It’s been over a year since our friend MG has committed an act of textual assault (or at least since I’ve noticed). I’d begun to think he’d been reformed, and that perhaps he’d turned over a few new leaves, as opposed to “leafs”. But now, in writing Fast Break: As Of Last Week, Many At Sprint Thought They Were Merging With T-Mobile, MG Siegler has begun to slip back into his old, dark ways — the man he once was coming back to haunt him, reclaiming his soul.

I’m talking, of course, about this atrocity of a first paragraph:

This morning’s bombshell news that AT&T would be buying T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion has left a lot of questions. T-Mobile customers want to know what it means for them? AT&T customers want to know what it means for them? Would-be iPhone buyers want to know what it means for them? T-Mobile and AT&T have started addressing those already. One thing not addressed yet: what does this mean for Sprint, the nation’s third-largest carrier?

No, MG, this morning’s news doesn’t leave a lot of questions. You do, starting with your second sentence.

“T-Mobile customers want to know what it means for them?”

I’m not sure, MG, do T-Mobile customers want to know what it means for them? You’re the one writing the article, not me.

“AT&T customers want to know what it means for them?”

Or, are these rhetorical questions, MG? Are you expressing shock and disbelief at the fact that AT&T customers want to know what this merger means for them?

“Would-be iPhone buyers want to know what it means for them?”

Oh, no, I get it, MG; it’s not that at all. You just don’t know how to use a question mark.

Really, MG? A question mark? I can understand a semicolon or an em dash — they’re not usually taught in second grade or anything — but a question mark? You don’t know that it’s supposed to be used on questions that you, the writer, are asking, as opposed to simple sentences that are about questions? If you’re making a statement that “T-Mobile customers want to know what it means for them,” then shouldn’t you be using a period? Why do I have to explain this to you? Is it really that difficult to understand? Do you just like using question marks? If that’s the case, there are all sorts of ways to write a sentence which calls for a question mark at the end, so why waste the opportunity on something horribly, horribly wrong?

MG quickly recovers, using a colon properly in the final sentence of the paragraph, and continuing for the rest of the article with no readability-compromising errors. But the resurgence of his former tendencies concern and frighten me, and I recommend that we keep a close eye on him. MG is our friend, and I think I speak for all of us when I say that I hate seeing him like this.

How inspiring. I’ve been wanting to do more of these. Thus, without further ado:

Yesterday, MG published an article called “An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Nexus One“, because apparently there aren’t enough reviews which compare the Nexus One to the iPhone. Actually, there’s no shortage of them, just like how there’s no shortage of MG Siegler’s use of the phrase “no shortage of”. Speaking of MG Siegler’s predictable writing, let’s see what he’s predictably done wrong this time:

Last week, I attended the Google Android “Nexus One” event. As you may have heard, they gave many of us in the audience the device to try out. I decided that before I wrote anything about it (other than saying on television that it’s a “nice little device“), I would give it a real shot. So here I am, a week later, with my thoughts on it. To be clear, this isn’t meant to be a full review or overview, for that, see our review here. Instead, I’m going to come at this from the perspective of a pretty hardcore iPhone user of the past two-plus years.

A quick skim of this first paragraph may lead you to believe that MG has miraculously managed to finish a single paragraph without screwing anything up. Unfortunately, the second-to-last sentence falls apart if you’re the sort of person who actually reads things. MG is trying to make the sentence read like this, but read it aloud:

To be clear, this isn’t meant to be a full review or overview, for that, see our review here.

It sounds like this.

MG, have I frightened you into using commas instead of semicolons or em dashes? It’s not that you should always use a comma instead of a more “sophisticated” punctuation mark, it’s that you should use each one correctly. Those bold words were the chance you’d been waiting for to flourish a semicolon or em dash — in fact, either could have worked there. But you missed it. Fear overcame you, and you cowered behind the perceived safety of a comma, huddling for warmth and whimpering like a puppy. Alas, the comma was not safe this time, and now nobody will adopt you from the animal shelter and give you a loving home, where you can frolic and chase frisbees and get Siegly treats when you’re a good boy.

You’ve been very bad this time, MG. Stop chewing my shoes and get your muddy paws off the couch.

Moving on:

And to start off, I’ll come right out and say what everyone will want to know: Do I think the Nexus One is better than the iPhone?

I don’t care what you think, because you’re not supposed to capitalize the next word after a colon. It’s not two periods on top of each other, it’s a mid-sentence indicator of logical consequence. I’m not going to waste time explaining the big words to you, so concentrate on the mid-sentence part: colons don’t end the sentence. The only time you should send a big hulking capital letter barreling into the reader’s visual cortex is, other than proper nouns or names, at the beginning of a sentence. Otherwise you might cause people’s perceptions of reality to break down and turn their lives into the plot of Vanilla Sky. You are transforming millions of innocent TechCrunch readers into Tom Cruise, MG. Is that something you’d wish on anybody? Do you want that on your conscience? I thought not. Now fix it.

As the article continues, MG’s performance is remarkably passable. There are moments like this:

It’s hard to describe just how great Google Voice is on Android. When I set it up, I had to confirm maybe three or four things, and I was all ready to go. In two minutes, my Google Voice number completely took over my Nexus One. This included getting not only all Google Voice incoming calls and voicemails, but doing outbound calls with my Google Voice number as well. This is absolutely the future of number portability, and that no doubt has the carriers — and likely even Apple – spooked.

The end of this paragraph nearly brought a tear to my eye. It doesn’t really matter to me that the preceding sentences are choppy and mediocre; MG used em dashes to convey an emphatic pause, just like I taught him. He’s all grown up now!

Maps offers a number of features on the Nexus One that aren’t on the iPhone native version. This includes Latitude (which can run in the background), and Navigation. Other Google apps, like Google Sky Map and Google Goggles are also pretty cool, and useful to varying degrees, and again, only available for Android.

Or maybe not.

I’m aware that the Oxford comma is a matter of preference. Whether you choose to use it, or choose not to use it, there’s usually no problem. But for god’s sake, be consistent from one sentence to the other!

Now, there is, of course, a difference: the first sentence, in which MG did use the comma, had those pesky parentheses to make matters confusing. The problem with that is that no, there’s no difference at all, because you don’t just randomly insert a comma after a closing parenthesis for no reason. “Latitude (which can run in the background)” is the first item, “Navigation” is the other, and if you’re going to put a comma before the separating “and,” then you should also do that in the very next fucking sentence where you do the very same fucking thing.

Obviously, this issue (background apps) has been talked about in the past ad-naseum, so I won’t dwell on it here.

First of all, there’s no hyphen. Second of all, it’s “ad nauseam.” Christ, MG, you’re destroying Latin too.

Fortunately, MG continues the article for about 1200 more words without breaking things ad nauseam, no longer distracting the reader from his rather well-thought out arguments with slippery linguistic banana peels. In fact he manages to finish the whole article without another punctuation debac— oh, wait…

And it’s good to have two companies that can play off each other and push innovation — while at the same time, changing the industry.

I didn’t tell you to use em dashes instead of commas all the time, MG! Ugh, this is going to turn into an endless back-and-forth whack-a-mole game with you, I know it.

CC Photo by heartbeaz on Flickr

The idea of “social networking” exploded in the second half of this past decade, with MySpace becoming a household name, and everyone and their mother (quite literally) having a Facebook profile. It was extremely appealing: never stay out of touch with all of your friends, because they’re sharing their whole life with you, even if you can’t be there in person. I got caught up in the craze like all of us, but I soon discovered that, to me, at least, full-blown social networking was a passing fad. Perhaps I overestimated just how much I cared about every mundane detail of my friends’ lives. And considering all of the initial skepticism about Twitter, I’m probably not the only one.

Let me tell you my story, and how I came to this conclusion:

Ever since I actually started talking to people I met on deviantART, I too was enthralled by the ability to stay in touch with people I knew and cared about (especially because, in my case, most of my close friends at the time weren’t people I’d met away-from-keyboard). When I came out of my adolescent basement-dwelling phase and got some actual flesh and blood friends, this tendency translated seamlessly. Most of them were on Livejournal, and I subscribed to all of their blogs on my Friends Page; soon enough, I began to start writing posts of my own every once in a while.

It became a daily, or sometimes quad-hourly, ritual to read through my Friends Page — basically a blog which aggregated all of my friends’ posts in reverse chronological order, except there was no way of marking individual posts as “read”, so it was often a difficult experience — and each read-through gave me journal entries of varying length showcasing what was going on in my friends’ lives, what they were thinking about, or whatever ridiculous quiz or meme they’d stumbled upon that day. My journal was about the same, running the gamut from stories about school and work to my thoughts on the latest video games to “bawwww he doesn’t love me so I’m gonna paint my nails black and listen to Fall Out Boy” embarrassments. Writing those and reading my friends’ was one of the things I enjoyed greatly.

When Facebook became popular, I tried to get into it, but never really did. Perhaps it was because it was mostly populated by people from my school, whom I wasn’t extremely close with, and the members of my big dysfunctional family of geeks and furries were all sticking with Teh El Jay. The fact of the matter was that all the people on Facebook just weren’t involved with my life enough that I really cared about the mundane details of their lives.

(As an aside, the time much of my closer friends began to start using Facebook was about the time my mom did too, and no offense mom, but that’s not exactly an encouragement to start posting more of my personal information and thoughts there)

In January 2009, I rebuilt Plankhead.com (before that it was a Google Sites-built abomination that was so horrible, not even The Internet Archive gave a shit about it) as a place to talk about my filmmaking and futile attempts at projecting a professional persona. As I began to blog here, I started to get more heavily involved in blogger culture, and finally got around to making a serious effort at scrounging up a good RSS reading list. Feedly did wonders for me in this regard — it recommended a ton of sources that I’d never have found on my own, no matter how loudly Robert Scoble screams about the 2010 Web, or how egregiously MG Siegler misuses intermediate punctuation in a failed attempt to sound sophisticated. Lo and behold, there was a whole breadth of information about what was actually happening in the world! This was interesting! Stories about what shiny gadgets are coming out next year, articles doing the kind of artistic critique of video games I’d only dreamed of in the past, headlines about important news going on all over the world, and proclamations that we will all be immortals who have sex with robots in the future and how awesome that will be.

To be honest, it started to make hearing about how incredibly uggggh my friends’ midterms were for them a bit less appealing. I still wanted to keep in touch, but in lieu of slogging through the Friends Page every day, I simply went through the convoluted process of adding all of them to my RSS reader. One. By. One. You’d think it would be simple, but Livejournal has really user-unfriendly RSS feeds.

Now, I don’t get the chance to read every single article that shows up in my RSS reader. So, needless to say, some of my friends’ journal entries fell by the wayside. And I didn’t miss a thing. I saw them in person, and not having kept track of every detail of their lives didn’t inhibit our interactions one bit. In fact, dare I say they enhanced them, because we had so many more potential avenues of conversation.

Perhaps this is why I couldn’t get particularly enthralled by Facebook in its early days, before it started to turn into the Twitter-clone-meets-America-Online that it is today. Nice photos of you at a party. Do I care? No. No, not really. I mean no offense, it’s just not that interesting.

Now, if you post a link to that photo with a tiny bit of description attached to it, then maybe I’ll take a look, if the description is interesting. This is why Twitter appeals to me: it’s simple, distilled, and to the point. If I’m not interested in what you have to say or show me, it’s only 140 characters (although would it kill them to give us 200?). In general, instead of an in-depth analysis of what college classes they’d like to take, I would much prefer my friends share with me a link to a great article they found somewhere; it’s probably much more interesting and better written.

It’s funny, just as I finished that paragraph, one of the people I’m following on Twitter just said this:

• @Astolpho: what’s awesome about twitter is nobody can post a big long bullshit self-indulgent wall of text rant with it. #
• @Astolpho: I don’t think I’ve ever once seen anybody preface their tweets with WARNING: RANT MODE ENGAGED and thank god #

The irony of including that in this very big long bullshit self-indulgent wall of text is not lost on me, by the way. But if you’ve read this far, you’re at least enjoying it.

Of course, perhaps this isn’t as self-indulgent a big long bullshit wall of text as it may seem, because I don’t think I’m alone in this mentality. Devoting such an extraordinary amount of attention to your friends on the Internet, for me and many people, cheapens the personal relationships you have with them away from the keyboard.

There’s a good reason Facebook wanted to be more like Twitter: it’s so much better, overall, to pay less attention to what’s happening to your friends and more to what they’re looking at and want to show you. The occasional bit of personal reflection or drunken party photo album has its place, but there’s much more to be gained from social web sites and services if your friends become footnotes; when, for example, Bob links you to an article, you’re paying more attention to the article than you are to Bob, but subconsciously you make the connection between the article and Bob. Next time you see him, you and Bob have something new to talk about. Or, of course, you can reply to Bob’s link right then and there, and engage in a text-based conversation about something that’s decidedly not self-centered.

So perhaps the title I gave this big long bullshit wall-of-text is confusing now: how is this “antisocial” networking if it’s just a more socially fulfilling use of social networks? That’s because there’s one more facet to this, and one that may be more unique to me than the other things I’ve rambled about thus far: the most interesting stuff often comes from people you barely know.

Am I friends with Cory Doctorow and Xeni Jardin? No, but I’m fascinated by what they share with me and the rest of the world. Do Patrick LaForge and I know each other personally? No, but I’m often interested in what he’s looking at, and sometimes he’s likewise interested in what I link to. Oh, and that Astolpho person I quoted up above? I barely have any idea who the hell he is, he’s just someone who followed me one day. In fact, I had to Google him just now to verify that he was a “he” because I didn’t remember offhand. But he says and shares interesting things, so I keep track. I’m sure many people could find joy in a similar situation to mine.

Regardless of whether you’re a seeker of interesting stuff whether you’re personally acquainted with the person sharing it or not, or someone who wants to know what his or her circle of friends thinks is amusing today, the hardcore keep-track-of-all-your-friends-blogs-and-photos-and-rants is not something I see having a wide appeal for much longer, at least outside of shy teenagers with too much time on their hands. Perhaps that’s why all of our moms are getting into Facebook now: socializing on the Internet has grown up.

But I prefer talking in person, thanks.

As the web matures, it’s also getting more complex. Yet much of it is still fundamentally based on things like HTML which are 30 years old. A new startup, FasterWeb, aims to bring these old technologies up to speed — as it were — making the web faster, by optimizing the old standards for doing new things. [Emphasis added]

The second sentence (red) reads like it was said in one breath, with no pauses at all. Read that sentence out loud without pausing. Does it sound right? No, not really. Any normal human being would say it as if there was a comma between “HTML” and “which,” so MG is either a space alien or a sloppy writer. The former can get him a well-paid role in a Hulu commercial, while the latter merits endless shame. Meanwhile, MG’s em dash mishap (blue) isn’t as egregious as his previous one, to be fair, but it makes the sentence read like it’s being said by William Shatner. The appropriate pause length would be indicated by commas.

If you click through to the article, you’ll notice MG wields the em dash slightly more proficiently one sentence later. While he should have used a colon instead, and a comma could have worked better as well, the em dash doesn’t completely mangle the sentence this time. I’ll chalk that up to luck on MG’s part.

Moving on, MG almost manages to complete a paragraph without any glaring mistakes, but botches it in the last three words:

And that’s why his firm had no hesitation in pouring an undisclosed amount of money into the Israeli-based venture.

I did bring this up in the article’s comments section, but since I’m covering the whole thing now, I might as well take the opportunity to mock it even further. The company MG is referring to in this sentence is based in Israel, and it is run by Israelis. MG disagrees, though, asserting that the company is headquartered inside the body of an Israeli person and staffed by blood cells or bacteria or nanobots or something. TechCrunch’s own database, however, describes the company as “Israel-based,” which makes quite a bit more sense. It’s possible that MG is a rabid Osmosis Jones fanboy, thus distorting his fact-checking, or he just doesn’t know how to use adjectives.

On second thought, owing to the fact that the last sentence of the article does call the company “Israel-based,” MG is either making an avant-garde artistic statement against the bourgeois prison that is consistency, or he knows how to copy and paste something from a press release.

After this, MG goes an astonishing three paragraphs without breaking something. He does begin a few sentences with the word “and,” which might cause a few amateur, wannabe grammar Nazis to cringe, but that’s just a stylistic choice and doesn’t compromise the article’s readability. That’s how many people talk (including me), after all. But two words into the sixth paragraph, he screws up yet again:

Obviously, a two to ten fold increase in speed is a big difference, but Leitersdorf notes that the more complex a page is, the higher the magnitude of optimization will be.

It may seem nitpicky and genuinely fascist of me to point this out, as it makes the article only minimally more awkward to read; I congratulate MG for his restraint in fucking things up. Nonetheless, “tenfold” is one word, as is “twofold,” thus the bold text would be written “two-to-tenfold” by an individual without a prehensile tail and less fond of bananas.

MG’s next two paragraphs both start in a way that indicates TechCrunch pays him per sentence:

The business model for the project seems sound as well. FasterWeb has a multi-pronged approach depending on the situation of the website or ISP.
[...]
He also notes that in their research, YL only found two companies even come close to doing what these guys are doing. But Leitersdorf declined to name them.

Both pairs of sentences were meant to be together, but were torn apart by the iron fist of MG Siegler’s ineptitude. Their forbidden love lives on in the hope that someday, a hero on a white horse will ride into the realm of TechCrunch and copy edit this chimpanzee’s work.

The former pair of sentences should be joined with a colon. Nothing fancy, just replace the period with one. A semicolon might work as well, but MG has already proved that he has no idea what to do with one of those. As they are now, these two sentences aren’t astronomically bad, but the latter pair absolutely requires a comma instead of the first period. Separated, they cause the reader’s IQ to go down by several clichéd insults.

From that point on, MG doesn’t screw things up anymore, closing his article with a grammatically sound, if unremarkable, set of six sentences. But alas, the damage has already been done, and not a soul with access to the article’s “Edit” button gives enough of a crap to take thirty seconds out of their day to fix any of it.

I hope that someday MG Siegler learns the error of his, well, errors and commits to writing articles that aren’t confusing and read like an actual person talking. But in a way, I also hope he never changes, because he’s certainly a great source of material for me.

PreThinking added their logo to the image, as is common practice in the interblogosphernetwebs, where anyone can take your image and claim it as theirs unless you put some form of identifier on it. For what this man did, the phrase “pre-thinking” is coincidentally appropriate.

[PreThinking via Gizmodo]

Celebrities get impersonated on the web. They’re famous — everyone is anonymous — it happens. Most celebrities just ignore it; but some get pissed off.

Three sentences in, and writer MG Siegler — a man featured in the New York Times at one point, according to his bio — has already misused both the em dash and the semicolon. Perhaps this is an attempt by Siegler to sound intelligent through the use of esoteric punctuation; both sentences call for the use of boring, everyday commas.

Yes, I know, I’m being a grammar Nazi, and relatively few people care about this kind of thing. The problem, however, is that punctuation communicates ideas that words alone cannot. Letters represent the sounds we make when speaking; punctuation represents the pauses we make in between.

If you think it’s limiting to have only 140 characters to express a thought, try eliminating 90% of the English language. If people stop caring about proper use of punctuation, it will lose its meaning entirely. This will destroy a writer’s ability to communicate voice; without the range of punctuation we have available to us, it’s impossible to read anything as if an actual person might be speaking it. It’s not eliminating 90% of the English dictionary, but it’s certainly eliminating 90% of the spoken language.

Of course, this may be a by-product of the questionable literacy of Internet users. Perhaps very few people still know the difference between a comma, em dash, semicolon, or paragraph break, and thus it no longer matters; every writer is the same to people who don’t know how to read for voice.

To be fair, none of my English classes ever mentioned proper use of the em dash or semicolon; if I recall correctly, I learned both through a combination of my father and Wikipedia. So, yes, this is a complex, deep-rooted problem with all sorts of causes and effects. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fixed.

Okay, now I’m going to finish reading that TechCrunch article.

There’s even less of an excuse when you have 8 or 10 staff writers with editing privileges reading each other’s articles. Or when you make 5 updates to a breaking story and your third sentence still talks about “Aople, Inc.”

Unfortunately, all mention of Dan Lyons, who played Steve Jobs on the Interwebs, disappears completely after the first paragraph of the article. And it’s only alluded to there at all after an “UPDATE”.

The entire text of the article talks about how Jim Goldman is a bad reporter and didn’t tell everyone about something or other regarding Steve Jobs and how he’s maybe dying which you should all STFU about anyway because dying SUCKS so leave him alone whether he is or not. But Fake Steve? No, you have to watch the embedded videos to know what the hell they’re talking about in that aspect.

Now, it’s not too unreasonable to ask someone to watch a video to understand what you’re talking about in a post. It’s rather unreasonable to require someone to watch a video to understand what you’re talking about in a post and NOT ASK THAT IT HAPPEN.

Nowhere in the text of the article is there a reference to “the included video shows Fake Steve Jobs saying blah blah blah.” This is not very useful to people who would like to actually read your article as opposed to mindlessly clicking on a video which will have to load and be watched in the same page without switching to their IM window in the middle or whatever when they don’t even know if it’s worth watching based on the subject matter.

Also it’s extremely confusing for iPhone users. Gizmodo loves the iPhone; they give it its own gigantic section of App Love. So why are they writing an article which relies on video embedded with the Flash that the iPhone still doesn’t have?

Bad Gizmodo.