#AgChatNZ

At last, thanks to our wee team of four,

AgChatNZ will begin

tomorrow night,

Wednesday 12th March

at 8pm

on the Twitter

following #agchatnz

and discussing

Brand New Zealand

 

 

I know, finally!

 

This twitter bug will lead the way

 

Sophie's handle is @sestanley1

Follow her....

 

Sophie was a Nuffield Scholar last year

and like me believes twitter is a brilliant forum

for farmers to connect with each other.

AgriHQ posted this interview with Sophie here

 

And Colin the tweeting farmer

will be spreading the word and

adding in a few of his own.

Colin is @NZcows

 

Next in our quartet of tweeting agvocates

is Shona Glentworth or as we know her

@implementnz

Shona wrote our first blog post and AgChatNZ topic

on Brand New Zealand here

on our website www.agchatnz.org.nz

 

 Then there's me,

I've been dreaming and pottering along

working slowly towards getting AgChatNZ up and going.

Thanks so Sophie, Colin and Shona for giving it all a nudge.

 

Join us on Wednesday at 8pm to chat about ag stuff in NuZild.



stuff.co.nz and Simon Cowell

I get my news mainly from stuff.co.nz

It's easy to get there and has the usual amount of daily news,

which is not very much but

enough to keep one informed enough

to have conversations with other stuff readers.

 

I also enough reading The Herald newspaper,

but I like their hard copy rather than their website

firstly, because their paper is delivered to my workplace everyday,

secondly, because there's something nice about reading a newspaper

(but not enough for me to buy my own regularly once I moved to house with no fireplace).

 

What surprises me is the reasonably consistent poor

 quality of language ability and grammar on stuff.co.nz

 

It's poor.

Today's example was over kill with the term (sic).

When you see (sic) in an article it means:

 

sic¹

sɪk/

adverb

adverb: sic

1. 1.

   used in brackets after a copied or quoted word that appears odd or erroneous to show that the word is quoted exactly as it stands in the original, as in a story must hold a child's interest and ‘enrich his (sic) life’

To sum it up,

(sic) means the reporter or writer of the article is

distancing him or herself from the poor language skills of the

subject and/or person quoted in the article.

Nice.

 

So in today's entertainment section*

there is an article about Simon Cowell's new baby boy.

In the article, tweets from Mr Cowell's are quoted.

They are about little Eric with things like this,

"Named after my dad (sic)"

or

""I never knew how much love and pride I would feel,(sic)" he captioned the shot."

In case you missed it,

the (sic) is because Simon failed to put a full stop at the end of his sentence and

a comma at the end of the second example.

I feel this is quite judgemental of Mr Cowell as

I suspect the first (sic) may also refer to his use of a small 'd' on 'dad'.

Some people choose to use a capital 'D' on 'Dad'

but... oh let's go with who cares if you use a big 'D' or a little 'd'.

 

According to how I understand the grammar usage of generic names it should be

a capital 'D' as Simon is referring to a specific Dad,

namely his own.

If he were referring to a groups of dads,

as in a non-specific muddle of dads,

then a lower case 'd' would be appropriate.

 

 

Now  on Twitter there is a certain degree of leeway,

that's the point.

There's leeway on blogs because it's personal,

so quirky twists to language and errors are part and parcel of the nature of blogs.

But as a formal publication, that it will be assumed provides well researched,

c

orrect and current information that is

presented in a interesting and informative manner

with quality spelling and grammar,

thoughtlessness, overzealousness

What I learned a longtime ago,

in the communications business is that as long as you are consistent

in your poor or correct grammar,

then that is fine.

This is to accommodate the changes in how we use language over the generations.

 

But for stuff.co.nz to be sticklers about missing full stops and false commas

when quoting the bastion of poor and creative spelling and grammar, Twitter

but ignoring the very regular errors of spelling in other articles.

What I have realised is that the grammar Nazis are in the articles

directly gathered from overseas.

And the badly spelled articles are by domestic reporters. 

 

Unfortunate.

 

* The range of current events news is pretty limited, so I am forced to read the entertainment page.  It's not so bad I have to read the sports page.

 



Social Media for Farmers

I will, I will, I will

drag rural New Zealand into the modern age of

communication, connection and community

That's this year's motto.

So with luck and a spot of well connectedness

myself and Hannah from Federated Farmers

have organised the

We have created a programme that introduces

what social media is,

how the rural world is using it,

how rural New Zealand are trying to use it,

how our universities have used it,

and how @NZCOWS is using it.

@NZCOWS is Colin Grainger-Allen

a dairy farmer from the Rotorua area

uses twitter for a million things

not in the least to find staff and to share his farm experiences with the world.

Considering twitter is still new to NZ

having more than 1000 followers is stellar.

The Social Media for Farmers Forum

is sold out and the seats are filled with

organisations and a couple of individuals.

But there will be more of these forums.

I promise.

By the way,  I am super pleased with

my design concept for the invitation above.

Hat tip to the very helpful #AgChatOZ guys.

Take a look at the links over here