1 post from February 2009

I was originally posting the following link due to my interest in the subject, but now I am posting for a different reason. http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=670

To anyone who has poo-pooed my insistence of the use of proper English or grammar, told me I made their head hurt, or "semantics"ed me: this is why we need to fucking learn our own language.

This writer may be intelligent; he may even be brilliant. We can't tell because he can't properly communicate a thought. He says "use firefox" so we know that the point of this article is that firefox is better than I.E., but there is no way to actually discern this from his article. This is mostly because he doesn't present his arguments in any clear order, but also because his use of English is criminal.

Let us look at a few passages.

"I’m well aware within recent findings; those reported on the ZDNet Zero Day blog, that Firefox is one of the most vulnerable applications for Windows, although it doesn’t say anywhere that the actual application is insecure."

What exactly is he saying here? There is not a complete sentence with any coherent meaning in more than 3 lines. The semi colon marks a break between two separate but related clauses. I had to read this several times to realize that he meant to use a comma. A simple typo, maybe. But even with the comma it is hard to understand because he bungled it up by leaving out "that" after aware. Thus, the sentence read that he was aware of something but constricted by boundaries, rather than that he was aware of something within a body of work. I was expecting something like "I am aware within my limited study of psychology that...xyz", although even this is sketchy at best. I understood it eventually, but the point of an essay or article should be to clearly convey information to the reader. If you can not do this, then you have failed.

I'll ignore his slangy colloquial phrases that cause me to cringe, since a blog is allowed to be chatty. However, I do wish to point out another section of the article.

"Rory Cellan-Jones, well known to those who watch the BBC News or follow the content on the BBC blogs/websites, explained this in lay-man terms. The current zero-day flaw (which means the exploit has been found before the security boffs, and has been used for bad things already) can have such an effect as to:

* exploit the computer in question, by giving the attacker the same access rights as the person currently using the computer;
* it is only spread via malicious websites, so providing you have an anti-virus and use Firefox (or another browser, but use Firefox), you should be relatively safe. Jones disagrees, as Firefox has vulnerabilities also, but…
* providing you’re not stupid and don’t visit porn, hacking, cracking, serials and key-gen websites, you should be alright."

Read that a few times. When you bullet things like that, the reader expects each bullet to follow directly from the sentence before the bullets began. In other words, each bullet can be read individually of the others. Clearly this is not the case. The grammar and syntax are painful, but you could probably make a coherent statement after cutting and pasting those useless bullets into sentences.

[the flaw] can have such an effect as to exploit the computer in question, by giving the attacker the same access rights as the person currently using the computer. However, it is only spread via malicious websites, so providing you have an anti-virus and use Firefox (or another browser, but use Firefox), you should be relatively safe. Jones disagrees, because Firefox also has vulnerabilities , but providing you’re not stupid and don’t visit porn, hacking, cracking, serials and key-gen websites, you should be alright.

(For the record, there was no computer brought into question by anything he said except for perhaps a tenuous link to the the computers that we presume the bad things have already happened to.)

The sentence is created is what his editors should have created, and it is sure as hell easier to read to matter how much of an unreasonable asshole you think I might be. I don't care how smart you are or how much you know about any difficult, esoteric, or arcane knowledge. It is all useless if you cannot form a sentence coherent enough to explain to someone what you have discovered. The purpose of language is to efficiently share information, and if we start giving a shit about our language, we will lose any semblance of efficiency that our society might have.

p.s. You will probably find punctuation, spelling, or grammar errors in my post. you are not cute for bringing them up in such a manner as to refute my argument. No one is perfect, and I don't expect anyone to be. Misspelling a word or missing a punctuation mark is one thing.

p.p.s. I'm not saying everyone should be able to write excellently, or even well. I'm saying people should care.

p.p.p.s I'm not "waving my hands", being an elitist, etc. I just feel like we need to stop looking down on learning, especially where the arts are concerned, and start making the ability to write something that a person can feel proud of. Also, stop it with the idea that anyone can be a writer. Not anyone can be a scientist, an artist, a lawyer, a doctor... you have to know how to do these things first. Likewise, not anyone can be a writer. You have to know how to write first.

The article can be found below, as well as above.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=670