Anonymous Trolls and Hack Writing

I have gotten into a stupid online confrontation with one of these anonymous commenters.

This often used to happen on this blog, several years ago. Sometimes, quite possibly, I deserved it, because I was very mouthy and insistent about my opinions. However, since it is my blog, one would think that a modicum of decorum would be observed, particularly by those who are strangers to me. After all, I am not on their doorstep, and I am not standing on the street corner shouting my opinions out until people get headaches. This is my blog. If people don't like what I write, they can always respectfully disagree, and tell me why (preferably under a real name, or at least a pseudonym). I absolutely despise dive-bombing anonymous commenters who make it their mission to discredit (at least, according to them) the person whose blog they are trying to sabotage.

In the current situation, the back-and-forth between an anonymous commenter and I is at Michael Turton's The View from Taiwan. The comments section in question is here. 

For one thing, it is really annoying to be told off by someone who won't even given their name (even a fake one). If they can't be held accountable, why should I be beholden to their criticism? When I see those kinds of anonymous commenters, I always get  some image in my mind of a pimply teen sitting in his mother's basement, growling at the computer screen and eating nothing but Mars Bars and drinking Coca-Cola. This is a cliche, of course. It is likely that trolls - I mean anonymous trolls - come in many forms. They probably look just like you or I.

My writing isn't perfect. I never said it was. I said my writing is very good. Of course, subtleties like these get markedly ignored by adolescents in arrested development! I have absolutely no problems with people expressing their annoyance with me. For example, if someone, whose profile or some decent, non-anonymous pseudonym writes a comment like, "@Thoth Harris It seems to me, then, that if you are going to criticize Cole's writing, then you should make sure you spelled Murakami correctly."

As you see, the comment I just wrote, critiquing myself, takes up the same amount of space, and gives the same information, but the comment is done in a respectful enough manner so as not to be badgering or attempting to discredit me (whom he doesn't even know, after all!).

My second gripe has to do with bad writing. I made a comment on The View from Taiwan (see above), which started this nitpicking about my spelling on my profile/grammar in my comments. I know I am not a perfect writer, but to me, bad writing is bad writing when someone refuses to make an effort to be clear. If there is the odd grammar structure, I will overlook the writing, because I know exactly they were trying to say. Perfecting writing means perfecting communicating, first for oneself, and then for one's audience. If you cannot understand what you wrote, you should write it again. Sometimes grammatical rules impede us. Usually, they help us, but frequently, we do get into scraps with our grammatical training, or with rules which come to light after-the-fact. I cannot stress enough, however, that clarity is the most important thing of all when writing. One would think this would be self-evident to a journalist. At least, it should be evident to someone who frequently writes journalistic articles. 

This brings me to the article I recently read, brought to my attention by the above blogpost of Michael Turton's. The English style in the article is atrocious. I will cite a few examples, and write what I would have written to make it clearer. Obviously, that is not my job. J. Michael Cole is a professional writer (among other things). He has a B.A. in English Literature! He has a Master's degree in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. Considering his impressive qualifications, I am somewhat surprised, and perhaps shocked, as well, that his articles read so poorly.

Here are some examples from Cole's article: "Exactly one day after the new foreign minister had uttered his comments about Beijing’s assurances that China would no longer use the death penalty against white-collar crime, China was executing two former vice-mayors — Xu Maiyong of Hangzhou and Jiang Renjie of Suzhou — for taking millions of dollars in bribes while in office."

Okay, where do I start. Let's start by stating the obvious. This is a very long sentence (and it takes a whole paragraph, too!). Usually, in a newspaper article, with which you are trying to economically convey information to large numbers of people, you should be brief. You should be succinct. You should get right to the point. I believe I am doing just that, right now. (Not all anonymous commenters will agree. ;))

I would have split the sentences in the paragraph up. I would write this, instead: "Just one day after newly Foreign Minister John Baird repeated Beijing's assurances that it wouldn't executed white-collar criminals, it appeared China did precisely that. It executed the two former vice-mayors, Hangzhou's Xu Maiyong, and Suzhou's Jiang Renjie, on multi-million dollar bribery charges while in office."

There. See? Wasn't that simpler? I believe it was simpler to write than that convoluted swill linked to above!

How about another example? From the same article, the first sentence isn't bad: "In a speech earlier this month to mark the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese President Hu Jintao said the battle against graft was the key to “winning or losing public support and the life or death of the party.” Such comments are hardly indicative of a government that is willing to relax its campaign against white-collar crime, or that is on the brink of abandoning the most extreme of means to address what is, indeed, turning into a threat to the CCP’s legitimacy."

You see, however, that the second sentence is just more unreadable mishmash. Remember, this is a city newspaper, whose ideal audience is your average working stiff, be it an office worker, your regular construction worker, or an exhausted housewife (or house-husband, as the case may be). They don't have time or energy to sift through convoluted sentences. Anyway, it is extremely easy to rewrite Cole's sentence into a more manageable and readable form: "Hu's comments defy any indication that the government will do anything but brutally continue cracking down on white-collar crimes." I would leave out the reference to "threats to the CCP's legitmacy" because it is redundant, and takes us off-topic. I think you should also notice how Cole's sentences become convoluted when too many prepositions appear in a row. Particularly troublesome is when too many uses of "of" or "to" occur in the same sentence. Sometimes, when you are listing several things, you can get away with it. Cole's use of certain words and phrases is unnecessary. 

If you have the patience to continue reading these things, here's another one, from another of Cole's articles, this time in Jane's Defence Weekly and Cole's own blog, The Far Eastern Sweet Potato: "The ship was already put out at sea in November last year, with little fanfare. The announcement that it was officially launched, a splashier affair, recently, looks timed to coincide with rising tensions in the South China Sea."

Okay, at least the meaning is clear. The sentences are shorter. This is what Cole should have done for a simple Ottawa Citizen news article! But let's leave that aside for a moment and explore what's wrong.... Cole, like me, is Canadian. I have never heard another Canadian (or even British person, as far as I know), use the form, "Put out at sea." This sounds really strange to me. It might be correct, and since Cole was trained in the military, from what I gather, maybe it is military usage. I am not sure, however. Normally, I would use, "Put out to sea." You don't just leave a boat in the ocean. The use of "at" seems like "train-speak," that much-reviled, old-fashion use of language that has, particularly on British trains, recently prompted some negative reactions. "Put out to sea" seems much more natural. The worst offender in Cole's paragraph, however, has to be, "a splashier affair, recently..." If you can make head or tail of why Cole wrote it that way, I will consider sending you a ticket to Taiwan and you can exchange places with me and be an English teacher instead of me!