Complex Numbers

Pronoun Pronouncement

Sometimes I even make blog entries about (gasp!) writing. (No, despite the title of this entry, it's not about listing your pronouns in your bio.)

It’s time to talk about “It’s”  
It’s overused. It’s lazy. It’s something that should be stopped.

Everyone has their little annoyances. And in this case, the annoyance is, indeed, little.

“It’s” is a linguistic plague that is affecting all publications.

“It’s” is lackadaisical writing.

You know, when I first found this post, I felt myself filled with trepidation: Will this be one of those linguistic anarchists who insists that life would be better if we eliminated the apostrophe so that certain ignorant writers could stop getting dinged for mixing up the possessive and the contraction?

Fortunately, or unfortunately (because I had a whole rant prepared in my head), no. It's about using "It's" grammatically, but overusing it.

Funny thing about pointing out annoyances in writing: once you see them, you can't unsee them. Like when people use too many "-ly" adverbs in a story. So by harping on the overuse of "it's," the author overuses "it's," in a transparent attempt to get us all to hate it, too.

It’s time that I show you some examples of ledes (journospeak for the first paragraph of an article) that begin with “It’s,” which I have quickly cherry-picked from various publications excluding the New Yorker because I am out of free articles.

Whew. I've railed on the unnecessarily pretentious, precious, preternatural, purple prose of The New Yorker before (most notably here: "Antiphony" ) and I really wasn't in the mood for an example from them tonight.

Anyway, I won't recopy the examples here. The link is up there for a reason.

Many different words describe these ledes: Passive. Lethargic. Stultifying. Boring-ass.

I mean, passive, yeah, but not in the sense of "passive voice." I'd argue that the problem with most of them isn't the word "it's" by itself, but that they're dense with linking "to be" verbs in general, of which "it's" isn't even the most egregious example. Take the first one (like I said, you'll have to go to the link): It's, we're, were (though to be fair, that last one indicates past continuous tense). Replace at least one of those with an active verb and you get a whole lot less stifling scene-setting.

But now that she's inundated us with "it's" examples, we can't help but feel some of her pain.

This brings me to another pervasive trend: The sad abuse of present tense.

Present tense is standard for headlines, which is why every headline now is “X is x.” It’s all very meta which, fine. Life is recursive. But more enervating is how this convention is used in ledes.

I'm on the fence about the "it's" thing, but I'm firmly in the author's camp on this bit.

Headlines have been present-tense for a long, long time. I can't be arsed to delve into the entire history of newspapers, but here's one I found with a quick search,   from 1953: "Everest is Conquered." Which perfectly fits the format today's author noted (which, incidentally, should have been "X is y" unless she's actually talking about something like "A dog is a dog," or some other tautology, which I see only rarely, let alone "every headline").

I generally despise present tense writing, other than in headlines. Or jokes. Or certain other exceptions, but the point is, it's overused for everything from feature-length articles to entire fucking novels, and it's wearying. I get that using present tense conveys a sense of breathless immediacy, but for me it paradoxically brings me out of the moment. It's a gimmick to try to keep the attention of people with tiny attention spans. But I have a tiny attention span, and I still get more immersed in a past-tense novel.

Other people seem to like it, of course, but some people also think eggplant is food, so there's no accounting for taste.