Sherri Burns | Matthew Osgood | Dallas

Letter Rip

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LONG LIVE THE GEEK!
After reading the December 15 edition of Editor's Note, titled "How the Geek Stole the Ed Note," I had to write. My thoughts can be summed up as follows: YES, WES!

I, too, have often wondered about the frequency of the pronoun I in Sherri Burns's column. And - I'll risk starting a sentence with a conjunction here - it seems only right that the final analysis was done by someone with whom I have so much in common.

I, too, am a geek/dweeb/IT drone, traveling across the country installing computers, so it is rare that I miss Sherri's column (and her abuse of the first-person pronoun)!

So, here's my challenge to Ms. Burns: I dare you to write a column without a single incidence of the I. Come on, let's see what you're made of!

Matthew Osgood, Dallas, Texas

Dear Matthew: I attempted to construct a "Sherri's Ed. Note Simulator," which would randomly­ build an Editor's Note by pulling quotations from her previous columns while filtering out sentences heavy with first-person pronouns. Sadly, the results showed that, with the filter enabled, there was just too small a sample to work from. - Wes "the Geek" Besio