True. Writing structures for arguments and analysis make a huge difference in effective writing.
I wish brevity and linguistic precision were taught more, as well. Miscommunication due to ambiguity is one of the biggest causes I see for confusion or heated arguments.
A few times in some Discord communities, I've been accused of being A.I. because of how I write. Kind of sad and a bit annoying. I also quite like em dashes, but have felt the need to reduce how much I use them.
Glad to see some schools and teachers teach how to use them well, rather than ban them outright.
This problem has been haunting me for years, except in Google Docs. At some point, some template my team used had slightly gray text, and I STILL find it cropping up in our most recent documents.
If ads are clearly labeled as "ad" or "sponsored", and they only appear for free users, I think seeing ads is a pretty reasonable price to pay for those who want to use the service for free.
If they're not labeled, or are shown even to paying users, I think that's a problem.
I wish the article's graphs weren't distorted by skipping so much of the scale to make it look like a more significant difference than it is. But it does looks impressive.
The article makes some excellent points. I think this part isn't a great example, though:
> Saying something like “Go to my cases” is awkward and unnatural – if I told you to go to my cases, you’d think I was telling you to go to my cases, not yours.
A help article should use proper capitalization. a couple extra words can add clarity too. For example, "Go to the 'My Cases' page."
Many people don't know how to write good help articles, though, so it's probably still best to avoid "my"/"your" in UIs.
Ironically, it actually helped me stay focused on the article. Kind of like a fidget toy. When part of my brain would get bored, I could just move the cat and satisfy that part of my brain while I keep reading.
I know that sounds kind of sad that my brain can't focus that well (and it is), but I appreciated the cat.
Novice Question: How can you have a relational database at all without foreign keys?
In other words, if your tables aren't referencing other tables, how do you perform JOINS for your queries? From my limited experience, they seem pretty essential for most databases. Or is the article just talking about foreign key CONSTRAINTS and cascading UPDATES and DELETES, rather than literally talking about the values stored in foreign key columns?
If anyone can explain, I would greatly appreciate it.