pls clarify

Does this emoticon make my writing look unprofessional?

Yes. But that may be ok every so often.  

I’m pretty clear about insisting that emoticons and multiple exclamation points undermine a writer’s professionalism.  Especially the ladies!! ;)  (See what I mean?)

But there are three sides to every story, as a recent NY Times piece proves. In Emoticons Move to the Business World, the Times reports that the occasional well-placed smiley can be just the thing for a work email:

Lisa M. Bates, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia, has lately embraced the smiley — as have her academic colleagues, albeit “sparingly and strategically,” she said. “Basically, I’m often sarcastic and in a hurry, and a well-planted smiley face can take the edge off and avoid misunderstanding,” Dr. Bates wrote in an e-mail. “I figure they have saved me some grief from misconstrued tone many times.”

I’ll buy that.  Better to risk being perceived as a bit silly than to come across as alienating and humorless.  In my book, anyway.    

We’ll be keeping an eye out for how this trend plays out in the impossibly stuffy land of legal writing. Given the need for precision, these more nuanced emoticons might be useful than the plain old smiley and frowny faces. “Something’s fishy” seems especially promising for lawyers dealing with delicate circumstances. 

Image from mentalfloss.com.

Hat tip to Legal Writing Prof Blog, via Legal Blog Watch. 

Obama talks politics, life with Leno

It’s been way too long!  pls clarify has been on extended hiatus, but we are back in action. I’ve just seen a misplaced modifier that I can’t keep to myself.  

Here it is, the offending CNN headline:

Obama talks politics, life with Leno

Perhaps I haven’t ingested enough caffeine yet this morning, but I just stared at the words for a long moment, wondering, “Who is this Leno and when did Obama share a life with him or (more likely) her?” 

Finally it dawned on me…with Leno modifies talks, not life. Oh….

As I suggested, insufficient caffeine may be the culprit here. Off to make more tea.

 

Pompoms and proofreading: Fifth Circuit rejects cheerleader’s civil rights action.

Lots of virtual ink has been spilled in the past week or so about the Fifth Circuit opinion rejecting the lawsuit of a Texas cheerleader who claimed that her civil rights were violated when she didn’t make the varsity squad. 

The opening paragraph of the opinion gives a hint as to the court’s view of the merits:

Reduced to its essentials, this is nothing more than a dispute, fueled by a disgruntled cheerleader mom, over whether her daughter should have made the squad. It is a petty squabble, masquerading as a civil rights matter, that has no place in federal court or any other court.

Ouch. The court was irked not only by the action’s lack of substance but also by the sloppy and nasty brief writing of the cheerleader’s attorneys. The court singled this muddled passage from the cheerleader’s brief:

The Magistrate’s  egregious  errors  in  its  [sic]  failure  to utilize  or apply  the  law  constitute  extraordinary  circumstances,  justifying vacateur [sic] of the assignment to [sic] Magistrate. Specifically, the Magistrate applied improper legal standards in deciding the Title IX elements of loss of educational opportunities and deliberate indifference, ignoring precedent.  Further, the Court failed to consider Sanches’ Section 1983 claims and summarily dismissed them without analysis or review.  Because a magistrate is not an Article III judge, his incompetence in applying general principals [sic] of law are [sic] extraordinary.

The court handles this “unjustified attack” by carefully analyzing all the passage’s possible interpretations:

These sentences are so poorly written that it is difficult to decipher what the attorneys mean, but any plausible reading is troubling, and the quoted passage is an unjustified and most unprofessional and disrespectful attack on the judicial process in general and the magistrate judge assignment here in particular.  This may be a suggestion that Magistrate Judge Stickney is incompetent. It might be an assertion that all federal magistrate judges are incompetent.  It could be an allegation that only Article III judges are competent.  Or it may only mean that Magistrate Judge Stickney’s decisions in this case are incompetent, a proposition that is absurd in light of the correctness of his impressive rulings. Under any of these possible readings, the attorneys’ attack on Magistrate Judge Stickney’s decisionmaking is reprehensible.

And here’s my favorite part — a footnote precisely describing the grammatical and other errors in that paragraph: 

Usually we do not comment on technical and grammatical errors, because anyone can make such an occasional mistake, but here the miscues are so egregious and obvious that an average fourth grader would have avoided most of them. For example, the word “principals” should have been “principles.” The word “vacatur” is misspelled. The subject and verb are not in agreement in one of the sentences, which has a singular subject (“incompetence”) and a plural verb  (“are”). Magistrate Judge Stickney is referred to as “it”  instead of “he” and  is called a “magistrate” instead of a “magistrate judge.”  And finally, the sentence containing the word “incompetence” makes no sense as a matter of standard English prose, so it is not reasonably possible to understand the thought, if any, that is being conveyed. It is ironic that the term “incompetence” is used here, because the only thing that is incompetent is the passage itself.

Put that in your pompom and shake it. 

The power of punctuation.

It took me a minute to figure out what Robby was trying to say here.

Aye caramba! Who would want to watch his grandpa engage in sexual relations with a man in the hospital? 

Mason is on the right track, but both a period (after him) and a comma (after man) would help here. But a comma would be better than nothing. 

Reblogged from mister-rager.

A wonderful visual representation of the absolute wrongness of saying “I could care less.” 

Thank you! This illogical expression has frustrated me ever since I was a baby word nerd. 

Reblogged from anunexpectedterror.

I’ve just stumbled upon the phenomenon known as kinetic typography.  Wow.  

Check out this cool cascading visual representation of Stephen Fry’s views on the lovability of language, and the idiocy of language pedants.  All delivered with a frothy and fantastic British accent. 

Kinetic typography by RogersCreations, reblogged from roadtoenderheim.

Rupert Murdoch is offended by allegations of hacking

Rupert Murdoch is in hot water. The British public is calling for blood after revelations that his tabloid, News of the World, used illegal and unethical means — hacking a missing teen’s cell phone and paying cops for information — to obtain material for stories.  Murdoch has responded by issuing a statement that purportedly condemns these tactics. But instead of coming down hard on these sleazy tactics, his statement actually condemns only the allegations against his organization, News of the World: 

For the first time, Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, released a statement on the scandal. “Recent allegations of phone hacking and making payments to police with respect to the News of the World are deplorable and unacceptable,” he said.

Maybe I’m being too lawyerly, but I read his statement as leaving open the possibility that what Murdoch finds deplorable and unacceptable is the fact that these allegations are being leveled at him.  After all, the subject of the sentence is allegations.  At any rate, it’s hardly a definitive condemnation of the underlying actions.

Try again, Rupert. Choose a better subject for your sentence. 

Declaration of Independence: Beauty and brains

I hope you had a wonderful holiday and are experiencing a painless reentry. And why not take some writing inspiration from the document whose signing we just celebrated?

The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence has been called “one of the best-known sentences in the English language.” (Stephen E. Lucas, Justifying America).

That sounds about right to me: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 

Its fame is well deserved: the sentence not only sings, it dances and does cartwheels. And the words are not just pretty: the sentence is “brief, free of verbiage, a model of clear, concise, simple statement.” (Carl Becker, “The Literary Qualities of the Declaration,” in his The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922)).

Apparently legal writing was in its heyday back in 1776. 

The mother of all fireworks shows

I spent the weekend in Margate. (For those unfamiliar, we’re talkin’ Jersey Shore, and also the home of my girlhood days.)

This poster for Fourth of July fireworks was plastered all over town:

I’m confused. Who are these Margate Mothers, and do they own the fireworks? Are they omnipotent and omniscient, as I have always suspected? I never could get away with much there. 

The very fine print at the bottom of the poster indicates that an organization called The Margate Mothers Association is behind the event. So there’s no apostrophe in the group’s name, but there is one in the event name. Puzzling. 

I’m gonna ask my very own Margate mother what’s up.   

If the Oxford comma could speak…

Surely it would be invoking the famous Mark Twain line right about now:

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. 

Twitter was aflutter this week with rumors that the Oxford comma, aka the serial comma, has been abandoned by the very institution that gave it its name: Oxford University Press. 

Here’s how the Economist’s language blog explained the comma drama:

Rumours went wild on Twitter recently that the famed university press had abandoned the Oxford comma. Not so, it turns out. Apparently the university allowed dispensing with the comma only for press releases and internal communications. (Why remains unclear, at least to this blogger.)  So this tempest in a twittercup did not even belong in a twittercup.  You’ll just have to find something else to get worked up about today. 

In case you’re wondering, the Oxford comma is the comma before and or or in a list of more than two items. So this list includes an Oxford comma: 

bananas, apples, and oranges

And this one doesn’t:

bananas, apples and oranges

More later on why people give a flying @#$* about this small, curled mark.