> However, this takes the biscuit. You see, the only two people who were
> actually taking your claims at all seriously are Don and Rainer. Kenny
> on the other hand is just stirring the pot and playing with you. I'm
> surprised that a genius such as yourself hasn't realised this.
>
> With respect to your claims regarding your writing being better than the
> average english professor or journalist, I have to say your sadly
> mistaken. Your expressive style actually confuses and detracts from your
> arguements. You seem to believe your style is a new radical form of
> expression and those that criticise it are just morons who don't
> appreciate your great talent. Such an arguement may have merit in a work
> of fiction in which you are trying to push the boundries. However, it
> simply detracts from what your trying to express when your dealing with
> issues of fact or arguements regarding issues of technology, sociology,
> philosophy or belief. If you honestly want to address such issues, you
> need to express them in a clear concise manner that presents your
> arguments without the distractions of unfamiliar style.
> This is not uncommon. Many students find the more precise
> nature of maths easier to grasp than the less precise rules of english
> grammer (noting that english is often cited as the most difficult
> language to learn because of its inconsistent and complex grammatical
> structure).
actually, the problem is just whether i want to eliminate the brain
washing and insult elements when conversing with tech geeking morons
and fuckfaces.
logical clarity and communicative power is actually the salient
feature of my writing skill.
most of my post in the past month or 2, with my adaption to a chat
style to emulate and appease the tech geekers, are not carefully
written. My posts in the past decade, which i post at a intentionally
limited rate about 1 or 2 messages per week, are usually carefully
written, long, and each took 1 to 6 hours. (for detail, see
http://xahlee.org/Netiquette_dir/why_cant_you_be_normal.html ) But
even in these posts, typically there are typos, spelling errors, and
many unintended grammatical errors, and some phrasing and structure
that could have been better. These type of errors gets fixed when i
later edit and put them to my website.
So, for example, my lisp criticism about its irregular syntax and cons
business, originally is just a post here as a side effect of aswering
a lisper's question about processing trees. Now, i've edited it
somewhat so it's on my website for more general public consumption:
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lisp_problems.html
It still contains the fuck words. But say, if one day i decide to
publish my writings in a book, or say, submit to Calculus Esoterica
quarterly, then these writings serve as a draft.
As you know that recently we discussed emacs issues in gnu.emacs.help.
Many of them are on my website now, e.g.
★ Emacs's M-‹key› Notation vs Alt+‹key› Notation
http://xahlee.org/emacs/modernization_meta_key.html
★ Emacs Should Support HTML Mail
http://xahlee.org/emacs/modernization_html_mail.html
★ Emacs's HTML Mode Sucks
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_html_sucks.html
★ Why You Should Not Swap Caps Lock With Control
http://xahlee.org/emacs/swap_CapsLock_Ctrl.html
★ Keyboard Hardware Design Flaws
http://xahlee.org/emacs/keyboard_problems.html
Since these are linked in a more visible section of my emacs & elisp
tutorial, so fuck words are edited out and rantiness are mostly gone.
They are still not book quality though.
you can get a glimps of what my book quality technical writings is
like, and perhaps evaluate it, at my emacs and elisp tutorials.
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs.html
http://xahlee.org/emacs/elisp.html
The writing quality of the articles linked directly in that page, are
what i consider perfect technical writing. Though, they still exhibit
full idiosyncracy of me. For example, you will still see things like
the use of “i” for “I”, starting a sentence with a conjunction, lack
of conjunction at the penultimate position of a sequence, lack of “an”
form, “programing” instead of the more common orthography
“programming”, no use of period for abbreviations or middle names, use
of nested parens ... and quite a few others. Lol. It's that way
partly because i want to sting and elicit the grammarian and pundit
morons out there, and partly serve as education in general public (the
mechanism is by raising awareness (for example, if some grammar
sensitive moron hit me in some rude way in public, then i'll reply and
explain with a carefully crafted writing. Soon, the discussion will
snowball into a public controversy. Eventually, the world's top
experts in writing, linguistics, literature, comes out, and the
majority are likely to be on my side. This is when, the educational
purpose embedded in my “awkward” english takes effect, in fact carries
the seed of revolution. (as a example, did you notice how i mentioned
the origin of the word “OK” in gnu.emacs.help? The tech geekers
started to discuss about it and learn among themselfs, meanwhile,
reinforced my argument that the situation of the term “buffer” in
emacs isn't what they thought is.)).).
One might ask: “so where can i really see Xah's writings that
demonstrate its quality with respect to conventional English
standard?”. Well, if i write formal letter to strangers, love letter
to studious college girls, correspondence to government, educational
institutions, publishers, math journals, documentations for a company
or contract, personal communication to math professor friends and
acquatances etc, that's where. There are a few that are public that i
can cite, but i don't want to. But if anyone here really want to, you
can hire me to write technical documentation for you. I guarantee
you'll be satisfied or your money back.
O, actually, you can check out this work where orthodox writing is
employed:
“The Discontinuous Groups of Rotation and Translation in the Plane”
(1997)
Xah Lee
http://xahlee.org/Wallpaper_dir/c0_WallPaper.html
Written in 1997. That's before i have become a troll with my fully
developed bag of idiosyncracies. It is linked by math professors and
math institutions around the world, btw. (just ask, i'll show you the
hundreds of urls that link to it)
Btw, this year, i have replaced all proper use of “an” to all just “a”
on that site, in accordance of my kookiness that has developed in my
late recent life. If you want to see the “an” form, you can use
archive.org . I haven't become nutty enough to replace all “I” by “i”
in that work. Though it's on my mind.
