin a wheel with the alphabet on it, and it starts singing and playing music until the wheel stops, whereupon it announces the letter it’s stopped on. Like Wheel of Fortune for babies. I kind of like the tune, too, “spin spin a letter, look all around,” etc. although folks like my friend’s wife refer to it as “that fucking toy.” We just call it “spin spin a letter” and leave it at that. Nate actually just likes the spinning, not the music, so we get away with occasionally leaving the sound off.
Anyway. The wheel is well sensored, so it knows when and how much it’s being moved. Music stops promptly when spinning stops, and moving it one letter at a time does get the toy to say each letter in sequence. “B! C! D! C!”
Tonight Amy picked up the spin spin a letter to put it away. Nonbelievers would tell you the wheel had landed on either X or Z, but I took the device more literally, for it cried out, plaintively, as it was being put away:
“Why! Why!”
Don’t worry, little buddy, Nate will make a beeline for you in the morning.

Trainspotter

April 22, 2009 /

Rail travel on aiaio, the business blog.
I am a big fan of trains, apparently dating back to my childhood, when I’d get unreasonably excited about commuter trains passing overhead (whether this was my own obsession or something prompted by my mother, I am unsure). I still enjoy getting around New York by subway–most mornings, anyway–and have happily explored transit systems in scattered cities around the world.
Taking the Acela this year has been a great discovery. It showcases America’s potential in high-speed rail and the many advantages that come with it. Unfortunately, it also shows the shortcomings: the breakdowns, the slow top speeds, the inexplicably bumpy ride.
The more we can get ourselves to adopt, and appreciate, trains the better our environment will be. I will continue to take trains whenever they’re a viable option. And, yeah, getting excited when they go by. I still do that.

Tropicana feels it where it counts

April 3, 2009 /

In the wake of Tropicana’s disastrous rebranding over the winter, its sales plummeted 20 percent in six weeks. Twenty percent in six weeks!
That’s a disaster on a monumental scale for a brand this size–$33 million in lost sales, plus the millions of dollars in designing, packaging and marketing the new designs, and the funds to clean up the mess.
The sales news also sheds new light on the decision to switch the packaging back, which at the time was called a “deep emotional bond” among Tropicana consumers. Indeed, the exact opposite was true: without the logo, people assumed their juice was gone, and simply bought something else. Neil Campbell, call your public relations department. (via kottke.org and df)

On landing a job

March 4, 2009 /

How to Get Hired on aiaio, the Ai blog.
I have long been an observer, commentator and course-corrector when it comes to job interviews. Many moons ago I published a series of job-hunt best practices in this space. Titled “Interdon’t,” many of my pointers are just as relevant today as they were a decade ago.
I am continually amazed by the flagrant violations of basic job-search protocol. Among the things I’ve seen the past two weeks:

  • Cover letters with our company name in a different font, copy-pasted
  • Saying “this position is a great fit” while having a background in, say, high finance
  • Chatty letters with no resumes attached
  • Emailed resumes with no accompanying text at all

People expect to (and do) land work like this? How? I suppose they’re hired by people with similar approaches, but that’s not me.
Anyway, read the two links above if you’re looking for a job, and good luck in your search.

The Internet you didn’t know

February 25, 2009 /

Jurassic Web in Slate, subtitle: “The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.”

What did people do online back when Slate launched? After plunging into the Internet Archive and talking to several people who were watching the Web closely back then, I’ve got an answer: not very much.

To which I say: bullshit.

The World Wide Web was an invigorating, compelling and, frankly, amazing place in 1996. Innovations were fast, furious and quickly adopted. Clever people did clever things and pretty much everyone noticed, because “everyone” was a rather small and curious community.

I know. I was there. Not “watching,” like the folks Slate’s reporter Farhad Manjoo spoke to, but creating. Designing. Exploring. Sharing. And, pretty much daily, blown away.

The Internet of 1996 was certainly nothing like today’s experience. But to suggest there wasn’t much to do is to ignore everything that was being done.

There was no iTunes; but there were MP3s, and .wav files, and sharing was just as exciting (and covert). There was no glut of information, not yet; but there were unbelievably good reads and finds, large and small, like Suck and HotWired and 0sil8. Tools for online creation were primitive, but that didn’t stop people like me from hand-coding HTML and slicing together animated GIFs frame by frame and putting amazing works online.

No Yahoo Mail? So what? I was sending email with Eudora over high-speed connections back in 1991. And I first used instant messaging in 1992, on an old Mac running OS 7, when young Farhad was still in middle school. Which is not to be a grumpy old man, but to make the point he misses: the Internet wasn’t hamstrung back then. It was just different.

I dare say 1996 was, in certain ways, more interesting online than 2009. The Web was still the great unknown. People didn’t know what to make of it, but they knew it was radical and fascinating. It was the future, happening in real time.

Today the Internet is a mature medium that has become more sophisticated almost non-stop since the early days of its commercialization. But to call its initial era boring is to miss the real story. The Internet has never been boring. Those of us who were there in 1996, shaping what so many people now consider normal, know the truth.

GM and Chrysler deserve nothing

February 18, 2009 /

Here’s the thing about the latest auto industry bailout pleas: only under extreme duress are General Motors and Chrysler are making changes to their business plans. And only under the guise of getting more cash are they coming up with them.

I don’t want to see large-scale industrial failure any more than the next guy. But these companies do not deserve Federal assistance. They have proven for decades that their businesses are myopic and wholly resistant to change. While the rest of the world’s automakers adapted and excelled, Detroit was relying on focus groups, creating redundant models, ignoring macroeconomic and environmental trends, and overpaying employees.

The net result is companies that need overhauls and closures. Market forces should create the necessary change. Another $14 billion will only continue the status quo, which is akin to giving a drug addict just a bit more of his drugs in the hope he’ll figure out how to get clean if he’s given just a little more time. It won’t work.

GM in particular has busted its model by overdoing just about everything, starting with a proliferation of models. Take a look at model lineups in 1959, during its heyday:

  • Chevrolet: 8 including trucks (Bel Air, Biscayne, Impala, Corvette, Kingswood, El Camino, Suburban, Parkwood)
  • Pontiac: 3 (Bonneville, Catalina, star Chief)
  • Buick: 2 (Electra, Invicta)
  • Cadillac: 3 (DeVille, Eldorado, Fleetwood)

That’s 16 car models in total across their four major brands. Today Chevy has 15 models, Pontiac 7, Cadillac 6 and Buick 3–a total of 31 car lines, nearly twice as many models for less than half the market share. And that’s excluding Saturn and GMC, which heavily rebrand GM platforms for even more product lines. You’d think over the past, say, 15 years GM would realize it’s doing things wrong and try some fresh tactics. None ever came.

So add me to the list of “let ’em fail” naysayers. I’d like to see Detroit’s stalwarts continue to make cars, but only compelling concepts with strong identities that would actually have me consider buying one.

The potential ripple effects are frightening, but more bailout money will only delay the inevitable. Better to swallow hard and work on a Plan B.

Noticing the downturn

December 15, 2008 /

Frank Bruni writes today how restaurants have shifted from blase to dismayed at his canceled reservations.
I’ve been warily surveying my own neighborhood, and my actions, too. Our neighborhood Italian joint of choice is still jam-packed, even at 5:30 in the evening. But this is a restaurant that can serve two people a three-course meal with a glass of wine for $70. One might expect it to thrive, which so far, it is.
I’ve had a couple of fancy dinners the past few weeks where there’s been no second seating–by 9 p.m. the restaurant has scattered empty tables. Ruby Foo’s in Times Square defied this trend, but countless other restaurants are starting to feel the strain.
At home, I’m ordering in less frequently; the urge to save money is trumping the 20-minute neighborhood quickie once or twice a week more than it used to. (Also, there’s no good Chinese food near me. An open letter to the restaurant owners of New York City: please open a decent Chinese place on the Upper West Side! Everything uptown is mediocre at best, and heaven knows all these people should stop eating at Saigon Grill.)
The city in general is going to look far more bleak next spring than it does right now. Come February, I expect a rash of store closings, restaurants and otherwise, which will leave the city pockmarked like my local stretch of Broadway. One can only hope things don’t get that bad.

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