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In the News

Style Sheets and Hyphens; Censor that Mail; Will Teachers Groove?

25 October 2000

Style--Both Arbitrary and Important
Wired News offers an explanation of why, from now on, "email" will be written as "e-mail" in their publications. The return of the hyphen runs counter to the decree, issued in Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, that the hyphen was not needed. In the mid '90s, when Wired Style was penned, goes their logic, the Internet was young and ruled by geeks, but now it's mainstream, and acceptable, subsumed into the culture. And because it's subsumed into the larger culture, Wired now believes "e-mail" should be hyphenated to reflect what they see as standard hyphenating procedures. Go figure. Still, if you're talking to students about language, usage, grammar, and style, the article shows how even small editorial choices reflect a publisher's or writer's thinking and self-view. The piece reveals that to some extent style is arbitrary, but also shows why style matters and how it can make an impression. One can vigorously disagree or agree with the rationale for Wired's change, and critique its cultural assumptions (or praise them), but the underlying premise--that style does matter and is a choice--is cool to have at hand when teaching about style and details in writing. For the full Wired News argument, see Tony Long's piece from 10/23/00 at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39450,00.html.
For reactions to Long's piece, which was rather school-marmish and supercilious, go to http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39651,00.html?tw=wn20001025, and scroll down a bit to read Louis Rossetto's (a founder of Wired Digital) response.

Email Program that Censors before Sending
Eudora 5.0, a new version of a popular email program, offers a new feature called MoodWatcher that scans your incoming and outgoing email messages for offensive words and issues a rating presented as--I'm not making this up--chile peppers. The more chilies the hotter your message. What's too hot to handle? What will--in its heat--ignite a flame war? The answers have always been in the mind of the reader, but now, according to a review of the feature in Salon by Peter Y. Sussman, the answers reside in the stupidity of the software. MoodWatcher can't read, can't think, can't judge. It can only make indiscriminate estimates. With any luck, this is an idea that won't catch on. To see Sussman's assessment from 10/24/00, go to http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/10/24/moodwatch/index.html.
 
Will Teachers Groove?
There's a lot of buzz in the technology pages about Groove, a new suite of collaborative Web tools from Ray Ozzie, who helped develop the idea of groupware in the '80s that led to Lotus Notes. Groove, says CNET, an online technology news service, "brings together a number of disparate computing concepts that have been floating around the Internet for years, such as home and corporate video conferencing, the exchange of music, video and photo files, and instant messaging and chat, among other things" into one product. If the price is right and the tools are as powerful as Lotus Notes, Groove may offer teachers a useful tool for teaching writing and other collaborative skills online. To learn more, go to Joe Wilcox's 10/24/00 CNET report at http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-3280325.html?tag=st.ne.ron.lthd.ni or to Hiawatha Bray's 10/24/00 report from the Boston Globe at http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/298/business/Groups_in_Groove%2b.shtml.

 


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(Posted 10/25/00)