wordy things Archive

2

Sloppy, vague sentences are ‘the new normal’ for Australian newspapers

By
Josh
– 8 August 2011Posted in: media, politics, wordy things

Australian journalists either no longer know how to write clear, concise and grammatical sentences, or they no longer care.

Every day, in ever newspaper in the land, we read sloppy, vague sentences written in the passive voice with hazy attribution and bad grammar.

I’m going to pick on one example in particular, but if you think this is the exception, I’m happy to provide many others.

Kate Bracks and Michael Weldon celebrate. Picture: Channel 10

Kate Bracks and Michael Weldon celebrate. Picture: Channel 10

In the article ‘Viewers desert MasterChef finale amid programming backlash‘, Amanda Meade writes:

The third series of MasterChef Australia was decided last night with Bracks outperforming Adelaide film projectionist Michael Weldon to take out the title thanks to her version of a carrot sorbet snowman from Copenhagen’s famed Noma restaurant, considered the world’s best restaurant.

(Curiously, the same sentence appears word-for-word in this earlier article by Leo Shanahan and Michael Bodey. But newspapers often steal from themselves. Why reinvent the wheel?)

What’s wrong with it? Obviously it’s an unnecessarily long and complex multi-clause sentence that uses the weak ‘with’ to connect clauses. The second ‘restaurant’ is redundant. But the cracker is it actually contains not one but two passive verbs. In the one sentence! That’s talent.

You may argue that passive sentences are no big deal. ‘Lighten up, grammar head, it’s just the way people write nowadays, like, move with the times,’ you may say. And you are dead wrong. Idiot.

Passive verbs are not evil per se. But for a journalist, a passive sentence should be a crime because it deliberately conceals information.

Let’s take the first one: “The third series of MasterChef Australia was decided last night”. By whom was it decided? The judges, obviously; we can work that one out for ourselves without too much effort. But how much harder would it have been to say “Bracks won the third series of MasterChef Australia last night, outperforming Adelaide film projectionist …”? Just like that, disposing of the passive sentence, the vagueness about who decided the competition and the ugly ‘with’ connection, and saving two words in the process.

The second passive verb is the cracker. Noma is “considered the world’s best restaurant” by whom? Approximately 2.5 seconds of Googling gave me the answer to that: by the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, published by Restaurant magazine. In fact, Noma has won this award two years running (a fact the MasterChef judges may even have mentioned on the show). But the author(s) was evidently too busy and important to add this detail, instead opting for the vague ‘considered’.

This is simply lazy. But worse, by eliminating attribution, it allows the author to editorialise. Instead of “considered the world’s best restaurant”, she (they) could just as easily have said “considered a rat-infested tourist trap which serves live slugs in engine grease”. By whom? Who knows? The journalist assumes we don’t care.

Journalists use the same trick all the time to insert opinions into what should be straight reporting. “The government program, considered to be a debacle…” or “The minister, considered to be an incompetent boob and serial child molester…” It doesn’t take long, reading Australian political journalism in particular, before you start seeing this happening again and again.

Which makes one wonder if firing all those sub-editors, and having editors whose only talent appears to be firing sub-editors (as opposed to editing articles), has been such a great idea.

(Obviously, Muphry’s Law dictates that there will be at least one grammatical or spelling error in this post.)

Tags: , , , , , ,
8

The ten types of comments on news articles

By
Josh
– 1 August 2011Posted in: marketroids, media, techno-wankery, wordy things

One major criticism of reality TV shows, especially in the pre-MasterChef era, was they profited from encouraging and rewarding all the worst aspects of human behaviour. I think it’s time we recognised comments on online news and opinion websites have exactly the same problem.

It doesn’t take long before you start seeing the same people making the same kinds of comments over and over. The value to the publisher is obvious, in that it encourages readers to come back, click more articles, view more ads, buy more stuff. But what value, really, does it add for the reader?

Certain topics are guaranteed to bring out particular brands of loonies – think climate change or religion. But even reader comments on relatively innocuous topics are an incredibly effective stupidity concentrator.

Essentially, all reader comments on any article ever can be boiled down to one of the following:

  1. I had an opinion before I read this article. Since this article agrees with that opinion, it is an unbiased, worthy and well written article.
  2. I had an opinion before I read this article. Since this article disagrees with that opinion, it is illogical, biased nonsense.
  3. The parts of this article I disagree with are illogical nonsense. The parts I agree with are worthy points, well argued.
  4. Some completely irrelevant thing I am obsessed with surely proves this article correct/incorrect.
  5. This article surely proves some completely irrelevant thing I am obsessed with.
  6. Personally abusing and/or expressing sexual admiration for author, subject(s) of article and/or other commenters.
  7. The affiliations of the author who wrote this article allow us to discount anything it says.
  8. The bias of the publication in which the article appears allows us to discount anything it says.
  9. Immensely long and off-topic rant containing wild conspiracy theories and LARGE SECTIONS OF ALL CAPS.
  10. Repeating the same point five dozen other commenters already made and clearly demonstrating this commenter didn’t read any of the previous comments before mouthing off.

And…

  1. I had an opinion before I read this article. Because the article is logically argued and presents the evidence clearly and without bias, I am willing to concede I was wrong about this subject previously. [Note: this never happens]
Tags: , , , , ,
2

Why South American magic realist novelists shouldn’t write IT case studies (part 2)

By
Josh
– 20 July 2011Posted in: techno-wankery, wordy things

The story so far…

Grupo Nacional de Chocolates S.A invested heavily in technology for its food manufacturing business, but the machinery was beset by diabolical difficulties.

Solution

One clear and chilly winter morning, a flight of brightly coloured macaws circled the factory. After they had completed their one hundredth circuit of the high-walled compound, there arrived at the gates Desarrollo Sostenible, an elderly, wrinkled man with wispy white hair but eyes as clear and sharp as an infant’s. For as long as anyone could remember, he had travelled from village to village in his rickety cart drawn by a flea-bitten mule, dispensing knick knacks and folk remedies.

At the gate, he asked to speak to Marco Estratégico para el Actuación Corporativa, the company’s Director of Information Technology.

“I said, ‘Go away old man, we don’t need your witchcraft here’,” recounted Estratégico. “But he replied, ‘So, you don’t need help with your coffee beans turning into beetles? Your corn flakes becoming porn flakes? And your sausages that look like … you know what they look like.’

“I knew then that this old man had corporate learnings we could assimilate into our knowledge-based strategies moving forward.”

“Even 150-year-old wandering wise men need to visit the supermarket occasionally,” Sostenible said.

Estratégico and Sostenible ascended the four hundred steps to the company datacentre, at the top of the stone tower from which Colonel Sistemas Legado and his men held out in a heroic last stand against the army for 15 days and nights at the end of the revolutionary war.

“As soon as Desarrollo Sostenible entered the datacentre, the servers doused their flames, though the heat was still palpable,” said Estratégico.

Sostenible rummaged in his threadbare carpet bag and withdrew a small paintbrush and set of paints. He then proceeded to paint an uncannily accurate picture of an eye on the production control server. He repeated the process with the database server. He then began to chant in a deep voice that reverberated throughout the datacentre and over the whole factory.

“I couldn’t make out all the words he was saying, but it was something like ‘la ecología, la población local, el futuro’,” said Estratégico.

“Gradually a thick fog crept out of the forest to surround the datacentre tower. It started to seep through the cracks in the walls and settled around the servers.”

As this misty wet blanket smothered the passion of the servers, they began to work properly again.

“You don’t have to be a 250-year-old wise man to know you need two virtual eyes to prepare your datacentre for cloud computing,” explained Sostenible.

Business benefits

Sausages shaped like...With the servers no longer overheating, the production lines gradually resumed their normal operation, aside from the occasional flocks of butterflies from the pasta machine.

Grupo Nacional de Chocolates successfully expanded its operations into Ecuador and Venezuela. Estratégico then developed an innovative new product for the Brazilian market.

“The bonus payment and royalties I received for inventing deep-fried butterflies helped me gain my financial freedom,” he said.

“Finally I was able to marry my second cousin Estrategia de Comunicación, who I had loved in secret ever since I saw her swimming naked under the waterfall in the forest when we were teenagers, but our family forbade us to see each other and promised her to Barón de Ladrón.”

Having finished his work, Desarrollo Sostenible fed a few chocolates to the mule and packed up his decrepit cart, piled high with packets of sausages.

“They may not look appetising, but they are the most delicious sausages I have ever eaten in my 347 years,” he exclaimed.

Tags: , , , , ,
0

Why South American magic realist novelists shouldn’t write IT case studies

By
Josh
– 19 July 2011Posted in: techno-wankery, wordy things

Perched at the top of a towering cliff that plunges into the roiling waters of the North Pacific, at the edge of a teeming rainforest, is the headquarters of Grupo Nacional de Chocolates S.A., a leading manufacturer and distributor of confectionery-based solutions. The ancient, crumbling edifice dating back to the time of the conquistadors houses food processing facilities for chocolates; roasted and milled coffee; cereals; pasta; meat; sausages; candies; sugar; honey; and crackers.

I Can Do All Things by Julie Kirkland

Business situation

To support its expansion into Ecuador and Venezuela, Grupo Nacional de Chocolates invested in a $10 million solution based around gleaming machines that worked 24 hours a day and never went on strike. This enabled the company to redeploy 150 staff to higher-value activities. One day without warning, a troop of soldiers arrived at the workers’ camp at dawn and marched them into the forest, never to be seen again.

No sooner had this occurred, than the machinery began to experience diabolical difficulties.

“The manufacturing line we used for pasta started producing live butterflies instead of farfalle,” said Marco Estratégico para el Actuación Corporativa, the company’s Director of Information Technology. “Instead of jelly snakes, there were poisonous vipers. And don’t even ask what came out of the sausage machine.”

The control systems also suffered a range of performance and technical problems.

“The servers would burst into flames from the heat of their passions,” said Estratégico, a veteran of the revolutionary war. “I started to think this was a problem for which there was no end-to-end solution.”

Solution

One clear and chilly winter morning, a flight of brightly coloured macaws circled the factory. After they had completed one hundred circuits of the high-walled compound, there arrived at the gates Desarrollo Sostenible, an elderly, wrinkled man with wispy white hair but eyes as clear and sharp as an infant’s. For as long as anyone could remember, he had travelled from village to village in his rickety cart drawn by a flea-bitten mule, dispensing knick knacks and folk remedies.

[The story continues...]

Tags: , , ,
0

Not so sceptical my brains will fall out

By
Josh
– 23 March 2011Posted in: damned lies and statistics, nerds, scienticians, wordy things

Tim Dean has written a wonderfully reasonable and thoughtful piece on why conservatives are more likely to be climate change sceptics. I am somewhat more suspicious of their motives.

As you can imagine, this article provoked a flood of outraged, incendiary, irrational commentary from conservative climate change deniers.

Indeed, many climate deniers say their inability to face the facts of human-induced climate change stems from the most enlightened spirit of scientific rigour and critical thinking. As commenter ‘Unconvinced’ puts it:

You forgot the most important attributes of conservatives – the ability to think for themselves, and self-determination. Most of us will try to look at the evidence for ourselves not just blindly follow someone claiming authority.

That’s right folks, we should tip our hats and thank our lucky stars for contrarian free-thinkers like Unconvinced who bravely stand against the tide of public opinion and overwhelming evidence in the pursuit of truth, justice, Australia and cheap electricity.

Isn’t it simply breathtaking how many of these  über-intelligent experts in assessing scientific evidence choose to grace us with their wisdom in online comments? And how they all say exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, almost as though they’re reading from the same few sources?

You really have to marvel at the irony in the way they decry those who believe in climate change science as gullible sheep, even as they uncritically put their faith in unscientific climate-denier propaganda.

As Bernard Keane observes in Crikey:

Scepticism connotes a healthy willingness to be convinced if the evidence is sufficient, whereas of course no amount of evidence will ever convince critics of climate science, even as the evidence mounts and the numbers remorselessly add up to a warming planet. They’ll explain them away, make up their own data, reformat their graphs and cherrypick whatever data or explanations they can find — exactly as AIDS denialists and genocide denialists do.

Co-opting the language of scientific scepticism or contrarianism isn’t going to cut through the stench of those steaming piles of irony they’re trying to bury us under.

Tags: , , , , , ,
3

I do not think it means what you think it means

By
Josh
– 9 November 2010Posted in: nerds, techno-wankery, wordy things

As computers and internet technology have become mainstream, technology terms have entered the language. But the translation is not always accurate. As a professional pedant, it makes me turn purple the number of times I hear people misusing the following two terms:

1. Hard drive

What a lot of people think it means: The box part of a desktop computer.

What it really means: A smaller component inside the box that is used to store data permanently.

Why people get it wrong: If the box part of the computer has an official name, it is the ‘system unit’. You can see why it doesn’t grab anyone. Whereas calling the thing a ‘hard drive’ sounds about right to anybody who doesn’t know what’s actually inside one.

2. Screen saver

What a lot of people think it means: The image you put on the background of your computer’s virtual desktop.

What it really means: A piece of software that puts moving images or animation on your screen after you haven’t been using your computer for a while.

If computer monitors are left for too long with the same image or text in the same place, they can suffer ‘phosphor burn’. The light-emitting phosphor compounds in screens (especially old-fashioned monochromatic cathode ray tube screens) lose their brightness through use. If a screen always displays the same text in the same spot, that area will eventually become burnt in, leaving a faded ‘ghost’ image of that text.

Screen savers were designed to prevent this by placing an always-moving image on the screen.

Why people get it wrong: Aside from falling into the same category of ‘stuff you can put on your computer screen to personalise it’, these two things don’t have a lot in common. Modern LCD screens don’t suffer from phosphor burn (although plasma and OLED screens do), so actual screen savers aren’t particularly popular anymore. It’s all a bit of a mystery.

OK, so those are my two. What other tech malapropisms boil your blood?

Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

Stupid conservative numbers game is no proof of bias

By
Josh
– 24 August 2010Posted in: damned lies and statistics, government, media, wordy things

Gavin Atkins’s post on ABC’s The Drum is the latest in a line of conservatives playing stupid numbers games to ‘prove’ that the ABC (or some other media organisation) has an inherent left-wing bias. In fact, all it demonstrates is that Atkins and his fellow cultural warriors do not have the faintest clue about the purpose of journalism.

Atkins read through every article published on The Drum website during the election campaign and scored each individual sentence as follows:

Each time a value-laden remark was made about Julia Gillard (or her campaign) that was positive or negative, it was noted as G+ or G-. For Tony Abbott, it was given the value A+ or A.

Yup, that’s it. It’s all very well to call this system moronic or pathetically simplistic, but why?

Because it assumes that everything Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott did during the election campaign was equally credible or unbelievable and that all critiques or praises published on The Drum were equally fair. This is demonstrably not the case.

For example, every time Tony Abbott claimed interest rates would always be lower under a Coalition government than under Labor, this was:

  • Historically inaccurate, when referring to past governments
  • Completely impossible to prove or disprove, when referring to future governments

In other words, it was complete bullshit.

But if an article in The Drum criticised this comment, Atkins would give it an A-, thus confirming in his mind that the ABC was full of socialists.

The Atkins system also makes no differentiation between an article that criticised Julia Gillard for proposing a citizens’ assembly to develop a new policy on climate change – a dumb idea – and one that bitched about the Prime Ministerial earlobes or dress sense. Both would get a G- under this scale.

Being critical of politicians’ stupid ideas is a journalist or commentator’s job. If an article simply reports what a politician said without any analysis or comparison to reality, that is bad journalism. So is an article that ridicules a politician’s personal attributes.

To demonstrate bias, Atkins would therefore need to show not only that The Drum criticised one side or another more, but also that those critiques were unfair or unjustified. Otherwise, his results could just as easily be explained by the fact that Tony Abbott said and did a lot more stupid things that were worthy of criticism.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
3

Newsflash: lefty novelist-academic is elitist wanker

By
Josh
– 24 May 2010Posted in: turtleneck-wearing latté sippers, wordy things

At his closing address for the 2010 Sydney Writers’ Festival, Peter Carey said a lot of laudable things about the importance of reading and the value of good teachers. But underlying his speech was a severe, elitist disdain for ordinary people who, one guesses, do not read Peter Carey novels.

The cult of book readers

Carey started out by trying to butter up the audience. Who, he asked for a show of hands, had read a work of literature in the past week. Of course, most people in the audience had. He noted how unlikely it would be to get such a high proportion of ‘yes’ answers in any other room around the country. He later referred to it as a cult of literature readers.

He further pandered to the audience by throwing in a few titbits about environmental destruction and indigenous injustice and sundry causes likely to please middle-aged armchair socialists.

He went on to discuss the importance of people who can read works of literature and serious nonfiction – not just newspapers and cereal boxes – to making informed political decisions. (I would argue that the ability to think critically and analyse statements in context are more important, but I’d just be called a postmodernist tosser.) But at the same time, he noted with despair the incredible dumbing down of society.

Dumbing down

As evidence of this dumbing down, Carey played a series of vox pops taken outside a Sarah Palin book signing at a Borders bookstore in Columbus, Ohio. These booklovers were unable to discuss with any clarity what Palin’s policies were, or why they were so opposed to the evil Democrats.

As further evidence, he noted that one of the top-selling books in Australia was the Master Chef Cookbook and not, if there were any justice in the world, a Peter Carey novel. (OK, I added that last bit.)

But these were cheap shots that proved nothing.

There’s nothing easier than finding a place where dumb Americans congregate, pointing a camera at them and letting them talk, as the Chaser’s Charles Firth could tell you. And popular entertainment doesn’t need to be highbrow. Though to be fair, it should probably not be completely stupid. Carey made a nice analogy about junk news and junk entertainment being as bad for the mind and junk food was for the body.

This claim of dumbing down has been made for decades and has been refuted almost as often. Ten years ago, the Guardian examined the issue in great detail and found no evidence that people today were dumber than past generations. Au contraire.

Goodbye to privileged knowledge (and good riddance?)

Beneath these claims of dumbing down lie a profound discomfort with what is actually going on – a vast, unprecedented smartening up; billions of people who have access to information through books, newspapers, television and of course the internet. And the destruction of barriers to entry into the elite domains of privileged knowledge that novelists and academics like Carey inhabit and fight to maintain.

Everyone can read. And everyone can publish. A lot of it will be rubbish. But so what?

The world does not have a limited amount of cleverness to go around. Sarah Palin may be a more successful book writer (by number of books sold) than Peter Carey, but that doesn’t make Carey’s work any less intelligent or special for those who appreciate it.

And if the theory that ‘dumb’ books like the Harry Potter series are a gateway drug – they actually encourage people to read, and even to read real books – is true, there may even be more people around to enjoy Parrot and Olivier in America.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

Significant growth in substantial uniqueness

By
Josh
– 12 March 2010Posted in: damned lies and statistics, marketroids, media, wordy things

In this marvellous post, Tim Phillips rails against the proliferation of meaningless filler words in media releases.

Vague non-words like significant and substantial look like they’re telling us something, but they aren’t. They’re useful for people who have a deadline but no clear idea what they’re writing about; or people who know the numbers, don’t want to tell us what they are, but want to waste our time anyway because that’s what they’re paid to do. Often they are paid by the word, so chucking in a “substantial” here and there is basically free money.

To demonstrate this, he searches through the Factiva database. He found the number of media releases containing words such as ‘significant’ and ‘unique’ has remained fairly constant since 2002. However, the number of media releases containing all four words – significant and substantial and meaningful and unique – has tripled.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
1

Neologism of the week: shitkansen

By
Josh
– 11 March 2010Posted in: wordy things

Shitkansen (n)

A slow or low-quality train. Portmanteau of ‘shit’ or ‘shitcan’ + ‘shinkansen’, Japanese high-speed train.

Earliest Googleable usage: December 2008.

Dennis Vranic Japan has Shinkansen, we have SHITkansen

Often used in reference to the Sydney-to-Newcastle train journey (eg, Aaron Hewett and Marcus Westbury).

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Older Entries