Slightly OT because it's aimed at PowerPoint users, in particular those ones who think good grammar doesn't have anything to do with bullet points:

http://www.grbps.com/PPgram.pdf

And if you get as annoyed as I do by bad PowerPoint presentations, you can also take a look at another article of mine, called "Slides From Hell (or 'How to make truly horrendous PowerPoint presentations')":

http://www.grbps.com/Slides.pdf

Ray

(edited for typo)

Thanks, Ray. Those were interesting and informative.

Bill

Good stuff, Ray. It really hits a raw nerve with me. I had a huge post prepared, but decided against it. No one wants to read my rantings about the state of the English language, so I'll merely leave with the suggestion that we "separate out" the real mistakes so that we can "focus in" on them. If we have "to" many listed we'll tend to give them "to" little attention.


Edit: punchuation

Ouch, Roger, that hurt. But you missed out my favourite modern redundancy: "Going forward". I challenge anyone to use it in a sentence such that it changes the meaning of that sentence in any way at all.

Ray

Hi Ray,

Thank you very much for your articles. I try to teach some style to my students, and I will use your articles (by the way, would you mind if I post them on my Webpage, with proper credits of course?).

The subject of proper presentation is very dear to me, and one of the most influential works I have come across is "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", by Edward Tufte. His books are true gems highly recommended for everyone including technical readers.

Alejandro

Alejandro,

You're welcome to republish, with the attribution intact. They're quite widely republished and I get emails from all over the place responding to them. I once got involved in quite a long exchange about the Oxford comma (which isn't a sentence I ever imagined needing to write.)

Ray

Ray, what is an "Oxford comma"?

thanks,
Bill

It's sometimes called the serial comma.

This sentence has a serial/Oxford comma:

"I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand, and God."

This sentence does not:

"I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

This sentence epitomizes why some of us insist on a serial comma for clarity.

I find "going forward" merely a slightly grating substitute for "from now on," which I prefer.

Way back when, when I still learned stuff I was taught that the serial comma was standard grammar until the New York Times decided to eliminate it as a cost-savings measure. Legend has it that someone actually calculated the value of the ink used for the serial comma in a year's worth of the New York Times and the Editor and Publisher decided to eliminate it and save some money.

Can't say that it is true or not, but it was discussed in my High School Journalism class in 1969. The teachers preferred that we use the comma (they also called it the trailing comma) but did not mark down if you didn't use it.

Andy

I always use the trailing comma. According to his will, Donald Duck wanted his estate to be divided equally between nephews, "Huey, Dewey and Louie." Huey got half, and Dewey and Louie split the other half.

Doug

"Going forward" to point out another word misused by so many (including those television judges) -- "So you loaned him the money?"

Going forward, my car runs very well. Going backward, however, it tends to stall.

I rest my case.

Ray

Another example of redundancy. The word "bad" is not necessary. All PowerPoint presentations are bad.

"continue on"

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Thank you, Ray.

I need this.

Daughter enjoyed reading Lapsing into a Comma when she was visiting. I need many such references.

Or, the Times Roman font was selected by the London Times because it was the smallest, most compact typeface they could come up with that people could still read. This undoubtedly saved them millions of pounds in materials costs over the decades.

[I do not like Times Roman. ]

Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss (Brit slant to punctuation, not everyone agrees with her, but still worth reading IMO)

The Dictionary of Disagreeable English by Robert Hartwell Fiske (a hoot)

I don't know why our legislators feel so compelled to "protect" the English language, when they do so much damage to it themselves.

I hope my comments are consistent with the spirit of this thread. About a year ago, my 12-year old nephew showed me an instruction sheet handed out in his English class, by a college trained and state certified English teacher. It was just three paragraphs long, describing a project the students were to complete. On initially reading it, I felt there was something "wrong" with those instructions. I made a photocopy of the sheet and sat down with it to see why I didn't feel comfortable with it. In those three paragraphs, I found 19 (!!!) errors in punctuation, verb tense and agreement, syntax, spelling, and vocabulary.

So this teacher is a college trained and state certified teacher of English. From the looks of the instruction sheet, she was functioning at the reading level of a high school senior, or maybe a junior. This lady is teaching a generation of American children their English. I wonder what the Power Point presentations of the future will look like? I have heard it said that today's high school students have the computer competence to construct well-formatted presentations - but have nothing to say and no ability to articulate it.

Intereresting discussion for an "outsider", especially that you Anglo-Saxons think you need a trailing/serial/Oxford comma, while other languages do not allow it's usage in the exactly same situation and still have a clear understanding of the logic.


In the New York Times', German and Hungarian language the listing
"Huey, Dewey and Louie." resp. "Huey, Dewey und Louie." resp. "Huey, Dewey és Louie."
means:
{h,d,l} - the 'and' replaces a final comma in the set listing;

while for the unsure traditionalist non-NYTimers it means:
{h,{d,l}} - the 'and' means suddenly a composed member of the set listing - so you need the trailing/serial/Oxford comma to get your {h,d,l}


Who started to make you think this way?

why I don't know what you're talkin' about Mr. Editor.

I mean - I've always thought it was Nucyoolar and Reelator.

I go nuts with these things even though I make my fair share of mistakes (aggravated vs. irritated as someone named WS pointed out a few years ago.) But I can still see and hear glaring errors like "irregardless" or "very unique" and when I hear so-called television journalists use this language I want to weep.

...and that's less than phenomenal! Those journalists are not verbalization phenoms; they are liguistic terrists!

As "an alien", I write in my native French, U.S English and Spanish.

I can spot other's misspellings but not my own and in my hubby's word "I'm a terrible speller".

He is a great speller in any language he studies.


The invention of spellcheckers has been a wonderfull for business correspondance but it has stymied my desire to participate in handwriten snailing activities.

Bursting ideas come really easily while handwriting something but usually spelling and good penmanship fly out of the window if the pen is not as fast as the mind.

Anne-Sophie,

When I learned French at school, I had a wonderful teacher, who always told us, "Remember what language is about. It is about being understood, and everything else must be secondary." He didn't mind too much if you spelled words incorrectly, or got them in the wrong order. So long as the meaning was clear, he felt you'd done enough. Of course, as your skills develop, you learn that grammar is vital to conveying meaning, spelling less so.

If you were to write me a letter in my language, I should never be so crass as to judge the content from the spelling.

Ray

ooh... i like that. I'll have to remember that. Hubby will cringe. He speaks "Texas Lazy Speak" when he's relaxed.

Did you know that:
"ruin" has two r's (rurn)
"wash" has one r - you just can't see it (warsh)
and railroad is lacking an l. (rairoad - said quickly like running rare and road together, not ray-road)

I tease him because I can. And because he knows he's a brilliant engineer and can dazzle a crowd of 500 other engineers on any given day.

Those articles are getting a lot of hits this past week. It's given me the idea that we may all have some links to share of wider interest to the FPN community. How do folks feel about a llinks forum or even a links page?

Ray

Non-Texans note: If you hear a Texan say, "far," he/she is probably referring to a conflagration, or what you would call a "fire."

If a Texan says "awl," you can almost bet that the reference is to a lubricant ("oil")rather than a leatherworker's tool.

When we are weary here, we say we are "tarred," but that does not mean we are covered with bitumen.

If we are describing a landscape and refer to a "mott," that's not a "knot" or a cur dog in the road, but a small stand of trees, as in an "elm mott" or a "lahv oak mott." (N.B. "lahv" is just our way of saying "live," and a "live oak" is a species of oak tree, not necessarily an oak tree that has not died yet in the drought.)

And so on. You can thank your lucky stars that you are reading this and not hearing it in my drawl. (It would sound like, "Yew kin thank yer lucky stahrs thet yewr a-readin' this an' not hearin' it in mah drawl." Nothing so disguises a liberal education as a Texas upbringin'.)

Accent? What accent?

Perfect! Another phrase to remember.

I was very proud not to have a discernible TX accent for many years. In school in Colorado people would start grumbling about the Texans in town and when I defended my kind they were shocked. "You can't be from Texas. You don't sound like a Texan."

Well, those days are gone. I actually heard myself say "fahr" the other day - "I need to turn up the fahr on supper."

When I've had a beer or a glass of wine... i'm probably almost unintelligible to non-Texans.

BUUUUt... if I am paying attention I can reduce the accent significantly. Not enough to hide my origins*, but enough not to sound like a hick.

Bill, how does one show the Texan "now" phonetically? When you cut off the "w" sound at the end, that is. it's not really "naa" but close.


*technically I'm a transplant but i've been here for 23 years now and had about 10 years off and on before my CO sojourn.

East Texas or West Texas?

My best transliteration:

"now" (East): nao or naa or even (deep East Texas and preachers) now-uh

"now" (West): now (mostly -- I don't know how to capture that "ow" that my friends from Abilene to Amarillo manage to produce)

And of course, "now" (South Texas): ahora, and "now" (Louisiana border): maintenant or PDQ

Some places from Ennis to San Antonio to Seguin, you'd have to substitute German or Czech but that's beyond me.

Actually, PDQ is pretty universal.

I almost never deliberately shut down my accent, although I am perfectly capable of speaking Midwestern English. When I was a young sailor visiting the Med coast of France, I learned that with a Texas accent and a worn out old pair or two of bluejeans, a boy could barter for pretty nearly anything he wanted.

Hey, it's all cool so long as we can all get by without this government MANUAL.

I'm not a fan of that sort of "humor." It has nothing to do with the current discussion, it's offensive, and it really has (in my opinion) no place in polite conversation.

I'm sorry you didn't like my last post. Since you've taken offense, I will deactivate the link... Now turn that frown upside down and gimme a smiley!!!

Thank you.

Great fun - but my particular irk is with people who meet WITH other people, as in, "I met with Joe yesterday."

The "with" is redundant - try meeting Joe without Joe!

And even worse, if you'll allow me to begin with a conjuction, is meeting UP with Joe up, down, over, under? Why?

Though I will accept that you might have had a meeting with Joe, since without him there was no meeting.

It's a noun and verb thing, but as the New York cabbie - one of life's philosophers - is reported to have said, "There ain't no noun that can't be verbed!"

Phew... but at least going forward beats going round in circles, as the goldfish said :doh:

Chris

Chris wrote:

Great fun - but my particular irk is with people who meet WITH other people, as in, "I met with Joe yesterday."

The "with" is redundant - try meeting Joe without Joe!

And even worse, if you'll allow me to begin with a conjuction, is meeting UP with Joe up, down, over, under? Why?

Though I will accept that you might have had a meeting with Joe, since without him there was no meeting.

Please accept my response in the spirit of academic comment, not criticism. I feel you have missed the point of American English idiomatic expression. English in general does not have a wealth of declention or conjugation to convey meanings, so it uses prepositions. Each of the examples you cite conveys a different meaning.

For example, "I met Bill" does convey that I met someone named Bill, but it is ambiguous in that it does not connote why we met. That meeting might have been social or business. "I met WITH Bill" generally means that Bill and I had a prearranged business meeting. "The representatives of our corportaion are meeting WITH the representatives of XYZ Corporation tomorrow."

"I met UP with Bill" usually connotes that Bill and I made some effort to meet. We might have had two different and very busy schedules, but we managed to meet UP at a local coffee shop. Or, I started out from New York City and Bill started out from San Francisco and we met UP in Saint Louis.

Although a grammatical construction might at first appear to me to be odd, I always try to look a second time to see what meaning it might convey. Idioms will drive one to distraction and they are the hardest part of learning a new language, let alone understanding one's own language. But, for me, looking for the meanings is part of the fun of language.

Thank you Frank. I will happily learn more about what seem at times to me to be rather odd Americanisms, and I do see exactly the points you are making.

Indeed, English would often require you to add a word or two to explain the context where necessary:

"I met Joe by chance yesterday" as opposed to "the meeting arranged with Joe".

Unfortunately, these distinctions have been lost as they crossed the ocean so that many people here say "met up with" when they simply mean "met" and wish to sound a little more... well, actually I don't know why they say it. I think it is a form of verbal diarhhoea

But, I don't understand why the US has lost the distinction between alternate (ie, by turns) and alternative (ie as a choice) and I am fighting against its incursion into Eurospeak (a sort of Englishoid language with bits of French, German and American thrown in) or why US airlines generally announce they will be landing momentarily, implying passengers might not have time to alight

In the best of fun,
Chris

And speaking of airports, does anyone cringe at this little tautology: "This is the last and final boarding call for..."? I swear I once heard a very exasperated person say over the tannoy, "This is the very last and absolutely final call..."

Ray

two that drive me nuts.

"This program was pre-recorded."

and from one of my previous workplaces

"We will be holding a meeting on the Pre-planning system on ##-##-####)