Smooth Talk
reallifemag.com
reallifemag.com
I think Alex needs more than writing aid software. This sentence is overloaded with million dollar phrasing.
So many sentences in this article are nearly meaningless, and impossible to parse. The reason is that the author and his postmodernist/posthumanist idols reject meaning itself, so when they attempt to produce advice on conveying meaning, they instead produce nonsense.
Don't listen to Alex. "Late capitalism" and "patriarchy" are not to blame for the advice Grammarly and Hemingway give. The drive to be understood is what motivates tools like this. I have used the rules that Hemingway (the application) enforces to improve my business communications, and they have measurably reduced the need for retransmission or damage control related to misunderstanding.
The sentence you quote is, at worst, clumsy. There are few, or no, signs in the post itself that the author rejects meaning or anything or the sort. He might be a hardcore Derrida scholar for all I know (-- but that's hardly apparent in the post and the point he tries to make are quite clear.
Here's a "translation":
"While writing is supposed to intimately represent who we are"
This needs to translation.
"this software highlights the perpetual inadequacy of translation"
...this software is an example of how when we translate something, we lose some part of the meaning of the original.
"intervening with standardization as optimization"
...the software meddles with our writing process, presenting us with the most standardized options (regarding word choice, standard rules for "better writing" etc) as if they represent the optimal way to write something.
You're correct that the article itself doesn't spell it out clearly. My spidey senses just started tingling when I was uncertain I had understood the singular intended meaning of the sentences. I checked out the author bio and it confirmed my inkling: that postmodernism and/or posthumanism has something to do with why this article is such a pain to read.
I am a human, and all of the beings which read and understand English, as intended, are humans. Posthumanism is an affront to the conveyance of meaning, no matter how drab or lame you think your essay is after you run it through Grammarly.
It is true that, given only the rules and conventions of a language, no singular meaning can be read from an utterance. It is, thus, tempting to say that no utterance has any singular meaning. I contend that the human condition lends sufficient context to read a singular (or close enough) meaning from a well-formed utterance.
That though is not all that post-modernism says, but rather a a reduced straw-man version.
Even if they alluded (or openly) stated that, they did it for particular, quite rational, reasons, with they explained with much more nuance and drew rather rich conclusions from.
In the end, like with the dadaists/surrealists, people might have laughed at them, but half of what we consume culturally today, from ads and graphic design to mainstream tv and comics, owes them huge debts.
Speaking of the original post-modernists of course. Not that the American academics that followed french post-modernism much understood this nuance.
My try to parse it:
If language made us human, proofreading tech makes us post-human.
I'd say that the human technology is more human than any individual human, because it is closer to the humanist ideal than to any individual.
This touches on, I think, a pretty deep question. To what degree are our mistakes and imperfections "us" and how much should we seek to eliminate them? Where is the line between simply choosing how we present ourselves versus presenting ourselves inauthentically?
A completely untouched photo is obviously "me". A picture of a some other model is clearly not. But between those two points there is an increasingly smooth continuum that people are getting to choose from. When software using machine learning trained on datasets of photos of models subtly corrects my skin and facial structure, is it still an honest photo of me? Is the choice to use that software itself an honest expression of who I am?
Grammarly and Hemingway are not really intended for artistic writing. The best they can offer to the artist is some perspective on why the readers may not see what he's getting at.
I agree entirely with that, and it doesn't even really match Hemingway's style.
I would hold any day that the purpose of writing is to have something understood.
P.S. "late capitalism" is not "capitalism", it's a phrasing meant to normalize the implication that capitalism is expiring and/or coming to an end. This implication has been popular with socialists for well over a century, so apparently it's never been too late for capitalism. ;- )
See, that's exactly the issue. Shakespeare didn't write his sonnets simply to be "understood," he adopted a more difficult language for the sake of expressivity and aesthetic pleasure. Direct transmission of the author's intent is only one of writing's purposes. To treat it as the only one is to obliterate entire realms of human experience.
This is pretty clearly the author's point, anyway.
In prose it's lunacy and shit advice. That's the problem of the one trick pony education style we happen to have in the US. Lack of nuance from teachers is appalling. Growing up in Europe I got a much wider exposure to history, philosophy and other humanistic subjects than my american wife ever had (and ironically she's the art history major...).
... people are trying to do this ? Passive voice is the only way to have a meaningful conversation.
The joke only works in passive voice. If you attribute it to a specific person or group then it's no longer comical wishful thinking, it's just plain wrong. Sometimes vagueness is beneficial.
You could rewrite the sentence as “a single man...wants a wife” and talk about exactly the same group (men with a fortune) so that’s not where the inaccuracy lies.
If you look at basically every critique of some advice, it boils down to that core issue.
Often, people acknowledge this by saying, "Well, you need to know whether or not the advice applies to you." But that generally requires a level of sophistication the reader doesn't have. If they did, they wouldn't need the advice in the first place.
I'm not sure if there's a good solution to the problem. I think we tend to express advice in terms of a delta because it's more compact and because it's more directly actionable. Compare, "avoid passive voice" with "approximately 80% of your sentences should use active voice in most styles of writing however the fraction should be higher in narrative fiction and nonfiction and lower in academic writing."
In this case, "avoid passive voice" is a pretty good delta, statistically speaking. Most writers use passive voice too much. I have seen very little writing that uses too little passive voice. Those who don't overuse passive voice tend to be self-aware enough to know the advice doesn't apply to them. If you were to apply that advice to a large corpus of randomly selected text, you'd make more of it better than you made worse.
Exactly. Passive voice is the easier default for most writers and unfortunately, it lacks punch.
Example of a classic passive voice sentence: "Mistakes were made."
Writers love hiding behind passive constructions like that. But the reader wants to know _who_ made the mistake. If possible, write the agent into the sentence: "Nixon made mistakes." or "Kissinger made mistakes."
There was a writing style book that compared 10-K annual financial reports from companies that got hit by accounting scandals (Enron, Worldcom) vs clean companies (Berkshire Hathaway & Warren Buffet). There was a significantly more passive voice sentences in the dishonest companies. In contrast, Warren Buffet writes in a lively active-voice style ("I invested in this. I lost money on that.")
(I wonder if there's a hedge fund that uses text analysis software to scan 10-K filings to quantify which company is overusing passive-voice as a parameter to their models.)
An example from the abstract of my (unpublished) dissertation: Exploiting special hardware is a well-known technique to lower energy consumption, which is another important aspect that must be balanced with raw performance.
I don't want to use active voice, because at this point nobody cares who does the balancing. Using you (...that you must balance...) seems not suitable in an abstract.
1) Ambiguous antecedent - to what does "which" refer - special hardware? Lower energy consumption?
2) Exploiting is not a noun. "The exploitation of special hardware..."
Perhaps: A well-known technique to lower energy consumption is the exploitation of special hardware. ...
Most of the time, in most people's writing, switching most of the passive-voiced sentences to active will improve the writing.
As with all writing rules, you don't need to follow it if you know what you're doing—by definition, since knowing-what-you're-doing means (among other things) not accidentally using the passive voice where active would have better served your purposes, but using it only when you want its particular effects.