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[edit] WAKEY - WAKEY!!

I want to start a myles325a page here. This is a test.

Seekers of truth and good times, contact me

Am about to commence of a reworking of "Introduction to Special Relativity" at the site below.

User:Myles325a/Introduction_to_special_relativity

myles325@yahoo.com.au for all wiki relevant stuff (relevant defined broadly).

[edit] grammar, style notes observations

Feel free to make your points here. I am attempting to compile a list of common mistakes, focussing on ones which obscure meaning. The end-result would be a manual that might help budding writers, and have applications far outside Wikipedia. Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I see these kinds of linguistic problems everywhere. They are engendered, ironically, by a typical author's familiarity with their material. This familiarity leads to a word-blindness as to how a naive reader might interpret their words. One of the main villains is the ambiguity enherent in the little word "or". I found an excellent example of this just now in the Discussion page for Elephant. Here it is:

[edit] "or" can mean 1. "also known as"; 2. "as well", "in addition to" ambiguity

"One decade later, only around 600,000 remain. This decline is attributed primarily to poaching, or illegal hunting, and habitat loss."

This passage in the entry for "Elephant" has now gone, but it worth noting that the culprit here is the ambiguity of the word “or”, which can have two meanings. The first is “also known as”, and the second is “in addition to”. The author intends “or” to mean “also known as”, but a naïve reader could plausibly think it meant that there was another and distinct danger to elephants other than from poaching, and this was from “illegal hunting".