Archives for October 2007

Comma Chameleon

Posted on October 4, 2007 Written by Ike

Hi, my name is Ike (surname withheld), and I have a problem.

For years, I have been a serial abuser. Without regard to those around me, I have taken advantage of punctuation for my own personal gain.

My teachers along the way, both in elementary and junior high, warned me of my folly. They often told me I nailed every other punctuation issue without fail, but for some reason, I could not seem to resist the temptation to insert “unnecessary commas.”

“Grammatically those are unnecessary,” they’d say. Only, I’d write it “Grammatically, those are unnecessary.”

I tried to explain that I was writing for my ear. “When I place a comma in a sentence, it’s an indication of where I would pause, as an extra way of ensuring the reader would catch my full meaning,” I’d say. To no avail.

They warned me that superfluous commas would be a “gateway mark” toward other punctuation abuse! I might grow up to be one of those people who makes every statement an imperative! Or worse!!! Using multiple exclamation points!!!

I was able to put the commas away for a long time. For more than 12 years as a television reporter, the commas barely appeared, mostly in numbers 1,000 and up. Of course… I used the punctuation equivalent of the nicotine patch… the oft-excoriated ellipsis. However… I found a willing band of professionals… who… very much like me… wrote for the ear… and not the eye. The ellipsis in television news is the catch-all of punctuation… when speed matters… who needs to dicker around with formalities. AND FOR THAT MATTER… WHO NEEDS TO MESS AROUND WITH LOWERCASE LETTERS EITHER… YOU’D BE HARD PRESSED TO FIND A NEWSROOM WHERE *SOMEONE* HASN’T UNDONE THE CAPS-LOCK KEY IN YEARS… (and you wonder sometimes why it seems as though the people on teevee are yelling at you…)

I’ve given up the ellipses, but found I came right back to my initial love, the comma. I’ll fight to the very last day to preserve this point of punctuation. But the day is coming. Already, dictionaries are ditching the hyphen, as text messaging and email are changing the way we write. (I guess it is in fact email, instead of e-mail…)

And now, apparently a Brazilian district governor is banning the use of the present participle. Apparently, too many government workers are using “false present tense” to make it look like something is happening, when there hasn’t been any progress in a while. Much in the same way your local teevee news-reader (or is it “newsreader”) tells you “The council votes to suspend liquor sales,” or “a bizarre accident kills four lab mice.”

Now, if we can only figure out how we can make him a managing editor at the teevee stations…

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, language, English, humor, television[/tags]

Filed Under: Communication, Language Tagged: Broadcasting, Humor, Pop culture, Wordplay

Finding Your Muse

Posted on October 3, 2007 Written by Ike

What’s the point of finding your voice and being consistent if you run out of things to communicate?

There are some who subscribe to the school of thought that says you should only write/blog/talk if you have something to say. I disagree. Good writing is an exercise in clear thinking. Well-written prose can carry meanings on multiple levels, indicative of a marriage of substance, semantics, and style. Forcing yourself to write can be just as much an exercise in self-discipline as self-indulgence. But how do you tap a muse that is playing hide-and-seek with you?

Random input.
Go plug into something new. Preferably more than one thing. Watch a documentary. Go to PopUrls, close your eyes, and click on a couple of links at random. Consider what those websites have in common. Hone in on that concept, and follow the inspiration where it leads.
Look for the big in the little.
Wound tightly within even the smallest moment, you can find the human condition. The universal hum can drone to the point of inaudibility if we don’t celebrate it every now and again. Every picture on Flickr means something to somebody. Every gesture of kindness has a significance. The smallest of victories is still a triumph waiting to be celebrated.
Look for the little in the big.
Some events (and people) carry such magnitude that it’s hard to wrap our minds around the enormity. Small details can whittle away the hype, and reveal character and humanity. You don’t have to describe 50,000 people at a march, just one.
Be a bridge.
The interesting developments in science and philosophy have always come at intersections and crossroads. Mastering one skill or domain is important, but mastering others provides additional context – and provides great fodder for discussion. Cross some wires. See what happens.

These are just a few of the ways I go about getting “unstuck” as a writer. Share yours in the comments. Or, if you’ve ever used any of the above, link in as examples.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, writing, philosophy, language[/tags]

Filed Under: Communication, Language, Personal, Philosophy

Our S’s?

Posted on October 2, 2007 Written by ike

More from the mailbag:

Dear Ike:

I heard one of our executives asking about our s’s. He just watched a webinar, and said our competitors had our s’s, and was worried about how this would affect our logo. I told him that all of the keyboards in our department still had s’s, and there was no cause for alarm. Still, I am worried because I don’t know about these newfangled technologies, and concerned our rivals might actually have a way to get our s’s. Help!

Andy G., Santa Clara

Andy – don’t worry. All your consonants are belong to us!

Seriously, you need to gently educate your bosses about “RSS“. It means Really Simple Syndication. It’s a way to hide information in your communications so programs and machines can read it better.

Behind the scenes, every bit of text that is a little unusual is ‘marked up’. In the previous sentence, ‘text’ is surrounded by tags that tell your browser to BOLD THIS, ‘unusual’ is told to be rendered with underlines, and so on. Well, the same goes with RSS, except the message is encoded with information that says ‘this is the title,’ ‘this is the content,’ and so on. Now you don’t have to look at the data on a webpage for it to make sense anymore – the message has been set free and is nimble enough to make sense on many platforms. You enter the information one time, and your audience can choose to consume it as a website, or an e-mail, or as a pdf. There are even services that convert an RSS-enabled item into speech!

It’s a great tool for flexibility. It doesn’t require any additional work on your end, and makes your message more convenient for those receiving it. You can use RSS externally, or even internally within your company. And if your using it internally, that would be the only time I’d be concerned with your competitors ‘stealing’ your RSS. Even though RSS is about sharing, you can still lock it down with password protection with a so-called ‘authenticated feed.’

From a different perspective internally, just think of all the ways you could use RSS to pull in data from branch offices and the field. The data comes to you, and because it is internally tagged (using something else called MicroFormats), it can flow into several different applications, databases, and reports instantaneously.

RSS is your friend, indeed. Here are some other resources where you can learn about RSS, and why you need to get on the bandwagon:

Time for one more letter…

Ike Pigott:

Please visit http://canadianpharmmanmax.com for your high-discount low-anxiety V1a6ara and C14l1s enhancement meds.

Sincerly,

Hugeness Q. Cojones, Manila, Phillipines

Thanks for the offer, your Hugeness. Maybe you ought to run that through the spell-checker next time.

Filed Under: Now Is Gone Tagged: Ike

Muse Abuse

Posted on October 2, 2007 Written by Ike

{{myquote|Those who search for a muse will most certainly find one; those searching on a deadline best be prepared to suffer from the lowering of standards.}}

Filed Under: My Quotes

Consistency Cuts Through Clutter

Posted on October 1, 2007 Written by Ike

I was talking with my buddy Eliot at church. He’s a middle school principal who used to coach basketball a long time ago. We were talking about how one maintains order among the chaos.

Consistency.

With thousands of people screaming at once, and the band playing, and buzzers and horns and distractions, it might seem impossible that the kids running up and down the floor could respond to his voice, and his alone.

Consistency. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Communication, Language, Marketing