It seems that I am not the only person who wants to fight back against the conspirators. Word is on the blogosphere that Lake Superior State University has ‘banished’ some words. › Continue reading
Some of you may be wondering why I haven’t written about the conspiracy recently – that is the one to make a mockery of editors everywhere, to turn language into meaningless noise, to pollute our every moment with confusing messages and meaningless drivel, to litter our lives with the pointless delusion that we exist for a purpose, when in fact we are all drones serving the smug and swanky who think they’ve got the better of us in some way or other.
Sometimes I think isolation is a good thing and only adds to the quality of an editorial life. At other times – surrounded by words and expressions I don’t understand and yearning for a sentence in concise, plain English – I feel lonely. So imagine my delight this week when someone dangled some bad writing at the Dangling Modifier.
› Continue reading
I’ve been using Google Analytics to measure visits to my blog. Every week I discover that new users are checking the site, but are they coming back? Then I found out about this thing called Blogpulse.com which tells you ‘what’s hot and what’s not’ in the blogosphere. I was surprised to see that editorial issues are not hot – positively frigid, don’t even come up in the search facility. › Continue reading
How long do you think the recession will last? Six more months? Fifteen years? Only ten? Or is it impossible to tell because we’ve “never seen anything like it before”? Who knows, but one thing I’m sure of is that there won’t be any work for editorial staff by the end of it. Everyone will be a Globish-speaking publisher or journalist by then.
I have been trying to work out how to add a blogroll to this page. I thought that after nearly six months of blogging, the language would be familiar to me. Regular readers may recall the angst I suffered last time I tried to engage with the blogosphere. I thought things might be different now, but of course it was just self-delusion.
As I’ve been advised to ‘engage with the blogosphere’ I’m thinking of leaving a comment on this webpage. Trouble is it’s so hard to think of anything positive to say.
Digital-Marketing Series: 9 Ways to Reach Digital Natives (and the Rest of Us, Too)
Even if I did like extremely long headings (that one’s the length of a short sentence, for goodness sake) I definitely take exception to the cutesy tone of the first paragraph.
Obviously we all like to share our personal lives online. I know I have shared some of my bitterest and darkest thoughts on this blog, and may be it’s saved me. But really! If my 11-year-old progeny was attending the “Digital Marketing Mixer”, I think I’d keep it to myself.
It turns out that I’m supposed to respond to the comments left on my blog. I wish I’d known about this when I started blogging. There was a time early on in the life of this blog that people did leave interesting comments about language and the way it is used. They don’t any more; probably because I didn’t respond. Now all I get is comments like this:
“Nice post you have here.”
I get really excited only to discover that it’s yet another one from “jndtoebgack” or I click the link and it takes me to a website in Cyrillic script.
I miss the comments that accused me of not knowing what a ‘grammatical imperative’ is. I never knew when I started this that there would be so much to learn about blogging.
So I turned to Wordpress, because if you don’t manage comments properly you can get into all sort of trouble: ‘Trojans’ on your pc for example.
Wordpress manage to give a clear explanation about comment spam, pingbacks and trackbacks in plain English. But I don’t understand it. For once, I do understand the words, but the ideas elude me.
The Wordpress site says that the originators of trackbacks, SixApart, have a good explanation of trackbacks and pingbacks. I decided to read it but it left me none the wiser.
“TrackBack uses a REST model, where requests are made through standard HTTP calls. To send a TrackBack ping, the client makes a standard HTTP request to the server, and receives a response in a simple XML format (see below for more details).”