Cliches are an almost unavoidable part of writing, but some are way more annoying than others. Here are a few that particularly piss me off, which, while not limited exclusively to technology journalism, are particularly prevalent there. To be honest, I've probably been guilty of using some of them in the past, so don't feel bad if you have too.
There are a few grammatical errors that pop up frequently in tech journalism as well. I'm sure I've made a few mistakes here as well, but these are the ones that annoy me the most.
(By the way, if you're wondering why the accent over the 'e' in 'cliche' is inconsistent, it's because I wrote some of this on my phone, then in Word on a Mac, and then in Blogger itself.)
This picture does what it says on the tin
Bang for buck
Apparently, if you're going to buy a graphics card or a processor, you want it to have plenty of 'bang'. It's particularly important to get as much of this as you can for your 'buck', which it's safe to assume means currency and not a male deer. To be honest, I'd be more than a little worried if my PC components were going bang, but again this is not meant to be taken literally. 'Bang' in this context means performance - although it's worth noting that bang also has sexual connotations, which lends a somewhat more seedy meaning regarding the exchange of money. Clearly, ‘bang for buck’ is a rather tired and lazy expression to indicate value for money (arguably a cliche in itself), but my main objection to it is that it appears in British media, where the word ‘bucks’ to describe dollars sounds out of place and artificial.
Price tag/point
Imagine for a moment you're browsing the local branch of a national discount clothing chain. You happen to see a charming sweater with a picture of cat playing piano on it. You want it, but you're on a limited budget. Your immediate concern, therefore, is how much it costs. So what do you do? You check the price tag. Why? To see the price. Beyond telling you the price, the tag is of little importance. If the tag had fallen off, you wouldn't assume the sweater was free, would you? And the size of the tag wouldn't matter. If the garment in question had a huge price tag, but written on it was 20p, it would still be a bargain. It's evident that the word ‘tag’ is superfluous, and the same applies to the equally redundant inclusion of the word ‘point’. In spite of this, references to price tags and price points seem hugely popular with tech journalists.
It does what it says on the tin
Lazy, lazy, lazy and stupid. First and foremost, how often do technology products come in a tin? Very, very rarely. So there is no tin. Stop bollocking about the fucking tin. Assuming the tin is a metaphor, what does it represent? If it represents whatever packaging the product happens to come in, then it’s completely useless to the reader, because they don’t have said packaging. It would be like writing a movie review and saying, “It’s about what it says on the back of the DVD box.” Of course, some products have self-explanatory titles, in which case the ‘tin’ must be a reference to the title. So why not just say that? For example, ‘It does exactly what its title implies’ would be more than adequate without mentioning any tins. Finally, it’s a little worrying that some writers can’t think of anything more original than to quote an advert for Ronseal wood stain. The same goes for people who say ‘Seemples’. As a fellow journalist said to me, it’s a word that best describes the people who use it.
Sport
It’s best to begin this with a definition. I don’t mean sport as in football, hockey or whatever. I’m referring to the word ‘sport’ as in ‘to wear or be decorated with something’. It’s pretty simple: you can sport a new pair of purple flared trousers (probably best not to, though), a car can sport flags on its roof, and a soldier can sport medals on his jacket. A graphics card cannot sport anti-aliasing and a processor cannot sport a high clock speed. In spite of the very clear boundaries of what this word means, many technology writers seem unable to resist using it in place of words such as ‘have’, ‘has’, or even ‘features’ or similar. The fact is there are plenty of alternatives you could use that actually make sense, so please use them.
Out there
Like many of the clichés here, this one isn’t confined to technology writers, but it is pretty common among them. To illustrate, here is a made-up example: ‘This keyboard is better than anything else out there at the moment.’ Is the writer looking out the window as he or she types? Are they thinking, ‘Well, this keyboard is definitely better than that squirell’? No, of course they’re not (unless they’re mental). The safest bet is that ‘out there’ means the rest of the market in this context. However, there’s nothing to say where the boundaries of ‘out there’ lie. In the case of my chosen example, is the writer telling me it’s the best keyboard in the country, the world, or even the universe? Perhaps, taking things to the other extreme, it’s just the best keyboard in the office. As well as being used in comparisons, ‘out there’ also gets tacked onto sentences for no reason at all. For example, ‘There are a lot of great first-person shooters out there, so which one should you buy?’ Now remove the words ‘out’ and ‘there’ and read it again. Still makes sense, right? And you don’t sound like a moron. Awesome.
Show-stopper
How hard is it to look in a dictionary? ‘Show-stopper’ means something is so good, it stops the show – not that it’s got a flaw that stops it working. Use this one incorrectly, and face the full force of my admittedly extremely subdued and, indeed, barely noticeable wrath.
As instead of because
Somewhere along the line (is that a cliché?), the word ‘because’ has fallen out of favour, and has been replaced almost universally by tech journos with the word ‘as’. The word ‘because’ means ‘for the reason that’ and the fact that it has ‘cause’ in it should give you some idea of its connotations. While it’s okay to use ‘as’ sparingly as an alternative to ‘because’ for the sake of variety, rhythm and so on, it should be never used exclusively in its place. Why? Because it means something different and can change the meaning of whole a sentence. For example, ‘As I was going to the car, I picked up my keys.’ The proper meaning of this sentence is that you picked up your keys on the way to the car, but when used incorrectly to replace ‘because’, it means you picked up your keys, because you would need them. You see this happening all the time in technology journalism, and the worst offence is ‘as if’ meaning ‘because if.’ Just say the words ‘as if’ on their own. What do they imply? They express doubt, because they’re short for ‘as if that’s going to happen’. It should be obvious, then, that ‘as if’ has a very different meaning to ‘because if’ and getting them mixed up makes you sound like a dick.
Too many dashes
Dashes are useful things that can help put emphasis on a particular part of a sentence, or perhaps add something on the end of sentence as an aside – oh, and they look nice too. Of course, that just means they can be used as parentheses. It’s not uncommon and it’s perfectly acceptable. The problem is when it becomes unclear what their purpose is. Consider the following: ‘This motherboard has everything you could ever need – or want – as long as what you want is within reason.” It’s not a great example, admittedly, but it does show what I’m talking about: the first dash causes a break for emphasis and the second one indicates an aside. However, the two dashes could be also be used as parentheses around the words ‘or want’. As I said, this is a bad example, because you’d still be left with a valid sentence, but quite often this isn’t the case. A better way to write the previous example would be ‘This motherboard has everything you could ever need – or want (as long as what you want is within reason).’ It’s not the only way to do it, but it makes sense and, importantly, it’s far less shit than it was before.
Capitalising 'user guide'
Although the manual that comes with a product might well have 'User Guide' written on it, and it might well be capitalised, it's not actually the title of it. It's merely there so you know it's the user guide. If you're going to capitalise it, why not go the whole way and put it in italics too, like it's the name of a fucking Shakespeare play or something?
0 comments:
Post a Comment