To Write a Wrong

An objective pronoun: Someone to turn to

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2012/05/28/cartoons_20120521#slide=11

What it was like to speak at SXSW

The fire alarm went off because waffles were burning in the kitchen. That’s what I learned while walking back into the Sheraton with hundreds of other panel-goers 30 minutes before my SXSW Interactive session (Language of Mutilation: Grammar for Ads & Life). But it didn’t smell like waffles, charred or syrruped, which was too bad. Breakfast smells are calming, and I was nervous.

SXSW is held every year in March, but speakers submit their ideas in June. After the public votes on them via the PanelPicker, proposals must pass an advisory board’s muster before they are then voted on by SXSW staff. In early fall you learn whether your panel/presentation made it. And then you wait. For months.

Between October and March, speakers are assigned a volunteer speaker assistant who makes sure you electronically sign, download and complete this, that and the other thing in the online Panel Production Guide. SXSW also sends you regular emails about what to expect, what to bring and how to plan. You have no excuse to feel uniformed or uncertain. (Note: All SXSW materials are well-written and, though repetitive, grammatically solid.) An hour before their session, speakers must report to a “Green Room” in the hotel or conference center you’ve been assigned to. If you’re speaking with another presenter or are a member of a panel, this may be the first time you’ve been together in a room (which is not actually green). If you’re a solo presenter like me, you review your slides. Or head outside en masse and look for smoke. Eventually a “SXSW crew member” escorts you to your session’s room where more volunteers help you plug in and set up.

So, that’s how it works.

It was the waiting that made me want nerve-settling waffle smells, because I was prepared. My presentation was a version of one I’d given at McKinney the summer before, and half of it was a review of often-misused punctuation marks — which I’ve done in my sleep (both reviewed them and misused them). So I was relieved when, with four McKinney co-workers sitting near the front insisting they’d each painted a letter of my name on their chests, a SXSW volunteer closed the conference room door and gave me a thumbs up.

About 30 people came to hear what Language of Mutilation was all about, and they were into it. Nearly everyone in the room asked a question throughout the one-hour presentation. Even the volunteer staff assigned to the conference room, something I’ve never seen before. Examples:

• If you’re using semicolons to separate items in a series (when those items contain internal punctuation), must you use a “serial” semicolon before the conjunction? (Yes.)
• Can you replace a colon with an em dash? (Yes. It’s hard to misuse an em dash.)
• Had I heard that a style manual recently published a new guideline allowing the omission of an apostrophe after a plural noun ending in S to denote possession? (No. This can’t be. The horror.) 
• If your brand chooses to break an accepted grammatical rule in its advertising, what should it do in response to the resulting backlash from grammatical sticklers? (Use the opportunity to strengthen your brand and what it stands for — like Steve Jobs did with “Think Different.” This assumes that the rule was broken intentionally, however. If a proofreader messed up, that’s…unfortunate. How do you spell unstoppable, Downy?)

As one attendee summarized in a tweet just before the session began, #nerdalert.

If I submit another proposal to the PanelPicker in June for SXSW 2013, I don’t know that I’ll use the word “grammar” in the title. That’s my takeaway. From what I read on Twitter, it turned off some folks. I guess not everyone dreams of punctuation marks. 

PS. The four from McKinney kept their shirts on.