Category: ideas

National Grammar Day: to infinitives and beyond

grammarToday is National Grammar Day. Missouri S&T’s public relations manager, @mhstoltz, informed me of this yesterday.

Today is the day to celebrate grammar. Get out your Strunk and White, undangle those participles, rejoin those infinitives and get your good grammar groove on. (Or should that be “get on your good grammar groove,” so as to not end the sentence with a preposition?)

(And yes, I’m sure true grammar lovers are shocked — shocked! — that there is no serial comma in the second sentence in the above paragraph. Sometimes more modern writing conventions, or the Associated Press Stylebook’s punctuation edicts, trump those old-school grammar rules.)

In honor of this day, maybe we should talk about the subject of grammar. In this day of text msgs, telegraphic tweets and the death of the serial comma, what constitutes good grammar?

Or maybe we should air our pet grammar peeves? Here’s one of mine:

10itemsorlessConfusing less and fewer. Grocery stores do this all the time with their “10 items or less” signs. Here’s an easy way to remember which is which:

If it’s stuff you can count, use fewer. As in: “I have fewer than 10 items in my shopping cart — that is, if my six-pack of light beer, which contains fewer calories per serving than regular beer, counts as a single item — therefore, I shall check out via the ’10 items or less’ lane.”

If it’s stuff you can’t count or quantify, then use less. As in: “I am less drunk than Bob, even though he drank fewer beers than I.”

If that isn’t clear enough, consult Grammar Girl’s tip on the fewer/less conundrum.

And tell me:

  1. How do you plan to celebrate National Grammar Day?
  2. What is your pet grammar peeve? (Limit two or less fewer per commenter, please.)

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* Top image from Behind the Grammar. Bottom image from a Yahoo movie page.

Social media’s future: less Tweeting, more Facebooking?

Social media expert Brian Solis turned soothsayer for the crowd at Ragan‘s Social Media for Communicators Conference in Atlanta and told them that the future of social media lies not with Twitter, but with Facebook.

Why? Well, Facebook has a much larger audience, for starters, so the potential for greater reach is there. But Solis also says Twitter is too ephemeral. He says the average lifespan of a popular retweet is only about an hour. “Twitter has no memory,” Solis says. “It’s always moving on to the next thing.”

[P]articipation on social media runs deeper than just responding to other people.

“Our job is to contribute something to the greater conversation,” Solis says. “Have killer content. Make people feel compelled to share.”

I agree with Solis on the killer content thing. But my experience, based on working with both personal and organizational accounts on Twitter and Facebook, is that Facebook provides the greater reach but Twitter creates a greater connection among users. The people we interact with on the @MissouriSandT Twitter account seem more connected somehow than those we interact with on the Missouri S&T Facebook site.

Of course, most of you who know me from my blog and Twitter ramblings know I’m a big fan of Twitter, and that my interest in Facebook continues to wane with every new meme and every request to join a group that wagers a dog, a rock or some other object can get more fans than Sarah Palin or Obama’s health care plan. So maybe I’m a tad biased.

Also, it wasn’t so long ago that MySpace was the king of social networks, and Facebook was a mere sprite. But the table quickly turned. Could the same fate that came upon MySpace also befall Facebook?

The crux of the matter probably has more to do with what aspects of Facebook, Twitter or any other social media platform appeal to people — not which is the better platform for everyone. This post from Twitip got it mostly right, I think:

“Facebook appeals to social animals and can be very addicting to people who have an insatiable appetite to stay connected with friends and make new acquaintances,” while “Twitter is like a communications stream you dive into for an invigorating swim.”

What do you think? Is Facebook the wave of the future? Discuss.