A teaser

My third post on the “On Porn” is finished, but not ready. I’ve put it through the in-famous diction Unix command and I got tons of suggestions for change the wording of some phrases (By the way, if you use some form of Unix, you should really have style and diction in your toolset.) I am poring over those, and I am near the end, but I don’t really want to post this writing without an exhaustive check.

Meanwhile, and as a teaser, let me describe some aspects of what I intend to share with you. I tried to collect the most usual arguments people use against porn, and I studied them. I ended up with seven arguments. One of them is prima facie incontrovertible: porn is a sin. However, on the remaining six, I found that a lot of them were flawed or misguided. In fact, I found just one fully valid argument and one somewhat valid out of the six. The most notorious culprit was the famous “porn makes objects of women” argument.

Interested? Then wait a little bit more until I finish parsing those diction flags…

4 Comments

  1. Diction? It’s not available in the standard repositories of my distro, CentOS. Besides, I’ve never yet used a grammar checker I agree with. It’s okay to pick out obvious errors, such as consistent voice, but sometimes I really WANT that sentence longer than normal. Sometimes I choose a hackneyed phrase on purpose. And it’s not always wrong to start a sentence with a conjunction, nor to include a connective “that.” It’s the abuse of these things which cheapens writing; proper use makes them more readable. My current skills were once considered average. I still believe they should be so regarded.

  2. Ha! I found quite a few errors on the linked page, outside the examples. Okay, I promise to stop being smug.

    It’s far more important to use such software if English is not your first language, or you’ve had a very poor education. However, nothing replaces the two best methods of learning: (1) having a good editor read your work, and explain why something else is better, (2) coupled with writers learning to emulate the sound of good writing inside their heads. That is, read good stuff, absorb the pattern of word usage, then reproduce the styling. Read your own stuff outloud once in awhile. Good readers will sound the words silently in their own mind.

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