Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Help Stamp Out the Colon Epidemic
Susan's monthly news brief about the colon epidemic hit the nail on the head. I have also seen colons in the most superfluous places. I was told once that writers of all kinds are "the protectors of the English language." If anyone has any other examples of the colon placement problem, post them here. Let's have fun with this one: shall we! Oops!
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4 comments:
Here, here! Protectors of the English language--I like that. Technical writers must unite (Chicago Manual of Style in-hand) to clarify & tighten all of the marketese & legalese. Kidding, kind of...
One thing leads to another.
I've been monitoring the (often awkward) percolation of Instant Message and Blog jargon into our Technical Writers' bastion of proper language.
I fear our language has fallen ill. I'm all for continually incorporating new terms into our native tongue, but the quality of new words and new grammar constructs seems to be declining rapidly, pulled down by the forces of the "oh, whatever!" crowd.
Distressing trends I've seen with some consistency include the drive to SQUEEZE. Incredibly undecipherable (sometimes entertaining) acronyms seem to be an identifiable symptom of this illness.
Other symptoms include word and sentence truncation constructs often woven together by heavy reliance on assumptions (many apparently based on popular cultural 'norms') that emerge and fade as quickly as pop songs or Hollywood movie releases.
Another distressing symptom of this squished thought syndrome is the endless bloody massacre of our correct spelling values. Horrendous phonetic and 'poetic' spelling shortcuts are being too quickly adopted into common usage (witness Jay Leno's popularization of ridiculous rapper and "street" slang terms among his Tonight Show audience).
How can we protect our language against this onslaught? I feel like a cork cresting on a tidal wave. Well, idk, gtg, TTFN!
Exanding on John's comment about jargon, I've got one for you. Imagine if you can, my irritation when I received a markup of a document from an engineer consisting of at least a dozen emoticons. Yep, emoticons copied right out of Instant Messenger and pasted into my document. What do you do when the comment to the procedure you wrote to replace a printed circuit board is a frowning, little, yellow face? First you laugh, then you want to cry, then you calmly walk over to the engineer and ask if perhaps she can help you correct the procedure. What is our writing coming to?
I have to ask Lori -- how old is this engineeer? I'm guessing late 20s and has been IM for too long, or late 40s early 50s and is trying to keep up with his or her kids. Either way, this one should be sent off to Scott Adams the Dilbert creator.
I had one of my technical writing students this past semester enraged because I docked the student points for an illustration in a technical description where the student had a photo with an object in the front and a ruler behind it to show the object's dimensions. This student would think that using emoticons was perfectly acceptable, and would question Lori's ability as a Technical Writer, not the engineer's lack of ability to communicate effectively.
The student's response to my explanation -- "oh, whatever."
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