Granted, it's intelligible if I put my mind to it. However, internet blogs are not like books. (Well, there's a surprise.)
To take your commendably pithy comment as an example, blog-speak generally incorporates an unusually large number of parentheses (three, in your case), plus tropes such as ALL-CAPS, ellipses, and hyphenated by-the-bys. For fairly obvious reasons, these are not seen so much in books of 200 pages or so. Without due care and attention, they have a nasty tendency to slide into verbal hiccups and distract the reader from the point at issue.
That's why paragraphs are important in blog comments.
As you know, I'm a naturally lazy person, and I make this point simply on the basis that it takes little or no effort and it therefore works for me.
There's actually nothing wrong with your monobrow paragraph, except that when I read "policy is not what is being sold any more" I had to return to the top to decipher exactly what premise was being developed to this conclusion.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but your argument would present far better if you put a para break before "I think there are," and a further para break before "Since it's impossible..." (although the second of these isn't quite as forceful).
And of course I'm not being a Grammar Nazi. I'm being a Style Nazi. This rather worries me, since I have no intention of being the Gok Wan of the Internet.
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Re: Yer Friendly Uncle Grammar Nazi
Date: 2010-08-23 06:08 pm (UTC)To take your commendably pithy comment as an example, blog-speak generally incorporates an unusually large number of parentheses (three, in your case), plus tropes such as ALL-CAPS, ellipses, and hyphenated by-the-bys. For fairly obvious reasons, these are not seen so much in books of 200 pages or so. Without due care and attention, they have a nasty tendency to slide into verbal hiccups and distract the reader from the point at issue.
That's why paragraphs are important in blog comments.
As you know, I'm a naturally lazy person, and I make this point simply on the basis that it takes little or no effort and it therefore works for me.
There's actually nothing wrong with your monobrow paragraph, except that when I read "policy is not what is being sold any more" I had to return to the top to decipher exactly what premise was being developed to this conclusion.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but your argument would present far better if you put a para break before "I think there are," and a further para break before "Since it's impossible..." (although the second of these isn't quite as forceful).
And of course I'm not being a Grammar Nazi. I'm being a Style Nazi. This rather worries me, since I have no intention of being the Gok Wan of the Internet.