Joe McVeigh
Google has a style guide for technical writers and from what I’ve read, it’s pretty good. It’s short and sweet on the details, but that’s fine. The guide is direct and it’s not meant as a general writer’s guide. But it makes comments on the passive voice, so you can probably guess what’s...
Joe McVeigh
An article in the Sunday Times crossed my eyeballs this week. It’s called “Can song lyrics tell us how society is changing?” and the obvious answer is But there’s a bit of linguistics in here (and no, it’s not good), so let’s dig in. The article is by Tom Calver and he says “I have...
Joe McVeigh
George Will wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post titled “Five words that today are gratingly misapplied or worn out”. It is not good. Let’s see why. First of all, George Will is still alive?! Holy shit! Second of all, this post stinks. George Will clearly had a deadline to...
Joe McVeigh
A couple of weeks ago, Helsinki’s daily paper Helsingin Sanomat published an article called “Lauri Lassila huomasi, että osa hänen ystävistään ei osaa puhua enää suomea, vaikka haluaisikin” (Lauri Lassila noticed that his friends can’t speak Finnish anymore, even though they want to). It might...
Joe McVeigh
But this time it’s… on purpose? What?! Yesterday, Benji Smith became the main character on Writer Twitter. It turns out that Mr. Smith has created a database of novels that he obtained through probably illegal means. Smith used this database in his Prosecraft project, which published statistics...
Joe McVeigh
Content warning: This post is about harmful language and it contains words that are used to dehumanize people. Please take caution. In April 2023, the Atlantic published a 2,500-word opinion piece complaining about language equity style guides. The attack on these guides is misleading, wrong,...
Joe McVeigh
Is this dude about to mansplain mansplaining? Hoo boy. Here we go. This is going to be a long post. I’ll go through each part of the article with my usual irreverence, but don’t be fooled. Thomas’s ideas about language are a real danger to women. So I’ll comment seriously on that as well. Let’s...