How Sitting All Day Is Damaging Your Body and How You Can Counteract It
Thorin Klosowski, lifehacker.comDo you sit in an office chair or on your couch for more than six hours a day? Then here are some disturbing facts: Your risk of heart disease has increased by up to 64 percent. You’re shaving off seven years of quality life. You’re also mor…
Our old office, with fun and games! I miss that place…
That last one, the bug face? Totally Brandon from work, he calls it Bug Man! :)
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Writing can be really no-win. It’s not fair, but it’s true.
If you obsess over every grammatical and structural point, you can come across as stiff. But if you’re lax and make a bunch of simple errors, you’ll come across as stupid.
You make one mistake and a lot of people will let it go. Two and you’re making them suspicious. Keep that up, with your intelligence taking hits at each turn, and your reader will decide that you’re actually a chimpanzee — and not one of the smart ones, either.
Copyblogger has covered grammar nicely here and here and here. But I, as a newcomer to these parts, have a few more peeves to add to the pot. Ignore them at your peril, Bubbles.*
1. Improper use of “myself”
This is one that people make because they think that complicating the language needlessly will make them sound smart.
(It’s the same principle as a barely literate inner-city tenant telling me haughtily that her brother is “presently incarcerated in a corrections facility.”)
Unfortunately, misuse of “myself” isn’t just needlessly complicated. It’s also wrong.
Here’s a typical incorrect use:
“The committee will consist of Bob, Mr. Parsons, and myself.”
In this circumstance, “me” is the right choice. In general, “myself” is a word you shouldn’t find much use for, so if you’re using it a lot, you’re probably using it wrong. “Myself” should only be used reflexively, to refer back to the subject.
For example:
“I did the job myself.”
2. Subject/predicate disagreement
This is extremely common, and I can almost forgive it because the correct structure is cumbersome. Here’s an example of a disagreement:
“Clearly, this person didn’t know what they were doing.”
The problem is “this person” (singular) being used together with the pronoun “they” (plural). “These people didn’t know what they were doing” is correct, and so is “This person didn’t know what he or she was doing.” In each of those cases, the number (singular or plural) in the subject agrees with the number in the predicate.
Number disagreements are irritating to solve, because if you have a bunch of them and are writing about a hypothetical or unknown person, your copy ends up being overrun with awkward “he or she’s.”
A good compromise is to pick a gender and run with it. The standard used to be to assume any unknown person was a man (e.g. “This person didn’t know what he was doing”), but it’s more common today to use “she” as the universal pronoun. Alternatively, you can alternate “she” and “he” in different instances throughout your copy.
(If you’re confused on this, try substituting a person’s name in the subject. This tends to make things more obvious. Using the initial example, you’d come up with, “Clearly, Bob didn’t know what they were doing.” Assuming you know that “they” is supposed to refer to Bob and not to another group, this becomes obviously wrong.)
3. “An historic”
I always get argument on this one, but I’m going to put my foot down anyway. Not only is putting “an” in front of a word with an audible H grammatically incorrect, it’s also uncommonly annoying.
Chalk this one up to trying to sound intelligent, like the “myself” rule above. Somehow, users feel that the use of “an” in this clunky way makes them sound distinguished, kind of like adding ye olde in front of tanning parlor, or saying indubitably with an English accent.
If you’re bristling at this one, ask yourself if you’d say, “an horse” or “an house.” What would people think if you went into the store and said, “I’ll have an half gallon of milk, please”?
You can and should use “an” if the H is silent and the word starts with a phonetic vowel, like “an hour.” Otherwise, go with “a” as the article.
4. Was vs. were
Everyone makes this mistake, so don’t beat yourself up if you do. But you should also fix it.
Here’s the incorrect use:
“If I was rich, I’d buy lots and lots of pants.”
However, the correct choice here would be were, not was.
Were here would be correctly used in the subjunctive mood — a case in which what you’re saying is hypothetical. If you’ve used “if,” that’s a pretty good indicator that were is appropriate:
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
(You’re not me, so it’s subjunctive)
or
“If I were at work right now, I’d be eating a waffle.”
Remember, you use “were” because you’re actually not at work right now. But if you were writing about an actual past event, you’d use “was” (e.g. “When I was at work”).
5. Incorrect use of “literally”
Please don’t do this with a straight face. Not only will you look uneducated, you’ll also look absolutely hilarious.
Example: Kristen Stewart from the Twilight movies recently told a reporter, “I get to do something that literally if I didn’t get to do it, I would implode.”
Now, think about that for a second. If Kristen couldn’t act, she would actually collapse in upon herself like a black hole. I’d like to see that.
I collect “literally” mentions. Britney Spears has been “literally on a roller coaster to hell.” Crowds have “literally turned the city upside down.” And in a particularly grisly turn of events, a mall Santa reported that needy, sad children “literally tear his heart out.”
Whenever you use “literally,” stop and think about whether or not what you’re saying is actually true, in those exact words. If it’s not, use “practically,” “essentially,” or (ideally) “metaphorically” instead.
If there’s one thing you don’t want to be, it’s accidentally hilarious. Seriously, trust me on this one.
* “Bubbles” was Michael Jackson’s chimp. What, have you forgotten already?
About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is the creator of Zero to Business: A ridiculously simple guide to turning your online business from tech headache to profit center and almost certainly made at least one idiotic grammatical mistake above. By all means, feel free to jump all over it in the comments section.
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“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” - Charles Mingus
Creativity is often made out to be a nebulous, messy, complicated, difficult thing, and it can be.
But it doesn’t have to be.
The judicious application of simplicity can help someone to create, whether that’s writing, creating art, designing, teaching, starting a small business, or in some other way making ideas take shape into reality.
People who want to create are hampered by complications — tools that are too complicated, projects that are too overwhelming, the distractions of the modern world, too many cooks, too many options, too busy.
Simplify, and many of these problems go away.
Let’s take a brief look at how simplicity can help solve some of the problems of creating:
1. Ideas. It’s hard to find ideas, right? Not necessarily. Simplify things: find vastly different ideas and combine them in a new way. This isn’t the only way to get ideas, but it’s simple and useful.
2. Ideas, again. Instead of finding ways to do more than everyone else, find ways to do less. If your competitor has a coffee shop with a wide array of beverages and food items, narrow it down: offer just one kind of coffee, but make it amazing. “We sell only one thing: the best cup of coffee you’ve ever tasted.” If you’re a blogger competing against writers who cover a vast variety of topics, cover just one, but do it better than anyone else.
3. Clear distractions. One of the biggest obstacles to anyone who wants to create these days is the distractions of the Internet, of email and IM, of meetings and people coming up to us to talk to us, of phone calls and Blackberries and iPhones. Clear these out of the way, so you can focus on creating.4. Remove complications. Complications get in the way of creating. Find ways to simplify projects, simplify processes, remove barriers, narrow things down, remove choices, but increase focus.
5. Focus on one project till you’re done. This goes against how most people work, and in fact I have a hard time doing it sometimes, as I get excited about several projects at once. But it’s how I’ve been working recently and I can tell you, there’s no better way to create. Clear everything else off your schedule, at least for the moment, and focus on one project. Keep the focus small, so the project doesn’t take more than a week (if it does, break it into more than one project). Then just focus on that one project, until you’re done. It feels great. Now move on to the next.
6. Use one simple tool. For me, I just choose one text editor to write (usually either WriteRoom or TextEdit). The simpler the tool, the better, because full featured tools end up being distracting and you want to fiddle with all the options. A pen and pad are also great. If you must use more than one tool, keep them small and simple.
7. When you’re overwhelmed, focus on less. If the project is too big or complicated or just hard, narrow it down. If you must write a book, don’t focus on the whole book, or even a whole chapter. Just write a section — something you can do in a few hours or less. If you’re starting a new business, don’t worry about getting the whole thing up and running — what’s the smallest amount you can offer at first, the smallest unit you can create? Focus on that.
8. Do just a little each day. If you can write for 20-30 minutes a day, or take a few photos a day, it won’t be long before you’ve created something great. This tip is for those who think they don’t have time to create. It doesn’t have to take all day, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. Just clear 20 minutes and create — do nothing else during that time.
9. Be in the moment, let creativity flow through you. When you are creating, feel free to be messy and don’t worry about perfection and just get it out. The best way to do this is to forget about the past and future, and just focus on the moment. Pour yourself into creating, and let it flow.
10. Whittle. Once you’ve created that crappy first draft, and just let everything pour out, it’s time to edit and whittle. Get it down to simple. See if you can cut out everything extraneous.
11. Show up. The simple truth to creating. You just gotta show up. It might or might not happen, you might or might not create something great, but you sure won’t create a thing if you don’t show up.
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