single-base mismatch–discriminatable stringent conditions

GEF-H1–RhoA–ROCK–c-Myc–microRNA–p21 signaling axis [GEF-H1 and c-Myc are hyphenated, so a hyphen is unequivocally wrong (a slash would also be fine, though). Saito et al. 2010, J. Exp. Med. 207:2157–2174]

iodine–potassium iodide solution

long-term culture–initiating cells

Twi1p–guide scnRNA complexes

plant-pathogenic bacteria vs. plant–pathogen interactions [the first compounds plant-pathogenic into a single adjective; the second connects plant and pathogen, which are separate organisms that interact]

queen–worker caste determination [a hyphen would compound queen and worker into a single noun or adjective, like plant-pathogenic above]

cell wall integrity–related genes [with a hyphen, it means cell wall genes that are related to integrity]

partial hepatectomy–induced liver regeneration

Se-substituted methionine–containing protein

the combination grocery store–liquor store–short-order restaurant [Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla]

HBV pX–associated protein 8 [a hyphen would mean a pX-associated protein of hepatitis B virus, whereas the actual protein is associated with HBV pX. This distinction is vital when you consider other protein names, such as, you know, the actual HBV protein X.]

GGDEF/EAL domain protein–coding gene [this means a gene encoding a GGDEF/EAL domain protein; with a hyphen, it would mean a protein-coding gene that has a GGDEF/EAL domain]

Here are some examples of when I think you could get by (people probably do) with the hyphen, but the en dash looks and feels better because it’s more accurate:

G418 and ganciclovir–doubly resistant colonies [you would hyphenate G418-resistant and ganciclovir-resistant, so I think you'd still have to hyphenate (or en-dashinate) when doubly is added]

fluorescent protein–tagged AP2-L–expressing parasites

anti–platelet aggregation [with a hyphen, I don't know, would it mean aggregation of anti-platelets or an anti-platelet agent that you're shortening to "anti-platelet"?]

100 Å–scaled protein particles

So the problem with literally becoming *yet another* alternative to “very” is that we no longer have a word which means “no really, I mean this thing actually happened, it’s not just a strong metaphor”. So our language has become less expressive because this particular modification.

This is a good and wise restriction (or, gasp!, prescription) on word meaning and usage, the violation of which does impair clear communication and is entirely unnecessary. As machineghost points out, we already have numerous words and phrases to give emphasis to a statement, even to the point of hyperbole, and using literally to do so degrades the impact of this word when it is appropriate.

The non-necessity of using literally to give emphasis to a statement via hyperbole reminds me of Mark Twain’s admonition against using very to give emphasis to your writing. Good writing typically gets its point across effectively without adding this emphasizer, so it is either unnecessary or is the sign of weak writing.

The same lesson can be applied to hyperbolic, non-literal literally in probably every imaginable context. Take the much written-about instance of British soccer commentator Jamie Redknapp saying “David Silva literally floats around the pitch.” Or another one mentioned in that article, “literally in another galaxy”. The columnist uses history to justify his concession that hyperbolic literally is right and proper, but I’ve always seen history as only a part of any discussion about grammar and usage. Luckily, we in our wisdom can see the error of the ways of those writers of centuries past and can see how the misuse of literally impairs usage by weakening its impact in proper contexts. Writers who used or continue to use it for hyperbolic, metaphoric effect were/are writing ineffectively and impairing the effectiveness of this word in literal contexts.

On top of weakening literally in its correct uses and leaving us with no word to take its place as meaning “no really, I mean this thing actually happened, it’s not just a strong metaphor”, hyperbolic literally is literally entirely unnecessary. If you’re using literally in an obviously hyperbolic, unrealistic, out-of-this-world, impossible, or fantastical metaphor, then the metaphor should do all the work of having a strong impact on the audience, without being “strengthened” by the misleading addition of literally. What, if you say an athlete floats around the pitch or that some people seem to be in another galaxy on a political debate, these don’t have a strong enough impact on the audience, so you have to add literally before it to sort of fool the audience into thinking, “Oh!—maybe he does mean literally—oh, no, of course he doesn’t, but he must be really, really, doubly, triply, extra serious, then!”

This is weak hyperbole for writers and speakers who either can’t write or speak effectively or are so dense/see their audience as so dense that they cannot be satisfied with mere hyperbole. Stan Carey writes about this linguistic inflation and sort of manages to come down on the right side, by the end of the column. He does quote writer/composer Anthony Burgess with a sentiment echoed by machineghost above:

A ‘colossal’ film can only be bettered by a ‘super-colossal’ one; soon the hyperbolic forces ruin all meaning. If moderately tuneful pop songs are described as ‘fabulous’, what terms can be used to evaluate Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony?

This page, Not everything is epic, is amusing and spot on.

The literally vs. figuratively debate provides a good example of wise, beneficial prescriptive rules. The rule is: don’t use literally when you mean its exact opposite, figuratively. Breaking it encourages sloppy thinking, writing, and speaking, it insults the audience as if they aren’t smart enough to recognize the hyperbole, and it reduces the effectiveness of literally in its correct uses.

(To review, Mary Elizabeth Williams sort of lamented, sort of understood, and sort of threw up her hands in surrender at the Associated Press’s official de-banishment of the sentence-modifying adverb Hopefully, as in Hopefully, the AP won’t make future concessions that actually do harm usage. The objection is that hopefully should only modify specific verbs, describing how an action was done, not modify whole clauses or sentences, because sentential hopefully injects the writer’s own personal perspective (his hopes) into the sentence, where it doesn’t belong.)

The worst offender in the six pages of comments, which were a mix of sensible, smart, stupid, ignorant, superstitious, interesting, boring, and indifferent, was named Francis E. Dec. In response to a professional editor who wrote, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “Hopefully, we’ll all get over it,” Francis E. Dec responded,

(Hopefully, we’ll all get over it.)

What does that sentence mean? Does that mean you are hopeful that some other group accepts this change? You use the term “we,” but prior to that seem to exclude yourself from those who need to “get over it.” Or does it meant hat those who do not accept the change are hopeful?

Perhaps you begin to see the problem with using an adverb when there is ambiguity concerning the verb it modifies? I don’t know who is hoping in that sentence. Do you?

That you might be someone who has worked professionally for thirty years does not shock me. It is, after all, the declining standards of professionals such as yourself that has led to this change in the AP style guide.

Francis is an idiot or, more likely, is being intentionally obtuse to try in vain to make a point. It is obvious who is doing the hoping: the author. Stop being a smug, pedantic little twit. You, I, and everyone who reads that sentence know exactly who is hoping. It is the person who typed it. Stop pretending it isn’t obvious.

Further down, in response to the column itself, Francis E. Dec wrote,

The AP Stylebook editors did this to sell copies. They have no requirement to yield to changes in common usage as they claim. They publish a stylebook, not a dictionary. The job of the style guide is to provide a universal standard for writers in a particular profession. You can bet the MLA style guide, APA guide, and other professional style guides won’t change. (One hopes.)

One hopes? Who is “one”? Which one? You? So you’re filling in your own hope for the unknown hopes of your nameless, anonymous readers, who may or may not share yours? Are you assuming all of your readers’ hopes are one with yours? How are we supposed to interpret “One hopes” if not as “Everyone hopes”? How about “It is hoped”? Well, hoped by whom? Same problem. Why not write “I hope”? Because the first person is forbidden in your weird, stupid fantasy land and we’re supposed to pretend those words just appeared on the page with your name above them? You can’t bear to use an alternative wording that’s at least as clear (“Hopefully” or “I hope”), so you choose to say that “one hopes” instead of saying you hope it, thereby committing in equal severity exactly the same insidious personal perspective injection that you’re trying oh-so-smugly to shoot down.

People like Francis E. Dec are hopeless, self-blinding, insufferable, willfully ignorant, pedantic, annoying little twits who seem invariably to make the same “mistakes” they rail against or worse ones. At best they’re a nuisance that we ignore or brush away occasionally like a persistent mosquito, and at worst they’re a scourge on English usage everywhere, only impeding clear writing with their inane, groundless, ineffective pseudo-rules and harming the credibility of the purveyors of beneficial usage rules because they make us all look like crazy, superstitious pedants.

There are good grammar/vocabulary/usage rules, and there are bad ones, and those who push bad ones that aren’t grounded in logic, aren’t backed by history, aren’t observed by esteemed writers, and don’t improve style or clarity are harming their own language far more than any sentential adverb could.

Later, a commenter named G. I. wrote a thoughtful, sensible comment that was marred by, what else?, a weak objection to to sentential Hopefully:

So it is really pretty simple unless we choose to be perverse about it. That said, I would make a distinction between spoken language and written language re “hopefully.” In spoken language, it is, as its defenders say, merely a short form of “It is to be hoped that.” Like much informal speech, it is inelegant but unlikely to be misunderstood. In written language, it’s wrong for the simplest of reasons: it can’t be diagrammed–it can’t be attached to any word that it modifies with one of those little diagonal stems. (The phrase used as a sentence for effect CAN be parsed: the omitted part of the complete sentence is clearly implied and indicated as such in the diagram.)

Um, learn how to diagram better? I mean, come on, these aren’t fucking Feynman diagrams that illustrate a fundamental force, movement, or interaction of particles and energy under the immutable laws of physics; they are human-designed markings on paper to illustrate the uses of and relationships between human-determined, human-evolved, and human-implemented language components. If your precious diagrams are unable to parse sentential Hopefully, then you and your diagrams are the problem, not the word that makes perfect sense to everyone and has a clear, unambiguous meaning. The nature of sentence diagrams is not constrained by some universal laws; if they have a shortcoming, modify the diagrams, not the language! Sheesh!

In a sentence that begins with Hopefully, the subject doing the hoping is understood (I). Note another type of sentence that has an understood subject: imperative sentences, also known as commands. Go to the store. Read this article. Stop doing that. Their understood subject is You. Sentence diagrams are perfectly capable of handling those understood subjects, so no, I doubt they are simply inadequate to handle the understood subject of a sentence with sentential hopefully.

Finally, in an exchange that was pretty well handled by the more sensible of the two participants, one Rrhain tries to explain that adverbs can only modify adjectives, verbs, or other adverbs, and “They don’t modify phrases unless those phrases function as one of those parts of speech.” (This is simply a false statement.) He uses specific example sentences posted by a previous commenter and tries to rearrange them to make his point, to his own detriment:

Specifically, the adverb is not modifying the clause but rather a specific part of the sentence, either the verb or an adjective. It has simply been separated from it. You can recast each of those sentences to place the adverb directly next to the word it is modifying and remove the comma:

I actually do live in Chicago.
I do actually live in Chicago.
Mrs. Brown arrived surprisingly late despite her usual punctuality.
I usually eat at home.

He is right that many, if not most, sentential adverbs can be moved to the interior of the sentence, adjacent to the verb, adjective, or adverb they actually modify, but interestingly, he misunderstands the surprisingly example not once but twice. Here, he doesn’t understand that the original sentence that another commenter wrote, “Suprisingly, Mrs. Brown arrived late despite her usual punctuality,” has Surprisingly modifying the entire statement, not the arrived or the late. Due to his misunderstanding, he makes surprisingly modify late in clear contrast to the meaning of the original commenter’s sentence. After another commenter explains this to him, Rrhain still refuses to understand:

Whether “surprisingly” is modifying “arrived” or “late,” it is modifying a specific part of speech: The verb or the adjective. It is not modifying an entire sentence. To reduce your sentence down to its bare bones:

Mrs. Brown surprisingly arrived.

This was especially enjoyable and rewarding to me, somehow. This ignorant anti-Hopefully pedant misunderstands his own rules and admonitions, and misuses surprisingly not once but twice, all because he has set himself on this crusade against sentential adverbs and refuses to acknowledge that not just hopefully but many, many more adverbs, such as surprisingly, are frequently, clearly, and correctly used as sentence-modifying words.

With that last suprisingly example, Rrhain insists that Mrs. Brown’s arrival can legitimately be described with the adverb surprisingly only because this adverb modifies a specific verb in the sentence, arrived.

Um, no, it doesn’t. Let’s explore why.

Superstitious pedants like Rrhain love to repeat the mantra that hopefully shouldn’t be used unless the author means that a person was hopeful while doing an action; they performed that verb in a hopeful manner. Therefore, Rrhain and his ilk ought to know how to put verbs and adverbs together and what it means when a verb is modified directly by an adverb like hopefully or surprisingly; after all, they remind us that that’s the only truly correct way to use these adverbs every chance they get. Yet here, Rrhain has used surprisingly incorrectly to modify a verb it has no business modifying! Mrs. Brown did not arrive in a surprising manner; the effect that her arriving itself had on others was not to evoke surprise; she did not perform the arriving in a surprising way. Rather, the whole combined fact of her arriving late despite her usual punctuality is what’s surprising! That’s why Surprisingly should be used at the beginning of the sentence in a sentential role, to modify the whole sentence! However, because Rrhain refuses to allow sentential adverbs, we see him put surprisingly right before the verb, which changes its meaning from modifying the whole fact of Mrs. Brown’s arrival to the nature of her arrival.

It’s almost ironic, except willful ignorance, inconsistency, hypocrisy, and plain stupidity are expected from anti-Hopefully crusaders, so I don’t find his misunderstanding and misuse of surprisingly surprising at all.

He also makes the same mistake in his first post, in a slightly less obvious way:

For example: “I’ll go in a bit.” “In a bit,” while not containing any adverbs itself, is functioning as an adverb, modifying “go” to indicate time. You could use “hopefully” in this sentence: “I’ll go hopefully in a bit.” And in this case, you could easily move “hopefully” to the front of the sentence: “Hopefully, I’ll go in a bit.”

He thinks that “going hopefully” is the same thing as “Hopefully, I’ll go”! What phenomenal ignorance from someone claiming to guard English against degradation and criticizing others for their wrongheadedness! They are not the same. “Hopefully, I’ll go in a bit” means “I hope that I’ll go in a bit” or “I hope that in a bit, I’ll (be able to) go.” In contrast, “I’ll go hopefully in a bit” means that when I go in a bit, which is certain to occur, it will be in a hopeful manner. He thinks that putting hopefully in that spot makes it modify the adverbial phrase in a bit, but it does not. It is modifying the verb go in that sentence. If he meant to express the idea that he will go (for certain) and that he hopes this going will occur in a bit, he needs a well-placed comma: “I’ll go, hopefully in a bit.” Another punctuation change could express the same idea: “I’ll go (hopefully in a bit).” And this sentence can be rephrased, “I will go, and hopefully, this will occur in a bit.” The placement of hopefully and commas in his example can create sentences with three distinct meanings, all of which are, or should be, clear to all native English speakers and which exemplify the glorious flexibility and versatility of the English language. Let’s list them for ease of understanding:

1. “Hopefully, I’ll go in a bit.” Or: “I’ll go in a bit, hopefully.” (I hope that I’ll (be able to) go in a bit.)
2. “I’ll go hopefully in a bit.” (I will definitely go in a bit, and I will perform this going in a hopeful manner.)
3. “I’ll go, hopefully in a bit.” Or: “I’ll go (hopefully in a bit).” (I will definitely go, and I hope this will occur in a bit.)

Now that I’ve corrected his punctuation and adverb usage, we can plainly see that Rrhain is trying to use hopefully to express his own hope (example 1 or 3), and he justifies this by noting that in a bit is an adverb and then claiming that hopefully is modifying this adverb.

Again, no, it isn’t, except in my third example above, which is the only one he failed to type and which I had to write for him. In the first example, hopefully is modifying the whole ensuing clause, to express the speaker’s/author’s hope that the whole clause will come true. Rrhain refuses to accept this, so he tries rearranging the words to show that the sentential Hopefully in example 1 is actually modifying the adverb in a bit, as in example 3, but these sentences mean different things. Hopefully absolutely does not apply to the same group of words in examples 1 and 3. The only way to express the hope that “I’ll go in a bit” will come true using the word “hopefully” is by using it in a sentential role. Any other role applies hope to only a subset of the words, changing the meaning of the sentence.

I don’t know exactly why a preposition (in), an article (a), and a noun (bit) are perfectly fine to function together as a phrasal adverb but hopefully is not acceptable as a sentential adverb. I also don’t know why using Hopefully to express hope that an entire clause or sentence will come true is wrong but using hopefully to express hope that a time-adverb (such as in a bit) will prove true is OK. Either way, the speaker/author is injecting his own personal perspective into the sentence in a “sneaky” way without using the word I (or the far inferior One), which some people object to, possibly Rrhain. I think this “adverbs can only modify verbs, adjectives, and adverbs” rule sounds more like a post-hoc rationalization and extension of their specific opposition to sentential hopefully, in which they’ve tried to extend this position to a general rule that applies to all adverbs. They rail against sentential hopefully, they realize other sentential adverbs are used in identical ways, they want to at least appear consistent and logical, so they created a rule out of thin air to extend their fetish to other adverbs in the name of consistency, against all evidence.

This rule is unnecessarily limiting to the English language and inhibits, not enhances, clarity.

As the coup de grace in my exposure of Rrhain as a cartoonishly ignorant, illogically pedantic anti-Hopefully fetishist, Rrhain uses the adverb Specifically in a sentential role, not modifying any specific verb, adjective, or (phrasal) adverb, in one of his own sentences in the natural course of his writing, i.e., outside of his fabricated example sentences. He writes, “Specifically, the adverb is not modifying the clause but rather a specific part of the sentence, either the verb or an adjective.” There is no way to construe that sentence to claim that Specifically is modifying either is or modifying or any other specific word or phrase. Rather, it is modifying the entire thought conveyed by the sentence. This sentential adverb means To be more specific, and what follows is Rrhain being more specific. The entire sentence and not any one verb is described by Specifically.

This use of sentential Specifically is perfectly clear, logical, and grammatical—features it shares with sentential Hopefully and every other sentential adverb and adverbial phrase that good writers and speakers have used for hundreds of years. And even bad writers and armchair grammarians, apparently.

At the end of his first comment, Rrhain does make a good point that hopefully‘s sentential use is more of an interjection, sort of prefacing the whole sentence, but he is very confused about the roles that adverbs play in his own examples.

Plus, if you write about a usage rule or trend that you haven’t studied like a linguist, you’re bound to make material errors much worse than using a word supposedly incorrectly. For example, Mary Elizabeth Williams and her compatriots lament sentence-initial Hopefully because the AP stylebook recently un-banished it, but there is no doubt that every single one of those annoying, smug little pedants has used dozens of different sentential adverbs before, in writing, without batting an eye. Frankly, Obviously, Surprisingly, Next, Additionally, Also, Luckily, Happily, Fortunately, Unfortunately, First, Maybe, etc., etc. (the last two by Williams herself in that very column). This the ONLY ONE they have a problem with, because their parents or teachers had a problem with it and instilled this attitude in them, and they like enforcing rules because rules are good, not because the particular rule in question is good.

It is perfectly reasonable to object to sentential Hopefully on the grounds that it unduly injects the author’s opinion into the sentence either inaccurately (does every reader also hope what the writer hopes?) or subversively (hey, if you want to state your own perspective, write “I hope”; if personal pronouns aren’t allowed in this publication, you should revise your statements to meet the literary or logical rigor it requires, without just asserting things because you hope everyone else agrees). I see nothing wrong with objecting to this sloppiness or personal perspective injection when such objections are warranted. But it’s important to remember that everything that was ever written, even primary scientific literature, was thunk up and written down by a human(s), humans who have opinions and hopes and functioning nervous systems, so it is pretty rare for an injection of the authors’ hopes to be completely inappropriate and unacceptable. (Even in primary scientific literature, a sentence near the end of the paper could easily and legitimately begin with “Hopefully,” to express the authors’ hope about future studies, discoveries, or advancements. There’s nothing about “We hope” that is superior to “Hopefully”.)

Therefore, while the objection to undue perspective-injecting on the part of the author is understandable, the objection only holds water on rare occasions. In the contexts in which an author would be tempted to begin a sentence with “Hopefully”, chances are exceedingly, vanishingly small that the context is inappropriate for that word. (For instance, in a news article about what terrorist group did what or who died where, I don’t see an AP correspondent writing, “Hopefully, no more dead bodies will be discovered.”)

So the word and its sentential use are not the problem; inappropriate context is, and I challenge any Hopefully pedant to find a single instance of inappropriate, unacceptable, context-ignorant sentential Hopefully in any half-respectable publication.

Now, on to Mary Elizabeth Williams’s interjection against passive voice: “Language is meant to be subverted. (Note bold use of passive voice!)” I echo John McIntyre’s call to that famous passive-voice-misunderstanding-exposer Geoffrey Pullum to explain whether Williams is right in calling that sentence passive, but I’m going to take my own stab at it and say No. I think McIntyre is right when he writes,

Neither bold, nor passive, I think. We could argue whether a past participle following a form of to be is a true passive or merely serving the same function as an adjective in a copular construction, as in the sentence “Ms. Williams’s argument is impaired.”

How about changing one word in Williams’s sentence (admittedly the most important word, but keeping it a past participle verb): “Language is supposed to be subverted.” How about “I am surprised at the level of ire she musters”? These both have the structure [noun] [to be conjugate] [participle], just like her supposed passive sentence. The thing is, meant is being used more like an adjective than a verb; there is no implied actor performing the verb; there is no meanor in her sentence or supposer or surpriser in my sentences. Passive, I think not. Language is the noun doing the action in the sentence; it is the thing that’s meant to be subverted, and it’s doing so right there.

Before hearing about Geoffrey Pullum and, shortly afterward, encountering his screeds against people who mistakenly criticize the passive voice while completely mis-identifying the passive voice in their examples, I never would have guessed that so many language commentators who rail against the passive voice would so often mis-identify that very voice. But they do. Ms. Williams does it here. Dr. Pullum has catalogued probably hundreds of examples, by now, of passive voice bashers bashing something that isn’t even the passive voice. It’s quite astounding.

We should criticize the passive voice when it obscures actors and meaning, so it’s good to avoid it as a general default approach, but the passive voice is frequently extremely useful. Further, if “Language is meant to be subverted” is the passive voice (which I doubt), then obviously any “rule” or even guideline that would bar the use of that phrasing is stupid because that sentence is perfectly fine, clear, and direct! How else are you going to express that idea? Any “rule” that would label that sentence as grammatically “undesirable” or “improvable” is a stupid rule based in ignorance.

Finally, did you ever notice that some (hell, probably all) of the very people who rail against the passive voice are also the people who rail against sentential Hopefully, and that they are being laughably inconsistent in these two crusades? They hate the passive voice because it is supposedly just inherently bad—less forceful, less clear, less direct. But then they go and say that injecting the speaker’s perspective into an article or essay by writing “Hopefully” is inappropriate because not everyone necessarily hopes that. Well, the only two alternatives for expressing the author’s hope are the much more personal “I hope” and the heavily passive and ridiculous-sounding “It is (to be) hoped that”. The former must be far worse than mere “Hopefully” on the personal-perspective-injection scale, and the latter is about the most clunky, stodgy, awkward, unnecessarily passive clause I can imagine. If an author wants to express the meaning “I hope that…”, without starting with “Hopefully”, then he can either use the first-person pronoun, which seems worse than implying his opinion with the word “Hopefully”, or he can write “It is to be hoped”, so the anti-passive, anti-Hopefully crusader is left with either “I hope” or hypocrisy.

The excellent website of Chris O’Leary, a St. Louis–based pitching and hitting instructor, has dozens of helpful and informative animated GIFs, including of the three pitchers mentioned above. On his page about Adam Wainwright and the “inverted W”, O’Leary pinpoints what he thinks Wainwright’s mechanical error was, or at least the source of his problems: he keeps moving his elbow upward for far too long, resulting in his elbow being higher than the ball for too long and even significantly higher than his shoulder for a while. This requires his elbow to twist too much too fast and his throwing hand to whip around and forward too quickly, which puts way too much strain on the elbow over time.

Mark Prior’s mechanics were even worse and make me cringe just looking at them. O’Leary rightly calls Prior’s mechanics a train wreck. O’Leary even created another page comparing Mark Prior’s mechanics to Greg Maddux’s and Nolan Ryan’s, two pitchers who never had serious arm problems (though Nolan Ryan is kind of a freak of nature, so I’m not sure any comparison to him would be fair. I’d love a Roger Clemens comparison because I always considered him to have nearly perfect mechanics.) The story is the same for Mark Prior: elbow too high too late, ball dragging behind it, whipping around too fast too late.

Kerry Wood is among the most famous injured pitchers of the last couple decades, and O’Leary’s Kerry Wood page details basically the same problems that hurt his elbow as hurt the other two. Added to that is Kerry Wood’s somewhat across-body throwing style that presumably helped him snap off his curve ball so effectively. Maybe Kerry Wood’s curve ball contributed more to his elbow problems than his “inverted L” arm motion did, but I think I generally agree with O’Leary’s analysis.

I have little doubt Yu Darvish and Craig Kimbrel will suffer similar fates because I see the same faults in their mechanics: their elbows are ahead of their throwing hands, their elbows come up and back too far, and they have to whip the ball around too fast at the last minute, which puts excessive torque strain on the elbow. Their mechanics seem particularly worrisome because you don’t need GIFs or slow-motion video to detect their faults; they are obvious in real time on TV. Here are a couple photographs of each pitching:

Kimbrel is far worse than Darvish, and I don’t think the fewer innings he will throw as a reliever will save him. It isn’t as evident in those photographs of Darvish as it is in video, but he seems to whip or twist his arm around much more than most pitchers, possibly similar to Kerry Wood in the 1990’s (though I haven’t seen video of pre-injury Kerry Wood in a long time, certainly not enough of it to study it).

As we saw the rise of literacy over the next few hundred years, especially in the beginning of the 18th century, the language became relatively more fixed. It’s very interesting that a grammarian like Lindley Murray, who in 1795 wrote his English Grammar, became the best-selling author of the first half of the 19th century. He sold more than 10 million copies of that book. … Nobody else was close, and grammar was something that Americans seemed to care about a lot. … He outsold Stephen King or J.K. Rowling—and to a smaller population. It really is quite extraordinary.
[...]
With the rise of literacy, especially in America, there were strong notions of correctness. And, by the way, Murray was a good grammarian. He’s often derided. But he did not, contrary to maybe not popular belief but popular academic belief, tell people not to end a sentence with a preposition or never to split an infinitive. He didn’t. A lot of the popular notions about grammar are just wildly false.
[...]
My impression is—and there’s quite some literature on this—that the public schools have simply stopped trying to teach it [grammar]. It’s not that they don’t do a good job of it. They don’t even try. It’s not even a subject that is offered in most public schools. Part of why that is, I think, is a misguided egalitarianism that suggests that we should not put teachers in the position of criticizing language as it’s used at home by various students.

It might look as if the teacher is criticizing the parents of the pupils. And there is a view among some inane linguists that says that we shouldn’t be teaching nonstandard speakers the standard dialect—that it’s simply the dialect of the people in power. Instead, we should be teaching everyone to be accepting of linguistic differences.
[...]
I grew up in West Texas. I did actually have a high-school course in grammar that was taught by a coach. Picture this, in Canyon, Texas, a coach who stood at the head of the room dipping snuff while teaching, and filling up a Styrofoam cup with his gross, brown saliva, and he didn’t know a damn thing about English grammar. So I had no educational advantages in terms of picking up standard English.
[...]
I’m all in favor of plain English. The problem with most legal writers is they entered law school as rather inept writers, then they’re exposed to a lot of very bad writing and a lot of unduly complex writing, and this pollutes their own writing habits. So not only are they very weak in grammar and very weak in just putting together good, strong sentences, but they are also trying to ape something that’s much more complex and archaic. They end up being execrable writers.
[...]
When people ask me, “What are your biggest pet peeves?”—well, maybe this is because it’s my profession, but I’m beyond the state of pet peeves. There are 3,000 things that seriously bother me, but I find that having the outlet of the usage book to record them in and disapprove of them—sometimes with some denunciatory fun—is a great way of coping.
[...]
How about giving us a layman’s definition of descriptivism and prescriptivism?
Let me just try this off the top of my head. A descriptivist is someone who tries to study language scientifically with absolutely no value judgments—to simply describe how certain speakers use the language, without any of its sociological significance, but instead to record grammar dispassionately. And that means that whatever the dialect, if it’s West Texas, if it’s black English, if it’s cockney, there is no such thing as good or bad. A prescriptivist looks at the language from the point of view of the standard dialect and judges deviations from the literary standard as being less than ideal. To a prescriptivist, it is possible to make a mistake. To a descriptivist, a mistake is impossible. In the world of affairs, virtually everyone is a prescriptivist. Descriptivism is a very artificial construct, developed by linguists for purposes of recording grammars. Descriptivism has its place, but it has no place in the world of affairs.

It’s more like cultural anthropology than grammar.
That’s right. It’s very much in line with that, to talk about how a society does things and not judge them at all. If you were an anthropologist studying cannibals, there would be no disapproval of their eating habits. That’s something that’s hard for most people to fathom, just as it would be hard for most businesses to hire someone who answers the telephone by saying, “He ain’t got no business today.”
[...]
A really good discourse proceeds by paragraphs, and a paragraph is sort of the building block of a good essay. Too many people see the sentence as the building block, and they don’t pace their ideas well. They have bumps between sentences, not a smoothly flowing development of thought. Advanced writers know that the paragraph is the basic unit of composition.

I also liked the seven-question sample grammar quiz, excerpted from Garner’s full-length quiz, that they printed at the bottom of the article. I am quite proud to say I got six out of seven right; I only missed the one about the conjugations of swim! D’oh!

It’s not as musical as Spanish, or Italian, or French, or as ornamental as Arabic, or as vibrant as some of your native languages. But I’m hopelessly in love with English because it’s plain and it’s strong.

William Zinsser, Writing English As a Second Language

I deal with, and am myself, a scientific editor who corrects the language, grammar, and style of biomedical research papers written by non-native English speakers to improve them to the level of native English speakers’. This might mean my job entails much different functions from an editor who works for a scientific journal, who might do more copyediting than language, grammar, and meaning editing. It also means we often have to go a little above and beyond how a typical American scientist would write because they, too, are notoriously bad writers and grammar users! Consequently, I have had opportunities to witness self-appointed grammarians making simply awful, perplexing grammatical changes to perfectly correct, clear sentences all because they think it’s their job to force their 3rd-grade grammar fetishes on their customers—and, unfortunately, on their underlings.

As an independent contractor who according to the IRS is self-employed, I don’t exactly have a boss, but I do have managing editors who run the company I do work for, judge and approve of my work, and set either de jure or de facto house styles. Therefore, you might conclude that it’s frustrating to be supervised by, judged by, and have my ability to make a living partially determined by superstitious nincompoops who enforce certain rules only because they heard somewhere that they were rules or who enforce certain styles only because they don’t know any better. You would be right.

I think it’s possible to divide most of their mistakes and misconceptions into two rough categories: turgid scientific formality and ignorant grammatical superstitions. Their fixations on both could rightly be called fetishes. Dictionary.com gives this as its second definition of fetish: “any object, idea, etc., eliciting unquestioning reverence, respect, or devotion”. Turgid is also a perfect word to describe the style of most academic writing and all of the editing that these fetishists perpetrate. It means bloated, overblown, and inflated with self-importance and bombasticness.

The most prominent and most easily identifiable form that turgid fetishism takes in scientific editing is replacing short words with longer ones and Germanic English words with Latinate ones. Thus we have “then” being replaced with “subsequently”, “tried” with “attempted”, “by” with “via”, “rest” with “remainder”, “about” with “approximately”, “made” with “generated”, “before” with “previously”, “learn” with “ascertain”, “have” with “contain”, “seen” with “observed”, “show” with “demonstrate”, “now” with “currently”, “explain” with “elucidate”, “got” with “obtained”, “done” with “performed”, “check” with “investigate”, et cetera ad nauseam. (I will say that the last three changes mentioned are usually improvements, but not every time.) I have seen, in an edit of mine, a managing editor replace two instances of “so far” with “thus far” for no reason other than it suited that editor’s fancy (i.e., they were in separate paragraphs and were the only two instances of “so far” in the entire document, so those changes weren’t to inject some variety in the midst of a bunch of other “so far”s or “so”s). I’ve got news for you: as a writer, using “thus far” instead of “so far” in any type of document doesn’t make you sound more educated or formal; it makes you sound like a clueless twit who thinks longer is better and who is so lacking in a knack for language and so unconfident in his ability to impress readers with the content of his writing that he feels compelled to write as pompously as possible. As an editor, going to the effort to change somebody else’s “so far” to “thus far” looks even worse.

Some scientific editors also seem to have a bias against the conjunction “so” itself, such that in the middle of sentences they change “, so…” to “; therefore,…”. Where in the world did that prejudice come from? If the conjunctions “and”, “or”, and “but” are fine in the middle of a sentence to introduce an independent clause, what the hell is wrong with “so”?

The other category of inanity I’ve encountered, the enforcement of baseless grammatical superstitions, is surely a cousin of the desire for utmost formality and propriety, but separate enough to warrant a separate classification. This category includes mainly old prescriptivist grammatical pseudo-rules that never were valid, aren’t valid now, and shouldn’t have been taught. I think the best-known of these are the pseudo-rules against ending sentences in prepositions and against splitting infinitives. I don’t think anyone really follows these rules anymore, but—I kid you not—in an edit of mine, a managing editor rearranged a perfectly good verb, which I had left alone, to avoid splitting an infinitive. I was stunned that anyone would go to the effort to un-split an infinitive in someone else’s writing in this day and age. I don’t communicate with them about the changes they end up making (can you see why, by now?), and they leave no note about why each change was made, but I can only guess that infinitive was un-split because of a stupid superstition, not because it sounded more natural or flowed better. When I saw that, I thought, “Oh, no, honey. Oh, you poor thing. No, that’s…that’s just stupid. I feel bad. You’re an awful writer.” What else can you do but look down in condescension and pity at someone who makes such a stupid mistake? There’s certainly no reasoning with them.

The other two baseless grammar fetishes that I’ll mention are the proscription against using “Since” to mean “Because/Inasmuch as/Seeing that” and the proscription against beginning a sentence with “And” or “But”. As a general prescriptivist (a rational prescriptivist or selective prescriptivist, I like to call myself), I take Bryan Garner as the final word on language issues on most occasions when I need a final word. Garner classifies both of those proscriptions as “superstitions” on the level of never ending sentences with a preposition and never splitting infinitives.

The “Since/Because” issue came up in the discussion forum of my fellow editors recently. One editor said it was understandable to require editors to avoid using “Since” to mean “Because” when we add it ourselves, but that it is over-editing to change such usage of “Since” in the original document if its meaning is clear (which it is about 90% of the time). He cited the editing guide of the company we contract for, which says “Since” can have both a causative and a temporal meaning, but temporary confusion can result from the causative meaning, so they discourage it. They even discourage leaving it alone, even when its meaning is unambiguous. I never noticed the somewhat-almost-maybe permissive wording of this entry in the editors’ guide; I always assumed it was an absolute proscription and so I happily followed it religiously. It wasn’t until this discussion thread that I (somehow) decided to look up what actual grammarians say about it and respond to him. Actually I responded to the person who responded to him; that first responder said the rule bothered her at first but now she agrees with it. That rule seemed great to me at first but now bothers me! Maybe the descriptivist influence of Geoffrey Pullum and Marc Liberman at LanguageLog is affecting me…

Anyway, I could cite more authorities than just Garner on the “Since/Because” issue, but that would be pointless because they all agree with him; there is no dissent on its acceptability; it isn’t even an issue anymore. Except in editing circles populated with ignorant, superstitious pedants. Every English dictionary lists “because; inasmuch as” as a definition of since. If it weren’t for overzealous grammar-delusionists who have turned their delusions into fetishes and their fetishes into (pseudo-)rules, there would be no point in discussing this word at all except to occasionally remind people not to use it if there is some chance of confusion between a temporal and a causative meaning.

I decided to put the managing editors’ words to the test recently and see if they really meant what they wrote in their editors’ guide: that causative “Since” at the beginning of a sentence is discouraged but not wrong. I left it alone at the beginning of a few sentences where there was no chance of confusion to see if they would also leave it. Nope, they consider it wrong and will change it religiously against all evidence, all history, and all sense. If that’s their policy, they should make it a part of an official house style and say, “No dictionaries or grammarians agree with this restriction, but the managing editors have been specifically instructed, on threat of termination, to change ‘Since’ to ‘Because’ whenever possible and to dock your editing score if you don’t, so follow this house style because it’s in your job description.”

The sentence-initial “And”/”But” issue came up recently in a review article I edited. A review article is secondary literature, i.e., it summarizes and occasionally comments on previously published findings (from the primary literature) and does not report any new findings. Reviews are slightly less formal than primary literature, if only in the sometimes quirky, punny titles that the authors probably spend weeks coming up with. In my opinion, there should be a little more leeway in the formality and stiffness of secondary literature, but some people (surprise) disagree. In the aforementioned review article, the author, who was German and wrote in very good English but not nearly the perfect English we sometimes ascribe to northern Europeans, began a lot of sentences with “But”. Like, 10 or 12 throughout the 5000-word document. I had deleted or changed all of them to “However,” except the last or second-to-last one, in the Conclusion of the article. The sentence began with “But although”, which is fine and correct to any educated English speaker with half a knack for English prose. I knew of their proscription against sentence-initial conjunctions, so I wrote a comment to the managing editor when I uploaded my edit: (paraphrasing) “I had to change a lot of ‘But’ at the beginning of sentences, but at least one near the end of the document was fine. I felt like an overly pedantic, zero-tolerance elementary school teacher deleting them or changing them to ‘However’ every time.”

Nope. She was having none of that. She either doesn’t understand or doesn’t agree that good, formal writing can have sentences that begin with “And” or “But”, so she changed it to “However”. Never mind that her sentence sounds more stilted and awkward than mine; The Rule says sentences can’t begin with “But”, and that’s that. (Note that this Rule doesn’t actually exist anywhere except in a small minority of English speakers’ minds. It literally isn’t a rule in a single extant grammar guide. And why can an adverb begin a sentence but a conjunction can’t? Conjunctions are only supposed to connect two independent or dependent clauses, not two sentences? Why? Aren’t adverbs supposed to modify verbs and adjectives? Why whole sentences, then? Why am I asking when I know she has no answers to these questions other than “Just because” or “My 5th grade teacher said it; I believe it; that settles it”?)

I couldn’t help but wonder what was going through her mind when she changed a perfectly clear and sonorous “But although” to a clunky and discordant “However, although”. (I mean, honestly. Listen to that clunky, stilted sentence starter. “However, although”? Seriously? Who thinks that sounds good? What could lead anyone to think that looks, sounds, feels, or flows better than “But although”?) What was she thinking and feeling? Was there some intellectual consideration or emotional turmoil as her mind struggled to figure out whether The Rule she had been given was inviolate? “Hmm, he’s got a point, but my hands are tied because The Rule says so”? “Yes, ‘But although’ does sound better than the clunky ‘However, although’, but the point of academic writing isn’t to express thoughts clearly and smoothly; it’s to show off how pompous you are and how many syllables you can waste”? “The author didn’t hire us to leave boorish informalities alone but rather to mark up his paper with as many changes as possible”? “It’s not up to me to determine whether anything is grammatical or acceptable; that’s why we have rules: so we can implement them uniformly and move on”? “In theory, a sentence could start with ‘But’, but I’ve never seen an appropriate one yet, so I’m changing it”? “Oh, but what will people think of me and my intellect and my upbringing and my employer if I let such an egregious affront to decency pass? We must all be dutiful rule-followers and never question such basic facts of grammar”? “I’ve always changed sentence-initial ‘But’ to ‘However,’ and I’m not about to stop now”? “Uh, in scientific literature? No way, rookie!”? Or a jaded, “Fuck it, I don’t care what’s right; it’s in my job description to change it, so I’m changing it and moving on”?

So, obviously “But although” sounds, flows, and feels better than “However, although”, and obviously people talk that way, and obviously non-scientists begin sentences with “But” and “And” all the time. But is it acceptable in formal academic literature? Bryan Garner is yet again a sufficient authority to quote on this matter:

Many legal writers believe that but, if used to begin a sentence, is either incorrect or loosely informal. Is it?

No. But the superstition is hard to dispel. Usage critics have been trying to dispel it for some time. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the great H.W. Fowler dispatched an editor who wanted to change a but to however at the beginning of a sentence:

“It is wrong[, said the editor,] to start a sentence with ‘But’. I know Macaulay does it, but it is bad English. The word should either be dropped entirely or the sentence altered to contain the word ‘however’.” That ungrammatical piece of nonsense was written by the editor of a scientific periodical to a contributor who had found his English polished up for him in proof, & protested; both parties being men of determination, the article got no further than proof. It is wrong to start a sentence with “but”! It is wrong to end a sentence with a preposition! It is wrong to split an infinitive! See the article FETISHES for these & other such rules of thumb & for references to articles in which it is shown how misleading their sweet simplicity is.

When Sir Ernest Gowers revised Fowler in 1965, he treated the question with and:

That it is a solecism to begin a sentence with and is a faintly lingering superstition. The OED gives examples ranging from the 10th to the 19th c.; the Bible is full of them.

“Faintly lingering” is a good description of what the superstition is doing nowadays. It isn’t supported in books on rhetoric, grammar, or usage—though several try to eradicate it.
[...]
Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage—generally ultrapermissive, but thorough in marshaling previous discussions on point—found unanimity among language critics:

Part of the folklore of usage is the belief that there is something wrong in beginning a sentence with but:

Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with “but.” If that’’s what you learned, unlearn it—here is no stronger word at the start. It announces total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is primed for the change
–Zinsser 1976

Everybody who mentions this question agrees with Zinsser. The only generally expressed warning is not to follow the but with a comma….

Perhaps we can all agree that beginning a sentence with but isn’t wrong, slipshod, loose, or the like. But is it less formal? I don’t think so. In fact, the question doesn’t even reside on the plane of formality. The question I’d pose is, What is the best word to do the job? William Zinsser says, quite rightly, that but is the best word to introduce a contrast. I invariably change however, when positioned at the beginning of a sentence, to but. Professional editors such as John Trimble regularly do the same thing.

Sheridan Baker, in his fine book The Complete Stylist, recommends that writers choose but over however in the initial position.

Garner then goes on to quote Baker as saying “however” is best left between commas in the middle of a sentence, which I completely disagree with. I actually think that is less clear, more awkward, and more often leads to confusion than putting it at the start of the sentence. But then Garner cites lots of examples of “But” starting sentences in very formal writing, to support his (everyone’s) point that it isn’t ungrammatical or informal.

Like just about any matter of style or syntax, too much of anything is…well, too much. So I would suggest that sentence-initial “And” and “But” be used sparingly, maybe once every few thousand words in formal writing. This style advice has nothing to do with their being incorrect or informal but rather with the fact very much repetition of anything is unwise. Eliminating them entirely from the beginning of sentences is groundless from every historical, logical, stylistic, or grammatical perspective that can be conjured. Some people just don’t care, and it’s not only to their detriment but to mine as well, since I work with them. I have little doubt that these delusional formality zealots would edit Bible verses to say, “Additionally, God said, ‘Let there be light’” and “Moreover, it was good.”

Fowler was right: The proscription against sentence-initial “And” and “But” is ungrammatical nonsense, and only bad writers and editors follow it.

I think it’s ["consumed"] an ugly term when applied to information. When you talk about consuming information you are talking about information as a commodity, rather than information as the substance of our thoughts and our communications with other people. To talk about consuming it, I think you lose a deeper sense of information as a carrier of meaning and emotion—the matter of intimate intellectual and social exchange between human beings. It becomes more of a product, a good, a commodity.

—Nicholas Carr, in an interview about his books and five books on technology and information that he recommends

I never took any English or Literature classes in college (exempted by taking College English at my high school in 12th grade), and I only took a few humanities classes. Today I doubt my perception of style over substance held true in very many English or humanities classes across the country any time recently. Instead, based on what I read in newspapers, magazines, and web pages, I think another perception of mine is accurate much more often: that the broad world of professional and academic writing outside of the sciences judges the quality of a column or essay on how well the author seems to make his point and how strong its self-contained logic is, from the first to the last sentence, and not on whether any one of its statements is supported by actual data and not whether the author’s opinions are worth a lick more than anyone else’s (completely contradictory) opinions. I should note that this perception of mine is not based on any journals, college essays, or actual academic writing; it’s based on the columns of professional journalists, freelancers, and writers of other stripes that seem to say to the reader, “Take my analysis as fact based only on what I write here; don’t factor in any outside data that might contradict my conclusions, and don’t worry about the existence of other opinions, which would reveal that all I’m telling you is what I think, not what I know.”

I think I can identify the column that instigated this perceptual change in me, or at least, looking back on that column now, I identify it as the earliest column that I can remember that should have started me thinking this way. Unfortunately, I don’t know who wrote it or when it was published, but I know I read it in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about 10 or 12 years ago. It was about the mis-perceived political and social messages of “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The point of the column was basically that “Sweet Home Alabama” isn’t a racist song or a lame Republican (Wallace, Nixon) cheerleading song. The author wrote something like, Skynyrd was actually being satirical and criticizing racist/segregationist George Wallace supporters, and the line, “Now, Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you?” was referring more to Northerners and Southerners and not simply to the Watergate scandal and the Republican president who perpetrated it, and they meant all Southerners are not to blame for Southern racism or governmental policies any more than Northerners are for Watergate, or something along those lines. (In scouring Google with every search-term variation I could think of in order to find this column, I came across a few others about “Sweet Home Alabama” that say basically this, so I’ll just assume the column I read in the AJC put forth the same explanations.)

I remember thinking as I read that column, “Well, maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t. How do I know? Why should I take your interpretation of the lyrics as fact?” It could be because he was limited to the space of the newspaper column, but I think that’s a secondary issue. Columns and blag posts that I read around the internet about entertainment, society, and leisure rarely back up their opinions or “facts” with data, studies, quotes, or even supporting opinions. That just isn’t how they do things. In my limited experience, they seem to write for the purpose of presenting their opinions and conclusions based on the way they see things and putting them up for comparison with the readers’ opinions and conclusions, and however well the author’s perspective jibes with the audience’s is how worthy their writing will be judged. However, the way it usually comes across to me is that they have analyzed the song, movie, TV show, book, societal trend, event, or other story, they’ve interpreted it and drawn conclusions based on their understanding of society and their own life experiences (and possibly sources they don’t mention), and they present it not as opinion but as learned analysis to be taken as fact or some combination of opinion and fact. I just don’t buy it most of the time.

My background in biomedical science doubtless flavors this perception of mine. In science, every statement in a primary-data paper is either reporting previous findings, reporting what the authors of the current study did (methods), stating what they found (results), or stating an obvious opinion or judgment on their part (“This discrepancy could have been caused by…”, “It is interesting to note…”, “It will be necessary to determine…”, “Future studies should investigate…”). Nothing is presented as true unless current or previous data are cited. I see nothing wrong with holding journalists, humanities writers, and entertainment columnists to the same standard. Either insert a lot more “I think”, “It seems”, “Maybe”, and “In my opinion”, or cite something to back up your claims.

These thoughts were most recently prompted by the column “Did The Sopranos do more harm than good?: HBO and the decline of the episode” by the A.V. Club’s Ryan McGee. If you want the short answer, it’s No. If you want my opinion of his column, continue reading.

McGee’s thesis is that the popularity of HBO’s heavily serialized shows (shows that link each episode with the previous ones and tell a single story over a season(s)-long story arc, as opposed to procedural shows like CSI and Law & Order that tell a completely self-contained story within each episode that does not link to anything else), represented primarily by The Sopranos, has led to such a focus on serialization in the TV industry that the (largely) self-contained single episode has suffered, which is a bad thing that often makes the viewing experience worse, not only for that episode but for that show as a whole.

Below, I will first quote McGee’s statements that strike me as assertions of fact that I think could only be accepted as fact if supported by real outside data or some sort of statistical analysis, and then I will contrast his analysis of (over-)serialization with my own perspective.

Here are the statements that seem to be written as facts, but I have no way of knowing whether they are really true because he cites no outside sources and has no data, statistical or otherwise, to back up his claims:

[M]aking HBO the gold standard against which quality programming is judged has hurt television more than it’s helped it. [This is one statement of his thesis, which seems to be backed up subsequently by a bunch of opinion, not facts or data.]
[...]
[E]ach piece of art [novel vs. TV program] has to accomplish different things.
[...]
HBO isn’t solely to blame for this trend. It’s been accelerated not by internal mandate, but by viewer consumption. [That's probably true, but the column cites no outside opinion or data to show it.]
[...]
Plowing through a single season in two or three sittings may feel thrilling, but it’s also shifted the importance of a single episode in terms of the overall experience.
[...]
How about those who sit at home on the night of initial airing and obsessively analyze that week’s episode in order to discuss it at length online or at the water cooler? Such a viewing model should put an emphasis on the episode as a discrete piece of the overall pie. And yet the critical praise heaped upon HBO has infected the way we look at that discrete piece.
[...]
Rather than take stock of what has just transpired, eyes get cast immediately toward that which is still unseen.
[...]
After all, if we measure quality by the gold standard of HBO, then by definition, the best element of the show has yet to actually air.
[...]
Such an assignation has merit, but has established a benchmark against which other programs simply can’t compare.
[...]
But the perception exists that the only way to be a critical hit is to write the equivalent of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.
[...]
[T]hese shows [that follow the Burn Notice "mythology" model] feature long-running arcs that usually harm, not help, their sturdy-if-bland lather/rinse/repeat episode structure. Rather than having the two dovetail, they often work against each other, producing uncomfortable friction as both sides seek to establish the same space.
[...]
David Goyer, who created the show Flash Forward, bragged that he and his writing staff had built out the show’s first five seasons before the pilot even aired. [Again, I don't doubt this is true, but how are we to know? Take Ryan McGee's word for it? Search Google on our own? It is a statement that we are supposed to take as fact because he read or heard it somewhere, mixed in with all of his opinions that are also presented as fact.]
[...]
The idea of having a fixed point toward which a show inevitably builds is fine in theory, but false in practice. There are too many variables at play when producing a television show that slavishly adheres to a predetermined finish line.
[...]
Assuming that a superior idea won’t arise later is simply arrogant thinking, and counterintuitive to any collaborative process. [I don't know, maybe it occasionally replaces mediocre collaborative results with brilliant ones; who knows? How can we ever tell? What observations support this claim?]
[...]
Laying in groundwork for a massive payoff down the line is a terrible risk, one that comes with so little control as to be almost laughable.
[...]
With a theoretically unlimited amount of episodes to fill, it’s smart to look at the environments in which shows operate and look under rocks and behind corners to see what might exist. [Always? Necessarily?]
[...]
Show-creator Vince Gilligan planned the overall arc of the show [Breaking Bad] in the broadest strokes possible: the transformation of Mr. Chips into Scarface. But he’s run a writers’ room in which narrative improvisation fueled the actions seen onscreen. Rather than staying constricted to a heavily planned scheme, Gilligan and company have worked through each episode, looked at the results, and then adjusted accordingly down the line. [Probably true, but mixed in with pure opinion, it makes most of the statements sound like facts.]
[...]
A meticulous attention to detail on the part of both those who create television and those who consume it has stymied a desire for the kind of experimentation and exploration working in the microcosm of episodes allows.
[...]
Everyone’s so concerned about getting everything right that they’ve forgotten how much fun mistakes can be.
[...]
Showrunners are too often trying to fool the audience rather than entertain it. Audience members are too busy trying to solve the show and being disappointed when reality doesn’t line up with theory. Amid all of this, the episode has suffered under the weight of crushing expectation over where a story is going to go as opposed to what it currently is. [How verifiable is any of this?]

I must re-emphasize that I’m not saying he has no business publishing his opinions, whichever statements were in fact supposed to be opinions. I’m definitely not saying every statement in a TV column needs to cite either outside sources or primary data. I also can’t really say entertainment writing should be any different. What I am saying is that I simply don’t buy a lot of it because he presents nothing to support his analysis except a bunch of personal experience, and furthermore, that mixing in things that are definitely verifiably true or false (e.g., the David Goyer and Vince Gilligan stories) with assertions that strike me as purely subjective (most of the rest of the column) leads to the perception that all of it is verifiably true—that he has done research to obtain objective facts and is not just spouting his personal opinions. The tone or wording is usually not different between the sentences that seem to be facts and those that are probably actually opinions. Maybe I’m being too much of a scientist and failing to interpret this column the way a normal person would (mostly opinion that we can take or leave), but I just don’t buy a lot of it.

Now my comments on McGee’s assertions and conclusions, with plenty of my own opinions and un-cited facts. My thesis is: McGee’s conclusions are only valuable if one or both of the following conditions hold: (1) his assertions and judgments are supported by outside facts and statistical analysis that would reveal them as actual, verifiable trends and not just subjective perceptions; (2) you already agree with his opinions anyway.

The Sopranos took a patient approach that rewarded sustained viewing. The promise that payoffs down the line would be that much sweeter for the journey didn’t originate with the HBO mob drama, but the series turned into the boilerplate for what passes as critically relevant television.

But is this a good thing? The Sopranos opened up what was possible on television. But it also limited it. It seems silly to state that the addition of ambition to the medium has somehow hindered its growth, but making HBO the gold standard against which quality programming is judged has hurt television more than it’s helped it. The A.V. Club’s TV editor Todd VanDerWerff started pointing out the change in HBO’s approach when, speaking of Game Of Thrones, he noted something that had been in the back of my mind but not fully formulated until I heard him say it: HBO isn’t in the business of producing episodes in the traditional manner. Rather, it airs equal slices of an overall story over a fixed series of weeks. If I may put words into his mouth: HBO doesn’t air episodes of television, it airs installments.

This isn’t merely a semantic difference that paints lipstick on the same pig. It’s a fundamentally different way of viewing the function of an individual building block of a season, or series, of television. Calling The Sopranos a novelistic approach to the medium means praising both its new approach to television and its long-form storytelling. But HBO has shifted its model to produce televised novels, in which chapters unfold as part and parcel of a larger whole rather than serving the individual piece itself. Here’s the problem: A television show is not a novel. That’s not to put one above the other. It’s simply meant to illuminate that each piece of art has to accomplish different things. HBO’s apparent lack of awareness of this difference has filtered into its product, and also filtered into the product of nearly every other network as well.

Why is treating an episode as an installment a problem? An episode functions unto itself as a piece of entertainment, one that has an ebb and flow that can be enjoyed on its own terms. An installment serves the über-story of that season without regard for accomplishing anything substantial during its running time.

I think he and I would agree on one thing here: there is a valuable distinction between connecting an episode to the overall story arc in such a way that it entices further viewing and making an episode simply boring, unimportant, and un-entertaining by itself because little happens in it. To the extent that his argument is, “The propagation of episodes in which little to nothing happens and which can’t be enjoyed on their own (by some people) is due entirely to the obsession with serialization,” he seems to be on solid ground. But when he jumps to conclusions like (paraphrasing) “treating an episode like an installment is a problem”, “TV shows shouldn’t be like novels”, “TV shows can’t be planned weeks, much less months, in advance”, “Focusing on the future often hurts the present”, and “Adding a long-running story arc to a show usually harms, not helps”, he has ventured into pure opinion and conjecture.

HBO isn’t solely to blame for this trend. It’s been accelerated not by internal mandate, but by viewer consumption.
[emphasis added]

Yeah, because people like it, an obvious and well-established fact that McGee entirely ignores throughout his column.

It’s easy to blur the line between “episode” and “installment” if you’re blowing through an entire season of Breaking Bad over a single weekend. When doing this, thinking about how a certain episode works on its own becomes less relevant. Simply getting through the virtual stack of content becomes paramount, with the next episode literally moments away from appearing on your screen. Plowing through a single season in two or three sittings may feel thrilling, but it’s also shifted the importance of a single episode in terms of the overall experience.

He again implies that something is bad when what he means to say is, “I don’t prefer it.” The affordability and ubiquity of DVD/Blu-ray players and of TV series on DVD, Blu-ray, and Netflix has changed the landscape of TV viewing. People neither need nor want to catch every episode of every TV show they like on a weekly basis, even with the life-saver that is DVR, preferring instead to buy the disc set (or torrent entire seasons) and watch them as the televised novel that they are written as. I am one who prefers the latter. My wife is another. I think of heavily serialized TV dramas, with good, exciting, dramatic, suspenseful TV episodes that not only put you on edge during the episode but make you anticipate what’s to come in the future and entice you to guess how an individual episode’s events will tie in to the overall story arc, as far superior to (mostly) procedural dramas.

How about those who sit at home on the night of initial airing and obsessively analyze that week’s episode in order to discuss it at length online or at the water cooler? Such a viewing model should put an emphasis on the episode as a discrete piece of the overall pie.

How about those who like completely serialized TV shows with no stand-alone episodes? They don’t get any shows that are up their alley? Their tastes are just dismissed as wrong or, actually, ignored altogether? McGee’s opening example of Luck, an HBO show in which virtually nothing happened during the first three and a half episodes except to set up a web of storylines that would all come together during the fourth hour, is obviously popular with many people (Tony Kornheiser called it the best show on television in a recent episode of Pardon the Interruption). Many viewers most likely felt rewarded and even further enticed by the big payoff that materialized mid-way through episode four. There might very well be many people, perhaps including many fans of Luck, who would rather see a completely novelistic TV show with no stand-alone episodes that includes some boring clunkers along the way in exchange for the long-term payoff. McGee seems basically to be pushing the conclusion that this is bad, when a more accurate take would be that he doesn’t like it. Who cares?

I also find suspect his conclusion, “Such a viewing model should put an emphasis on the episode as a discrete piece of the overall pie.” I don’t think such a viewing model should put an emphasis on either one. I would say that to the extent that one model (self-contained vs. subservient to story arc) is better for discussing online or at the water cooler, I would lean in favor of the episode that is subservient to the story arc. It is more interesting and popular, among people I correspond with, anyway, to talk about how an episode fits into the story arc and not just about what happened in the episode alone. This is just another in a long list of conclusions reached by McGee that might be verifiably wrong or are simply opinions that he tries to dress up as objective analysis.

The single episode has taken a backseat in importance to the season, which itself is subservient to the series.

I say that overall, that’s a good thing. Nothing is perfect (as McGee notes later), and if some go-nowhere episodes are the price to pay for a several-season story arc that actually resembles the paths that many people’s lives could take in the real world (well, a real world far more interesting than the actual real world), then that’s a great tradeoff to me. If you don’t like it, then, (1) who cares?, and (2) watch something else.

Rather than take stock of what has just transpired, eyes get cast immediately toward that which is still unseen.

Not mine. I am actually able to think about what just happened, what happened before that, and what might come all at the same time! If you can’t think about two things at once or don’t want to, then, again, who cares? And why pass off your own experience as universal fact?

In other words, what just aired gets mixed into what we’ve already seen in order to formulate opinions about the unknown future.

In my opinion, that’s a good thing. I like being reminded (or being forced to remind myself) what happened to lead to this point, and I love how a good TV show will make you try to anticipate and speculate about the future.

Then there are shows that adhere to the USA network’s model of modern-day television “mythology.” … The model: Any particular episode will have roughly 90 percent self-contained story. This works well and counters the trends listed above. But for some reason, these shows also feel the need to have a larger, ongoing story that serves as the spine for a season.
[emphasis added]

Hmm, I wonder what reason that could be. Why would TV writers construct stories in a certain way, and why would TV producers hire them to do so? Why, why, why… It’s like he isn’t even capable of taking millions of people’s tastes into consideration. It’s like he has some sort of neural block or electrical device hooked into his brain à la “Harrison Bergeron” that prevents him from acknowledging that shows do this because people like it! I am one of those people, and there are millions more who like or even love it! This concept is honestly, seriously not that hard to understand.

[T]hese shows [with a mysterious "mythology" behind everything] feature long-running arcs that usually harm, not help, their sturdy-if-bland lather/rinse/repeat episode structure. Rather than having the two dovetail, they often work against each other, producing uncomfortable friction as both sides seek to establish the same space.

No, I think the background mythology rather helps the creative and entertainment value of the show, and the only reason they would work against each other is if there isn’t enough of the mythology, which I think is the case so far with Grimm. If a lather/rinse/repeat episode structure is bland, that seems to speak against the procedural TV drama, and his whole column inveighs against overly serialized dramas, so what does he want? A happy medium? So do most people; that’s not really saying much. Hopefully the mythology of Grimm will continue to grow and absorb Detective Burkhardt into itself, so that the show can actually go somewhere instead of giving us formulaic supernatural police procedurals, which perhaps Ryan McGee prefers to serialized “mythology” shows.

David Goyer, who created the show Flash Forward, bragged that he and his writing staff had built out the show’s first five seasons before the pilot even aired. But what Goyer and company forgot to do was build five characters the audience could relate to. The idea of having a fixed point toward which a show inevitably builds is fine in theory, but false in practice. There are too many variables at play when producing a television show that slavishly adheres to a predetermined finish line. All those breadcrumbs have to lead somewhere. But what if that destination changes along the way? How can one account for the clues already left behind? Assuming that a superior idea won’t arise later is simply arrogant thinking, and counterintuitive to any collaborative process. A television show is a living, breathing entity that represents a synergy of creative, cultural, and social forces that simply can’t be predicted five weeks out, never mind five years out.

Actually, contrary to his completely opinionated and unsupported claims, several shows have succeeded by planning out large chunks of their storylines months and even years ahead of time. For example, Supernatural, my favorite show that I started watching within the last few years. Eric Kripke originally planned out a rough three-season story arc for Sam and Dean Winchester, but as they got into making the show, it turned into a five-year arc. The above-quoted paragraph therefore does contain a nugget of valuable insight, but only a nugget: A television show is a living, breathing entity that can change along the way with writers’ input and viewers’ opinions. But it very obviously can be planned five weeks out and even several years out. Every script needn’t have been written; only the overall story arc.

Another show that I only watched recently that followed the season-long story arc model for the first two seasons was Veronica Mars. According to the commentary from creator Rob Thomas in the special features to season 3, they didn’t have every major plot point of season 3 planned out before they started shooting, but I would predict that they had most of seasons 1 and 2 planned out before each one started shooting. And it worked to perfection: Veronica Mars is a brilliantly plotted mystery show that presents the viewer with good mysteries and interesting happenings during most episodes, with occasional big payoffs, the biggest obviously coming in the season finale.

Yet another perfect example of the merits of planning things months in advance is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon probably knew how he wanted some plots to unfold and the paths he wanted characters’ lives to take before they started shooting each season. The best adjective that I’ve read to describe Buffy is “groundbreaking”. That was a show that was dominated by the season’s story arc (the “Big Bad”, they always called it), and it had great stand-alones, but my favorite parts of that show were the whole Slayer mythology and the paths the characters’ lives took, which may not always or even often have been planned far in advance but sure seemed like it sometimes.

This very TV season provides us with three perfect examples of phenomenal dramas that seem to have been planned out, either broadly or meticulously, from the beginning to the end of the season: Ringer, Revenge, and Once Upon a Time. I have never watched three TV shows all in the same season that are as good as these, and it might be a long time before three shows as good as these debut at the same time. The main thing that makes them good is their serialization, the season-long story arcs that must, at least in the first two cases, have been planned out in some level of detail, before shooting or possibly even casting began. I would love to know if this speculation is true. Whether it is or not, the effect on me, my wife, and the couple friends I’ve talked to about these shows is the same: They seem like they were planned out from beginning to end, and that makes us admire the shows even more. The only drawback to Once Upon a Time so far, in my opinion, is the stand-alone episodes that don’t push the season’s story farther along.

Yet another show that was definitely planned out from the beginning to the end of its most recent season was Dexter. A few episodes of season 6 were followed by short clips of interviews with showrunner Scott Buck, who basically revealed that they had planned the plot twists and the major plot lines before shooting ever began. I think that’s how every season of Dexter has been, much to its benefit. Therefore, TV writers clearly can plan storylines five months in advance, and this clearly does produce excellent results, and frequently.

One of my favorite TV shows of all time is The X-Files, which many people think mixed the stand-alone episode with Chris Carter’s “mythology” brilliantly (at least, for the first seven seasons). Some people’s favorite episodes were the stand-alones, whereas mine were the alien/government conspiracy episodes. One problem with the alien mythology that Chris Carter created over nine years was the very fact that it was a living, breathing storyline that wasn’t really planned out from the beginning, such that what we really got (as far as I remember) was every question being answered with three more questions and Mulder never really finding any closure with the aliens and the government conspiracy (although he did find closure with his sister, which was the most important to him), and I was always left wanting more about the alien mythology: more answers, more facts, more explanation, more closure. I scarcely got any, because Chris Carter had no answers or end-goal from the beginning, only a great ability to keep people watching by making stuff up as he went along.

Contrast that with Supernatural, a show I originally thought was just a cheap X-Files knockoff but which I now like more than The X-Files for two main reasons: It is more serial, meaning there are fewer stand-alone episodes and more focus is put on the multiple-season story arc and the whole Winchester mythos; and much of the first five seasons was planned out from the beginning, with the result that things actually went somewhere and, in fact, ended somewhere, at least in a way (a very good way). My only two problems with the sixth and seventh seasons are that season six was a little bit unfocused and didn’t handle all four of its major storylines perfectly, probably because they didn’t have a plan from the beginning but rather were making much of it up as they went along, leading them to struggle to either eliminate or tie together the plot lines in the last few episodes; and season seven has had way too many stand-alones in a row and absolutely zero action on the story arc since about Thanksgiving.

The balance between standing alone and tying into the mythology or story arc is a topic of some debate among fans of many shows. I have corresponded with Supernatural fans on the internet who miss the good ol’ days of Sam and Dean huntin’ ghosts and burnin’ bones, and I must say that nearly every stand-alone this season has been excellent, especially “The Mentalists”, “Adventures in Babysitting”, “Repo Man”, “Plucky Pennywhistle’s Magic Menagerie”, and “Season 7, Time For a Wedding!” (which was less stand-alone than the others). But there’s just something missing from season seven, and that is a heavily serialized story arc that ties episodes together, builds on the Winchester mythology, and portends of things to come.

Clearly for most TV shows, especially those with full 22–24-episode seasons, a good balance between episodic and novelistic interest is ideal, and making the viewer interested in the characters is the most important thing, as with any fiction. But McGee’s disparaging comparison of TV episodes to installments of a novel fails to be useful or meaningful at all, to me. The reason is because not even novels get away with being boring and having very few events until some big payoff towards the middle and then some bigger payoff at the end. A good novel piques people’s interest throughout. Not necessarily in every single chapter, but certainly every 50 or 100 pages. Therefore, in order for a TV show to be novelistic in a good way, it must pique most viewers’ interest in every episode and keep them enticed to follow the overall story arc. For a TV show to be novelistic in a bad way, it won’t pique the interest of many viewers very often, just as a bad novel loses most readers’ interest along the way. And just as a good novel draws three-dimensional characters that readers relate to, root for, root against, or care about on some level, so does a good TV show. Therefore, to say that a show is bad because it is novelistic doesn’t hold water; it might be bad because it’s like a boring novel, but it’s good if it’s like an interesting novel! To say a TV show that fails to build five characters the audience can relate to or that sacrifices interesting individual episodes to serve a pre-planned, season(s)-long story arc is bad because of serialization is like saying a novel is bad because of some inherent problem with novels. No, they are bad because the writers are bad and failed to find one happy medium or another that would appeal to enough viewers to maintain sufficient ad revenue and/or studio support.

The serialization or novelization of this generation of TV shows isn’t bad and hasn’t gone too far, according to some people, such as myself. It might very well be true that some TV writers, even entire teams of TV writers, are driven too far to the TV-novel end of the spectrum, where they aren’t as effective as if they stuck to 45-minute procedurals. It also might be true that some writers apply the paradigm of serialization poorly to their particular show (McGee sites The Killing and Walking Dead as examples). This isn’t a problem with serialization, and it isn’t indicative of over-serialization in Hollywood. It seems to me like a problem of some writers trying to do something that works for others but not them. If I watched more TV or were paid to analyze it, I probably could find some examples of TV shows that were too procedural and not serial enough. For example, the main reason I was so intrigued by The Office in the first three seasons was the Jim and Pam storyline; maybe some sitcoms could benefit from more (any) serialization, which would just go to show that serialization hasn’t necessarily gone too far or spread too wide, the fixation with serialization isn’t undue, and the problems are with individual writers and writing teams that are trying to expand outside of their forte.

When Ryan McGee complains about overly serial TV trying to be something it isn’t, a novel, he strikes me as similar to the dinosaurs in the record industry and movie industry who don’t understand or don’t accept that technology changes, society changes with it, and they have to change with society. The record industry has sort of adapted by embracing digital downloads, but the movie industry is stuck in the 1990’s. They are (perceived as) old, greedy, out-of-touch suits who think they are owed money simply for doing the job they’ve always done and refusing to adapt to change. Well, TV has changed too, maybe starting with The Sopranos or maybe starting with Buffy or earlier, and its evolution into a TV-novel paradigm should be praised as progress rather than denigrated as eroding the single episode’s purpose. Whose purpose? Ryan McGee’s purpose? The purpose of fiction is to entertain while exploring the human condition and creating characters the audience cares about, and I think novels and TV shows are wonderful ways to accomplish all of those goals. TV offers opportunities a movie doesn’t: to explore how characters and their interrelationships evolve, in addition to telling much longer, more epic, more rewarding stories. To suggest that a fixation with serialization is bad and that erring on the side of more self-contained episodes and less story-arc progression/tie-ins is the solution would be to deny TV the great advantage it has over other audio-visual media, and would unjustifiably clip its wings.

If anything, I’d rather TV writers err on the side of too much serialization, because as McGee notes, nothing is perfect, and there’s a cost/benefit tradeoff to everything in life, so I prefer the heavy serialization and seasons-long story arcs, even with the drawbacks they bring (which are much fewer and less important than McGee would have us think).

In summary, I feel like I can look at this rambling column by Ryan McGee in about three ways:

1) His opinion of good TV differs from mine. So what? Why is that worth a 1938-word essay? Why is that worth a salary as a professional writer? What has he added to the world if his entire column is opinion backed up by more opinion, selective sampling, and blind assumption? (What am I adding to the world by writing this? Probably very little. What am I getting paid for it? Even less. Fortunately for me, I write for myself and not anyone else.)

2) He actually isn’t saying serialized TV shows are bad per se, just that a happy medium between self-contained episodes and a season(s)-long story arc needs to be found. Wow, that’s even more worthless than option #1.

3) He is actually right but has a grand total of zero data to support his hypothesis.

The answer is obviously a combination of #1 and #2, but option #3 brings me back to my original impetus for writing this blag post: opinion pedaled as objective analysis. His conclusions aren’t the result of research and data-gathering; it is all just contemplating and opinionating. Again, maybe my scientific background skews my perception of professional writing in other fields, such that I simply don’t appreciate what everyone else appreciates, viz., that he’s offering primarily opinions that we can either take or leave. But they sure don’t seem to be phrased like just opinions. Many of my assertions and opinions in this post don’t begin with “I think” or “In my opinion”, and they are presented pretty assertively, like facts, but to me it seemed pretty obvious that most of them came from my thought processes in response to McGee’s statements and my TV experience, not research or fact-citing, and the tone and purpose of a blag post are both much different from an entertainment column by a professional writer in an actual publication. Maybe I should just start interpreting the purpose of non-scientific writing as experience-backed subjective analysis that we should compare to our own perspectives, and stop interpreting it as purported objective analysis to be judged as correct or incorrect.