a holiday language laugh

I hope you are enjoying the holiday season.

I follow a blog entitled Language Log, which offers interesting and sometimes amusing insights into language. This week Mark Liberman shared a few cartoons that poked some fun at the intricacies of English grammar at the expense of A Christmas Carol.

In one, the "Ghost of Christmas Future Imperfect Conditional" says to Scrooge:

I bring news of what would have been going to happen if you were not to have been going to change your ways.

There are a couple more as well. Take a look.

Happy Holidays! I plan to be back in the new year with more notes on writing and the web.

 

resources for online education

Whether you are looking to improve your web skills or your writing skills there are a lot of resources available online. You will find a lot of variation in pricing, policies, and processes. I thought I would share with you some of the resources I've used.

udemy:  This is the best of web sites, this is the worst of web sites. It is the worst because prices can vary wildly and because anyone can upload a course. It is the best because there some excellent courses by qualified instructors and because sale prices can be very good. The best advice is caveat  emptor: buyer beware. Pay close attention to the course ratings and wait for the course to be on sale.  I have taken some highly valuable courses on udemy. I used the techniques in Jonas Schmedtmann's responsive web design course to build my own site.

udacity: There are a lot of good things to say about udacity. Courses are developed by engineers at companies such as Google, IBM, and Amazon. They are free unless you enroll in a nanodegree program. The videos are professionally produced and include a dash of humor. Tests allow you to gauge what you have learned.

edX: edX is different from udemy and udacity in that courses start on specific dates rather than being on demand. Courses are provided by academic institutions worldwide and taught by instructors affiliated with those institutions. New lessons are made available on a regular basis. They are reasonably priced. I have only taken one course from edX, and that one was inferior in my mind to what I have taken from udemy and udacity. I may simply have taken the wrong course.

I would be remiss if I did not mention Lynda, now owned by LinkedIn. Lynda does have some very good courses, but the meter is always running. Lynda charges a flat monthly fee. If you take a lot of courses this could be a good thing. Otherwise, you have to be disciplined in your course-taking to avoid having your money go down the drain.

Whatever your preferences, there is an online education option for you.

 

the passive voice

I recently came across an article I had saved from the first quarter 1991 issue of Technical Communication, the journal of the Society for Technical Communication, or STC. The article by Kent Porter is entitled "Usage of the Passive Voice," and is a hilarious spoof on the use of the passive in technical communication.

The passive voice, of course, is when the subject of the sentence becomes the object. The sentence "He clobbered me" is in the active voice. "I was clobbered by him" is in the passive voice.

Although most of Porter's article is funny only if you have either been a technical writer or a user of technical manuals, the author provides a couple of tidbits that any student of language can enjoy. First, he re-writes Shakespeare:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, your ears should be lent to me. … It is intended that Caesar be buried, not praised.

In another example he writes:

Jane was asked to be married by Robert through a romantic proposal.

Both great examples of why to avoid the passive.

Of course, there are times when it is appropriate to use the passive. Anne Curzan, in her video course English Grammar Boot Camp, writes about starting a blog entry this way:

I have a new favorite mug. It was given to me by graduate students in the English and Education program.

Curzan points out that the passive is useful here because the focus of the second sentence is the mug and not the graduate students.

In The Elements of Style Strunk and White state:

The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive. … This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.

The pompous H.W. Fowler states in Modern English Usage that the passive "sometimes leads to bad grammar, false idiom, or clumsiness." Note the "sometimes."

The bottom line, then: give preference to the active voice, but use the passive when appropriate.

By the way, if you are a technical writer or a user of technical manuals you might enjoy Porter's original article. It's here in PDF format. Note that the article starts halfway down the page.

 

double negatives

My entries to date have all been about the web. It's time to talk about writing, or in this case language in general.

I got a good laugh when I saw this cartoon on Facebook. Judging by how many different places it shows up in a Google image search, it has certainly made the rounds. And I am one of those who would initially agree with the perspective of the jurors.


Many experts in the English language would disagree with this interpretation of the defendant's statement, however. They point out that English is not math or logic, and a double negative can be used for emphasis.

In her video course English Grammar Boot Camp, the instructor, Anne Curzan, discusses double negatives in detail. Curzan says that while there are sentences in English where the negatives do in fact cancel each other out, a double, or multiple, negative is also frequently used for emphasis. Similar to “I didn’t do nuthin’” she uses the example, “We don’t have nothing to hide.” She says it is clear that the meaning is “We have nothing to hide,” and not “We have something to hide.”

Curzan points out that double negatives used for emphasis can be found in Chaucer. She tells us that you can find double negatives used for emphasis in Shakespeare as well. In As You Like It, Celia says: “I cannot go no further.”

She says that she has two answers when someone says, “But when you multiply two negatives you get a positive,” to support the idea that two negatives in a sentence cancel each other out.

1. “Language is not math.”
2. “OK fine, let’s do math. If you have two negatives in math and you add them, what do you get? You actually get a bigger negative.”

So if we listen to the defendant on the witness stand saying “I didn’t do nuthin’” I guess we’re actually going to have to acquit after all.
 

the dominance of mobile

My last two entries were about ways to create your web site. I wrote about using a cloud-based service to simplify the process and I said that you can still hand-code your site if you so choose. The cloud-based services take care of optimizing your site for mobile devices (in some cases requiring you to do some tweaking). I wrote that if you do your own coding you need to take advantage of free tools out there to make sure your site displays properly on mobile devices.

We all know that mobile devices are ubiquitous, and if you don't use a mobile device yourself you nonetheless constantly see people out in public focused on their iPhone or Android device. How dominant is mobile? One study says that in December 2013 desktop computers had a 47% share of digital media time. By December 2015 that had decreased to 35%. In the same time period mobile's share increased from 53% to 65%.

The study says that most e-commerce transactions still take place on a PC, but if you have a web site to create visibility for your business or nonprofit, the odds are better than even that a visitor is going to get to your web site using a mobile device.

Some experts use the phrase "mobile first." I'm not sure that I like that mindset. I believe that it is essential for your web site to be attractive and usable on a desktop or laptop. At the same time mobile needs to be integral to your web design strategy. Your site needs to be responsive: accessible on any device of any size.

Whether you choose to use a drag-and-drop cloud-based service or whether you elect to hand-code your site, it's important to keep mobile on your mind all the time.

 

another approach to creating your web site

My last entry was about using a cloud-based service to create your web site. When you take this approach you can create a beautiful web site with little or no HTML knowledge. The service will also optimize your site for mobile devices.

Perhaps you are a get-under-the-hood kind of person, however. If that's your style you can certainly code your site by hand. There are a lot of tools out there that will help you in this task. There is a cool open source editor from Adobe called Brackets. I have come to really like it and to rely on it for my web site.

Of course you need to make sure that your code is optimized for mobile. That is essential. I took a marvelous course from udemy entitled Build Responsive Real World Websites. (Responsive, of course, means making your site viewable on any kind of device.) The course is clear, complete, and comprehensive. The instructor includes a useful PDF manual and directs you to a number of free tools to assist you with web design in general and making your site responsive in particular. (By the way, I'm not getting any sort of kickback on this. I simply found the course extremely useful and well done. I used the principles in the course to build my web site.)

For HTML reference, the W3C HTML/Elements listing is the definitive source. However, I find the independent W3C Schools HTML Element Reference much more accessible. It is my go-to source when I have an HTML question.

Creating your site by manually coding it can be challenging if your are not an HTML expert. At the same time it can be a satisfying process to build a site from the ground up with your own hands.

 

creating your web site

When I first set up my web site in 1996 I was given a UNIX account, space on the server, and was told, in essence, "Knock yourself out." I was very much on my own and had to learn what I could from the sources I could find.

Much has changed since then. In the following years tools proliferated, from the simple and free to the complex and expensive. Some required strong HTML knowledge, while others, like Dreamweaver, provided a graphical user interface.

Today the landscape is very different. In this era of The Cloud there are many online services that not only host your web site and provide a graphical interface, but which offer drag and drop tools for creating your web site. I just finished launching a web site built on Wix, which allows your to build a complete web site via drag and drop. I was a little reluctant to give up control over the underlying HTML code, but I was doing this for a nonprofit and I wanted them to have an environment where a non-technical volunteer could update the site if they decided to go that route. Wix pricing is also reasonable, and it was easy to claim the organization's desired domain name. Both very helpful for a nonprofit.

Wix has a few limitations, but there are generally workarounds. I was able to accomplish everything I wanted to on the site. I was pleased with the results I achieved for the Student of the Month program.

There are other services that do much the same thing. My cousin is a freelance marketing consultant. He has been using Squarespace for a number of years and is very happy with it. He has also used Virb for a client and was impressed with that service.

Whatever route you choose, creating your web site today is much easier than it was in 1996.



   

the evolution of the web

I have been involved with web sites for a very long time. I acquired my domain csquared.com in 1996 and immediately started creating a web site. I have worked with web sites in one form or another ever since then.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is the language used to create web pages and web sites. Standards for HTML are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C for short. You can find their web site at w3c.org. While the basics of HTML are unchanged, the standard has evolved to allow for the creation of more powerful and useful web sites. The current standard is HTML5, along with CSS3. CSS stands for cascading style sheet. Cascading Style Sheets provide the formatting for web pages.

Most web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc.) do a great job of maintaining backward compatibility, so you can continue to create web pages using older versions of HTML and the page will display properly. But you are missing out on a lot of functionality when you do. HTML5 and CSS3 also provide the framework for more efficient and logically structured code.

When my corporate career ended and I started looking at the world of freelancing I began taking online courses on HTML5 and CSS3. I was astonished at how much more powerful, efficient, and elegant the current standard is compared to the older version I had kept using out of habit and laziness. (The HTML reference manual that still sits on my shelf covers version 4.01 and has a copyright date of 2001.) You can learn about HTML5 and CSS3 on online learning sites like udemy, udacity, and edx.

Of course, you may not need these skills at all. Companies are popping up that allow you to create beautiful web sites with no knowledge of HTML and CSS. I'll talk about those next week.

 

it's a small world

I was a denizen of the high tech world of Silicon Valley for many years where I spent sixteen years working for a Fortune 100 company. I now live in Southern California on the eastern edge of what is called the Inland Empire, itself east of Los Angeles.

During my high tech years I worked on a variety of global distributed teams. From Silicon Valley I worked, at various times, with team members in Houston, New England, the United Kingdom, Australia, and almost always India. Even though I am no longer in a corporate environment, with broadband Internet access, Skype, and email it's easy to work with anyone anywhere from my spot in Southern California.

If you have a project I can give you a hand with please do let me know.

 

welcome to my blog

Welcome to my writing and web notes blog. My intent is to provide you with hints, tips, and tricks for communicating with your audience. Whether your audience is customers for your small business, donors to your non-profit organization, or another group entirely, I hope to provide you with tools to reach them more effectively.

I hope you'll join me.