Fragment (consider revising)

Wow, I just figured out what this means.

Thanks to the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University, I now know what a sentence fragment is, why Microsoft Word is complaining, and what to do about it. And very soon you will too.

Firstly, some background. An independent clause is a clause with a subject and a verb that stands on its own. Independent clauses are usually sentences, although it’s possible to combine multiple independent clauses into a single sentence like this one. A dependent clause also has a subject and a verb but cannot stand on its own as a complete thought. Dependent clauses are often marked by a dependent marker word such as after, because, since, unless, or when. For example, “unless I feel happy…” is a dependent clause. The thought is not finished until we find out what happens when I’m unhappy. “Unless I feel happy, I find it hard to write beautiful code”.

So, a sentence fragment is a dependent clause treated as a complete sentence. I suspect that Word seeks out dependent marker words and, unless the sentence also features a coordinating conjunction (and, but, so and the like) deems it an unfinished fragment, a blight on your otherwise grammatically correct document. Word is not always correct of course — often the resolving independent fragment is provided by context, such as in dialog — but at least now I know what it thinks the problem is, and can rightly judge whether a revision is warranted.

A call to comic authors: annotate

Amongst the many gems that Ryan over at Dinosaur Comics has produced there is a strip about how the humour of a joke varies in inverse proportion to the number of people who will understand it. I love that strip and was looking for it recently to help me make a point, but I couldn’t find it. As enjoyable as browsing the Dinosaur archive was, the experience was marred by frustration that I could find what I was looking for. These days, everyone is used to being able to find whatever they want online, and find it quickly.

The problem, of course, is that I can’t use a search engine to find it. None of the queries I tried turned up the comic, or a page linking to it. For very popular strips this is sometimes not a problem — enough bloggers will write about and link to the comic that it’s easy to find. The strip itself still won’t show up in search results though, which I think is sad. XKCD should be the top result for “retrograde wheelbarrow”.

So this is a call to webcomic authors: transcribe your comics so that they’re easy to find, and take the recognition you deserve. You can hide the transcription in a hidden HTML element so it needn’t clutter up your page, but the search engines will find it.

P.S. Does anyone have a link to the Dinosaur comic I’ve been looking for?

Absolute essentials

I recently re-installed Windows on my IBM X31 due to random memory corruptions. It had had a good run but, you know, Windows. Lenovo now provide a schmick new update manager that automates most of the pain of downloading and installing drivers, even on a clean install (I had to manually install the chipset and Ethernet drivers so I could download the other updates).

I was amused by this though (click to see detail).

Of the pending updates (some hidden here in other tabs), which do you think are the least critical to the productive use of my computer. In fact, they’re probably counter-productive. Yeah, you know it.

This reminds me of Eric Sink’s comments about the deprecation of the word “urgent”.