[Gllug] Star Office/ Open Office.org

[Nix]

On Thu, 6 Nov 2003, Simon Rumble uttered the following:
> On Thu 06 Nov, Nix bloviated thus:
> 
>> Just about the only thing I've found it *doesn't* complain about is
>> short memos written in baby-talk.
> 
> Try adjusting the settings to be appropriate for your form of
> writing.  Then it tends to flag up the appropriate errors.

This was *after* doing that.

>> (Corporatespeak gets complaints about
>> the passive voice --- what's wrong with the passive voice? --- and
>> overlong sentences.)
> 
> The passive voice is almost always a more complicated way of saying
> things.

I didn't say that corporate-speak was necessarily well written.

(Actually the academic papers got hit more heavily by that one.)

> Of course, many people who receive MBAs think corporate-speak means
> making yourself sound important, clever and complicated.

I think this is a variant of the postmodernist syndrome; that is,
they're impressed by the way that scientific/technical jargon makes
things harder to understand for the uninitiated, so they introduce huge
piles of jargon which have that as its sole purpose, then talk to nobody
but other members of the same clique, reinforcing the silly terminology.

(They've not understood, of course, that scientific/technical jargon is
there to make things *easier* to understand, since referencing
complicated concepts without using new words for them is tireosme. They
see a side-effect and mistake it for the purpose.)

>                                                           They end up
> writing everything in complicated passive voice and do really
> ridiculous things like turn innocent nouns into verbs ("incentivize",
> "productize" et al).

Well, that's actually always been common; nouns and verbs have been
swapping roles like that for as long as English has existed.

(There's still no excuse for `leveraging', though.)

> Word's grammar checker gets a lot of flack from people who don't
> change from the defaults and don't understand the reasons it's
> flagging up specific rules.

I give it flack because I understand how crap nearly all of those rules
really are. The only way to reduce FPs from the grammar checker to an
acceptable level is to turn nearly all the rules off: and then what are
they there for?

>                            Actually it's an indispensable tool if
> you don't have time to re-read your documents every time you issue
> them.

I find my brain works better. ;)

(But then I find spelling checkers useless, too, yet I can perfectly
well understand that most people would find them useful. I just don't
make any non-typo-caused spelling errors.)

-- 
`Me, I want exploding spaceships and pulverized worlds and clashes of
 billion-year-old empires *and* competently written sentences.'
                                                    --- Matt Austern

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