Posts in Words

This season a number of philosophically arresting moments have managed to insert themselves into the television landscape. True to form, Ronald D. Moore and company continue to address contemporary political, philosophical, and religious questions in the alternate world of Caprica, territory he brilliantly charted in his groundbreaking Battlestar Galactica. If the pilot is any indication, Caprica promises to explore even more pointedly themes of religious and ethnic tolerance, terrorism, technology, and the nature of the soul. ABC’s FlashForward, clearly aimed at continuing the legacy of Lost and retaining its audience, has somewhat disappointed so far, but has nonetheless woven several provocative existential questions into its narrative, including one powerful Sartrean moment in particular. On the comedic front, NBC’s Community had the temerity to devote an episode to whether humanity is intrinsically good or evil, and did so superbly. I’ll admit to being prone to vegging in front of the tube even when the viewing is less cerebral, but a couple of these moments had me off the couch cheering for the writers.

In this new century, Web designers and developers have been on a crusade to standardize the rendering of webpages across platforms and browsers so that all comers experience the Web consistently. It is a noble ideal, and it has been a pitched battle with the continuing prevalence of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 retarding the adoption […]

It seems nigh impossible to unlearn the punctuation rules we were schooled in. For example, inserting two spaces after a period is a relic of the typewriter, a convention used to avoid the “rivers” of white space created by monospaced fonts. But though this convention has long since been deprecated, I have found it to be a fool’s errand trying to help older writers unlearn the reflexive habit of punching the space bar twice after a full stop. Nonetheless, if only in my own writing and editing, I’m on a personal mission to overturn convention, to promote using the hyphen in a way that it correctly communicates what is intended.