User:Joevanisland

Most Recent Thought

If many editors here do not believe their adverbs and adjectives color nouns and verbs with POV, just what exactly do they believe adverbs and adjectives do? Joevanisland 23:46, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Who is Joe

Joe VanIsland is the online pseudonym of a Vancouver Island fiction writer and magazine columnist. Joe, being a Canadian writer, has occasionally had to eat his writing, as that was often the only way it could be said to "put food on the table". Though he has had day-jobs in retail and small-business management, he is currently a full-time writer. He should be currently writing right now, in fact, but once again is on the wiki. Joe does not claim his writing career makes him an expert on language or grammar, and shares this lack of expertise with his real-world editors. Joe's a little worried as to whether writing about oneself in the third-person constitutes any sort of narcissism, but once he chose the title "Who is Joe", he couldn't control himself.

Comments or civil criticisms are welcome on my talk page.

Online History

Three-hundred baud, when 1200 was fast!, but no cradle-modems. I confess I may have pirated a C64 disk in my day. BBS's to DDial, then the net from there.

Editing Philosophy

Editing for errors of structure, idiom, vocabulary, coordination, or parallelism is not nitpicking or pedantry. English can and should be fiercely precise, and I feel precision is always in the best interests of Wikipedia. All such errors should be corrected boldly, even if this necessitates some rewording, with respect to the original author shown through explanation on discussion pages or in the edit summary.

However those who claim the presence of such errors (including typos and errors of context) invalidates the logic or argument intended are themselves guilty of fallacious logic as well as being jerks.]

Writing Philosophy

I find it significantly and unfailingly annoying when amateurish writers consistently insist on using numerous, endless, and multitudinous quantities of adjectives and adverbs when it is categorically not remotely or reasonably necessary, as this only makes for extremely long, usually boring sentences considerably riddled with tone and simply difficult to read.

Irony aside, I dislike the use of "simply difficult", for word-choice as well as an unnecessary adjective, and feel this is a common error that erodes the precision of the english language. Though I agree with the use of it for describing something as being, in simple terms, merely difficult, or for the weight that something is only, by virtue of no other factor, difficult, this does not mean one should define something as being "simply difficult" as a turn of phrase. It belongs to cases where the difficulty is not dependent on any other influence or factor. The restaurant closed because it is simply difficult to find parking means you don't have to scratch your head wondering if it was also the food, or the sign, or the font on the menu. It was, absent all other complexity, simply difficult to park. How common this subtle error with English to believe seeing the presence of a word or phrase in any sentence means it is correct in any context.

You say "brevity", I say "of short and concise duration"

I do believe the above horrid, adjective laden sentence should be "The use of many adverbs and adjectives annoys me."

Unfortunately, I also see examples where an attempt to simplify a sentence based on this sentiment leads an editor to unwittingly simplify the idea of that sentence. I feel the wording that communicates the accuracy of the idea, whether dense, difficult, or oft-putting to many readers, is still preferable to a sentence that may communicate merely the gist of an idea to more readers. PRECISE OVER CONCISE!

WikiFaith

Policies in which I have faith ( and somewhat in order of personal preference): (If you're reading this right now, pls don't see this work in progress as meaning I have no faith in WP policies!)