Why is it that we must tell everyone on the Internet that things are only our opinion?

Of course “I think” what I’m about to say. Why else would I be saying it? Of course it’s “in my opinion,” because I’m saying it. Anything said by anyone is, when you get down to it, inherently related to what they think, which is consequently their opinion. But now that they’ve been so kind as to emphasize that fact, it hurts their argument.

Here are two different statements a person can make:

A: I think that jumping off the George Washington Bridge can cause severe bodily harm. That could be fatal, in my opinion.

B: Nobody can get hurt from jumping off the George Washington Bridge. It’s actually very healthy and promotes long-life.

Now, assuming you didn’t know anything about the effects of jumping off a bridge, which of these two arguments would be more convincing to you? At first glance, without Wikipediing anything? Most of you will say statement B.

Adding language like, “I think” or “In my opinion” (or IMO or IMHO) to your arguments weakens them. You will sound less sure of yourself, or at the very least like you don’t care as much. This applies to actual speech as well as online discussion.

Some might argue that such disclaimers are common courtesy, but to the audience you’re addressing, they’re common sense. It’s not impolite to omit needless words, and doing so makes the remaining words stronger.

Today on MG Siegler Destroys the English Language, MG seems to be having a better day in terms of competence. But in “The Mac Versus PC Debate Has Never Been Clearer“, he proves once again that he has no idea what an em dash is supposed to do. Oh, and some other things.

The point MG makes in the article is a great one: the Mac vs. PC debate is very much like a Porsche vs. Camry comparison. But that doesn’t make his writing any less aggravating to read.

You need look no further than numbers released today by NPD to understand Apple’s strategy. Its revenue share of the “premium” price market — that is, computers over $1,000 — is a staggering 91%.

Better, MG. Much better than your previous efforts. In fact, you came so close to a successful em dash use there. But you just had to throw in a “that is.” Without the “that is,” you could’ve used these em dashes so well, MG, and I’d have been so proud, but with two little words, you turned the whole damn phrase into a parenthetical. You know, the half-circle thingies that you use to make sad and happy faces? Or, to put it another way, the things you used in the next paragraph:

Analysts and journalists are often quick to point out Apple’s relatively low overall market share (less than 10%).

That’s a correct use of parentheses, MG, and the fact that you were able to do that makes me wonder if you see any difference in all these punctuation symbols. They do different things; em dashes are for long, emphatic mid-sentence pauses, and parentheses are for shorter, more subdued asides. Listen to yourself talk, and it’s not very hard to figure out.

At least this time you didn’t use em dashes where there should have been commas, though. I’ll give you that.

Other minor errors include “naive” instead of “naïve” (normally something I’d let slide, but you’re a Mac user, MG — press option+u before typing the i, it’s easy) and “lets” instead of “let’s” (typo, maybe, I can’t tell with you). Alone, they’d be minuscule, but overall they deplete my confidence in you even further. I don’t like seeing you fail, MG, and I don’t like having to write these things; this blog doesn’t give me ad revenue. I think I speak for all literate people when I say, please join us.

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.

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.”