News on social media creates some novel grammar problems. Take this freeze frame of a quote by Issa Rae on ET…
And this one from Chris Evans…
You may not notice anything at first glance. But I did.
I’ve recently finished reading The Sense of Style by Stephen Pinker. A book about language - particularly writing - that builds upon and corrects some of the classic style guides from the past. It’s a modern and pragmatic rethinking of how we should write, based on Pinker’s specialty of neurolinguistics.
In sum, he argues for writing clearly, paying attention to what is happening in a reader’s mind as they read your words. There are rules, sure. But those rules should be based on rationale, not dogma – such as saying it’s incorrect to hang a “15 items or less” sign over a checkout.
The social media quotes seem to be affected by some dogma - that a quote should be enclosed in quotation marks. The problem is that the quotes are already indicated by the social media cards.
What I immediately began to wonder about Issa’s response to the riots was whether she truly felt disgusted or was mockingly proclaiming to be “truly disgusted”. (Yes, Pinker argues the punctuation goes outside of the quotation marks in this case.)
Was Chris Evans struggling to find words to express his emotions, or did he tweet about someone else proclaiming that they were speechless?
The irksome trend continued with numerous quotes that were not nearly as difficult to parse, but my attention had been lost already.
The point is simply that by using these graphics, the video editors are already indicating that the text is something the celebrity wrote on their own social media profile. The quotation marks are redundant and confusing.