Unintended Consequence of The Digital Revolution: Grammar and Style

I love the show Mad Men. I'm a complete fanatic. It takes place in an ad agency circa 1960, and takes on the business, existential, and romantic dilemmas of fascinating cast of characters (among them,the absolutely dreamy Don Draper). It is widely popular for its attention to historical detail: the fountain pens, typewriters, the brand-new Xerox machine are all authentic; so is the pool of secretaries that sit outside the offices of executives, diligently typing up correspondence taken from dictation. Remember those days? No? Well, watch the show.

It dawned upon me while watching that there was a time when white-collar professionals had secretaries to type up their writing. More than taking handwriting or rambling dictation and turning it into polished paragraphs, they also handled grammar and style- they were essentially editors. They had dictionaries at their desk to quickly check whether the correct word should be "affect" or "effect."

Enter the digital revolution. These days, all of us but the most senior executives are responsible for our own correspondence, and guess what? Grammar and style questions are coming back, kicking us in the ass-- a lot of us. When I worked at a financial company in the 90's, shortly after email became ubiquitous, I remember the 50-something CEO writing an email directly to the employees. He mis-used the word "quiet" for "quite." Simple spelling mistake? Typo? It doesn't matter. It made everyone titter and take him less seriously (His secretary edited mass emails after that).

Guess what, folks? Dust off those grammar and style guides, because these days, we write more than ever, and we are all responsible for our own editing. One of the most common pet peeves I see on Twitter is about grammar and style mistakes. People are becoming increasingly critical of those who make them. I'm not talking about simple typos-- we all make those occasionally-- I'm talking about mistakes made from lack of knowledge about correct usage. Not knowing the difference between the words "flout" and "flaunt" will reveal your ignorance. Misusing the words "your" and "you're" might cost you your reputation. Putting in apostrophes where they don't belong will make you the subject of someone's grammar mistake blog.

To get an idea of the grammar zeitgeist, just search Twitter for "grammar" or "difference between you're and your."

So unless you can hire an administrative assistant to edit all of your writing before you press "send," you had better root around in your bookcase for your college or high school grammar guide, and if you don't have one, get one. Those emails with your mistakes in them are kept forever.

Some helpful sites:

Grammar Girl - A great website to quickly answer those pesky questions.

The Chicago Manual of Style Online - It has a small membership fee, but worth it if you regularly do a lot of professional writing (which includes email correspondence at work).

The Elements of Style - The classic text from 1918. Short, and worth reading for everyone.

The Emergency Manual

This is a post which describes a challenge I'm currently working on, and a proposed solution. If others have other solutions, I'd love to hear them. 

Background:

I do all the administrative-like tasks in our two-person household. I pay the bills, handle the mail ( see the post on paperless mail ), handle income and property taxes, our immigration paperwork, etc., etc., etc.

All this work is mostly digital, mostly stored on my computer. I have it all backed up on an external hard-drive, so that if my computer crashes, I can recover everything. But it dawned on me the other day: What of something happens to ME?

I have to confess- I'm not the most organized person, despite having a degree in Library-stuff. I use technology to make up for the fact that I dump things in files without a very good system- I make use of applications that have good built-in search features to find things, and still I occasionally find myself thinking, Did I tag this with 'visa' or 'immigration'?

So if I somehow got konked over the head and ended up in a hostpital with amnesia, Rob would have to go through my computer and sort everything out. A couple of different problems would arise:

1: Where and how important documents are stored. Physical docs are not a problem. He knows where the birth certificates and passports are. But what about that pesky letter from the IRS that needs to be taken care of?

2: Scattered Accounts: We have different accounts at different institutions, that I interface with on the web, which have different URLs and passwords. 

3: Security: Rob does not have access my personal accounts: My personal email, the payment accounts I use for clients, the websites I own and maintain. Does he even know about all of them? If something happened to me, he would get a power of attorney-- but really, what a pain!

The fact is, by taking on the responsibility for maintaining all our household administrative tasks, I have also created a somewhat dangerous situation should anything happen to me. With digitization comes increased security, but it's all designed for the personal user, not the family. Have you ever seen a bank account that allows online access by multiple logins?

Proposed Solution:

I obviously need to put togather an "emergency manual" that has all the important information that Rob would need if I get kidnapped or marooned on a deserted island.  I could share it as a Google Doc or some such, but I'm uncomfortable with this kind of information being stored in the "cloud," as they say. I think the best place to keep it is on my external hard drive.

Included in this emergency manual should be:

• A list of all our bank accounts, URLs to the web interface, and passwords (including paypal, etc.)
• A list of all the bills we pay, passwords, etc.
• List of and passwords for my email accounts
• The name, address, and email of people that might need to be notified in emergency: lawyer, accountant, family members, and clients/employers
• The name of the file where all bank statements, tax returns, etc. are kept. (Since this would be a file that is constantly added to, it would need a pointer rather than the docs themselves)
• The names and contact info. for all household services, employees (gardener, fumigator, housekeeper, etc.), how often they are used and what they are paid.

This is the best solution I have come up with so far. And of course, I need to tell Rob it exists. Anyone else have interesting solutions to this problem? I would love to hear about them.

Firefox add-on for Spanish Learners: Barra de Español

For those of you learning Spanish, like me, there is a new Firefox add-on that it pretty handy: Barra de Español. It's a bar in your browser that gives you drop-down arrows for special keys that are not on your keyboard (á, é, ñ, etc.) and allows you to look up words in a dictionary with a right click. You can look words up English to Spanish or Spanish to English, which is handy. Worth trying.

Search Children's Books by Lexile Ranking at Barnes and Noble

Barnes and Noble now lets you search children's books by lexile ranking. Lexile ranking is the reading difficulty of the book, separate from grade level. A child's lexile level is determined by reading comprehension tests, and texts are analyzed for word frequency and sentence length to estimate their approximate level.

The lexile search can be found here. The wizard works pretty well, allowing you to either estimate the reading level by whether your child finds grade-level books easy or difficult, or search by the actual lexile ranking if you know it. It then gives you a sample text to read, allows you to narrow by the child's interest, and then gives you suggestions.

A Digital Halloween

Here are some high-tech tips for enjoying your Halloween:

Events:

Tweance: That's right. The first seance on Twitter is going to be happening Friday morning the 30th (the site doesn't say what time yet- but it's London time, I believe). Renowned psychic, Jayne Wallace is going to be asking questions to River Phoenix, Curt Cobain, William Shakespeare, and Michael Jackson. It's sponsored by a costume shop in London. You can follow at http://twitter.com/tweance.

Unicef : Unicef traditionally has trick-or-treat charities during Halloween, and this year, they make it easier than ever to make a donation. If you text "TOT" to Unicef- 864233, you will donate $5 to UNICEF.

Costume ideas:

iPhone: iPhone has a Halloween costume generator to help you out with ideas. You can put in general words like "witch" or "wizard" or filter by age, gender, occasion etc. It's $1.99

For the lazy: The Huffington post has some old-school masks that you can print out (the kind with dotted lines around the face and the eyes- tie to your head with string). Go as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Kanye West, or Rod Blagojveck

For the Online Addict: Go as your Facebook profile. Get a picture of your profile blown up on posterbard and cut out the square for your face.

For the REAL Online addict: Go as a LOLcat. Don't know what a LOLcat is? Go here. Dress as a cat with a T-shirt that says LOL on the front, or hang a funny caption around your neck, such as "I can haz Halloween candy?" LOL speak has sort of evolved into its own language, so go to the site to see examples before you choose a "capshun."

Super-Tech:

If you are a Verizon customer, Verizon has a new service called Family Locator that uses the GPS locator in your child's cell phone to let you know where they are. It's 9.99 a month, you have to be enrolled in Verizon's Friends and Family plan, and you have to have compatible phones. If this is successful, I can see other companies following along.