Writing: April 2003 Archive Page

"I expect this course to be challenging, but that's not what I want. I want just to be able to write better." -- anonymous freshman comp studentTough Lesson: Good Writing is HardMy Files)

"Writing for the Web is not the same as writing for print. People read differently on the Web. They scan read?jumping quickly from one piece of content to the next. People are much more action-orientated on the Web. They get online to get something done. Words should always be driving actions."

1. Know your reader
2. Take a publishing approach
3. Keep content short and simple
4. Write active content
5. Put content in context

Gerry McGovern --Writing for the Web: Part 1McGovern.com)

"[Cyberpunk novelist William] Gibson is currently winding up the book tour in Ireland and Britain. Once it is over, he'll end the weblog, he says. 'I have to go do whatever it is I do, to find the next novel,' he said. 'Writing novels is pretty solitary, and blogging is very social.'" Karlin Lillington

--Gibson Kicks the Blogging Habit Wired)

The text of the article states that Gibson will soon wrap up his blog; the headline screams that it's a done deal.

"Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.|And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore." Tamar Lewin

--Writing in Schools is Found Both Dismal and NeglectedNY Times)

One more for the "That Explains a Lot" file.

fisk (v): debunk via critical annotation, typically with heaping doses of contempt.
Recently Jill Walker lamented that it was hard to teach her students to blog critically. Perhaps we should first teach them to fisk.

Over the past month, I've seen the verb "fisk" pop up in weblogs discussing media coverage of Iraq. The eponymous verb is named for Robert Fisk, an award-winning reporter for the UK Independent. His writing talent is without question:

Did I sit on President Saddam's throne? Of course I did. There is something dark in all our souls that demands an understanding of evil rather than good, because, I suppose, we are more fascinated by the machinery of cruelty and power than we are by angels.|So I sat on the blue throne and put my hands over the golden armrests and surveyed the darkened chamber in which men of great power sat in terror of the man who used to sit where I was now. -- Independent 12 Apr 2003

While not flinching from calling Saddam evil, Fisk has been highly critical of the U.S.-led coalition's invasion of Iraq. He is extremely popular with [some] anti-war forces, in part becaue of his opinionated writing; but his consistent pro-Palestine slant does not escape the watchful eyes of pro-Israel media watchdogs, some of whom find his statements anti-Semitic.

But just as "boycott" derives not from something that the evil English landlord Captain Boycott did, but rather what the Irish villagers did to him, so too "fisk" does not refer to what Fisk does, but rather what is done unto him. In the blogosphere, some feel motivated to respond to Fisk's writing by refuting him in minute detail -- often repeating long chunks or the entirety of his articles, and interlineating their challenges. See: "Fisking Fisk."

The best definition I have found so far is by Eugene Volokh, who recalls an article in which Fisk "(1) recounted how he was beaten by some anti-American Afghan refugees, and (2) thought they were morally right for doing so." This, then, would seem to be the very first "fisking". Volokh credits an August 8, 2002 Instapundit post, and asked whether anyone had found an earlier usage. I wonder whether the term owes something to "MiSTing" -- a form of cultural criticism that formed the premise for "Mystery Science Theatre 3000," in which silhouetted wise-crackers in the lower right corner of your TV screen comment on and ridicule bad movies.

In general, then, the term "fisking" can be applied to any point-by-point critical annotation of another text. It is a mode of criticism well-suited to the WWW, since it begins by copying the full text of the target text, and proceeds to point out logical flaws and raise doubts. Since the fiskee's fixed text cannot respond to the challenges, the fisker can without too much trouble make the fiskee look ridiculous. While the term seems to have originated in conservative attacks against liberal positions, I recently came across a postmodern blogger who fisks an anti-postmodernist.

--Fisking as a Rhetorical ConstructLiteracy Weblog)

My idle curiosity about the term has turned into something of an epic quest... I think I'll post this now and take a break. You can post comments on the KairosNews version of the fisking entry.

"With regard to the article by David Whitehouse posted Friday, 18 April, 2003, 13:45 GMT 14:45 UK: Does anyone actually read these BBC stories before they are posted? It would be polite to to spell Mr. Rutan's name properly ('Burt' not 'Bert'). Moreover, this is not the 'world's first manned sub-orbital space programme'. I cannot imagine that Burt Rutan would have ever referred to his new project as the BBC says he did..." Cowling

--BBC Screws Up AgainNASA Watch)

This site appears to be an activist website focusing on NASA. Apparently Mr. Cowling has had past dealings with the BBC reporter whose story he criticizes above. The BBC story has apparently been silently corrected. Tissy-fits and snarkiness aside, this is yet another case of a reporter getting the facts wrong, which is why students should put extra effort into finding peer-reviewed journal articles instead of trusting whatever comes up on Google. Via Daily Dish.

When a blogger dies, what happens to the blog? "I keep it on my 'friends' list just so I can see his name every so often, but I can never bring myself to click on his name. The first year or so after he passed on I visited it with decreasing regularity, until eventually I couldn't handle the emotions. I had to move on. But the idea that it is still around is comforting -- it's almost as if he isn't dead." Garrett Palm, quoted by reporter Christopher Null

--Online, Some Bloggers Never DieWired)

Then there is the blogger who never lived, Kaycee Nicole.

When I found this in my in box it made my day. It's a report from a former student who is now a techical writer:

"Recently, one of your articles came up in my department at Unisys. Each month, my colleagues across the country and I receive a departmental 'e-zine' that includes links to technical communication Web sites of interest. This month, the e-zine included a link to the article that you and Jessica Bauer wrote called "Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips." I remember how much emphasis you placed on writing good e-mails, and the article was an excellent refresher for me. Also, it's fun to be able to tell my coworkers in the department that this article was written by my former professor at my alma mater. Aside from the article's origination just being a fun coincidence, it also gives UWEC and my degree even more credibility in colleagues' eyes."Greetings From a Previous StudentE-Mail)

"Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users' feeling of control and thus support the Web's mission as an instant gratification environment." Jakob Nielsen

--Low-End Media for User EmpowermentAlertBox)

There's nothing stunning in this post, but it's presented in the matter-of-fact, straightforward way that infuriates the "wow them with cool design" crowd. Nielsen also notes that search engines are attracted to text. There is currently no way to index the audio or visual messages (apart from trying to guess the media content based on the surrounding text). Of course there are some websites where multimedia is vital to the function of the site -- an archvie of animated clips, for example. A designer can probably assume that a visitor to Homestarruner, for example, has a fast enough connection to appreciate animated menus.

"The writing skills college instructors most want from incoming freshmen--proper grammar and usage--are considered least important by high school English teachers....Among six writing skills, grammar and usage were taught the least by more than 700 high school English teachers surveyed during a national curriculum survey ACT conducts every three years." Rosalind Rossi

--Grammar Valued More in College than High School Sun Times)

File this under "This Explains a Lot." Via KairosNews.

What does the above title make you think? It's a quote from an article in the Chicago Daily Herald., which reports that in a particular precinct, a worker registered 127 residents of a treatment center for sex offenders; 120 residents of that facility later submitted absentee ballots. "In the clerk's race, 229 voters were cast in that precinct. So sex offenders made up more than half the vote.| Voots, the Republican, received 42 votes in the precinct. May, the Democrat, received 187."

The reporter notes that the Republican (who ended up winning after all had "championed the 1998 state law responsible for [sex offenders] being detained for treatment, perhaps for life, rather than freed." Thus, this particular group of offenders would have had a motive to vote for the Democratic opponent. The statistic provided in the news article applies only to a particular precinct that happens to contain a sexual assault facility; but by taking that quote slightly out of context, I can create the impression that the news article is making a statement about all Democrats (or all sex offenders). The moral of the story: be skeptical when you read a startling statistic (or any statistic, for that matter)."Child Molesters, Rapists and Other Sexual Deviants Overwhelmingly Supported Democrats"Literacy Weblog)

A chart comparing newspaper references to the terms "weblog" and "blog". Not only is usage of both terms on the rise, "blog" is overcoming "weblog". Via Torill Mortensen --"Weblog" vs. "Blog"Eszter's Blog)

"Be pro-active, not reactive. Tell stories that provide background and context FIRST. We've tried to avoid two traps some media organizations, including The Bee, have fallen into:

• The 'minority of the week' story (writing about minorities for the sake of writing about minorities, i.e., 'Here are our Latinos!').
• The 'minority bad news story of the week' (writing about people of color whenever there's a problem, i.e., violence in minority neighborhoods). Those certainly are stories, but they go down a lot easier when you've provided context, and written stories emphasizing other aspects of minority life.

One big-picture story is worth 20 briefs. It lays a positive foundation, so when it comes time to write a critical story (i.e., the high welfare rate among Hmong and Iu Mien), you've got sources, they trust you, and they realize you've been fair to them." Stephen Magagnini of The Sacramento Bee

--Tips on Covering Race & EthnicityPenn State U)

Apparently this was reproduced as part of a journalism class. Via Donna Hibbs.

"Kelley's insightful window on the details of the war brought him increasing readership (118,000 page views on a recent day) and acclaim, including interviews in the The New York Times and on NBC's Nightly News, Newsweek Online and National Public Radio.| The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized -- lifted word-for-word from a paid news service put out by Austin, Texas, commercial intelligence company Stratfor. |'You got me, I admit it.... I made a mistake,' Kelley said. 'It was stupid.'" Daniel Forbes --Noted War Blogger Cops to CopyingWired)

"The Hassans decided to make the journey after an American helicopter dropped fliers over their farming village that showed a drawing of a family sitting at a table, eating and smiling, with a message written in Arabic. | Sgt. 1st Class Stephen Furbush, an Army intelligence analyst, said the message read: 'To be safe, stay put.' | But Hassan said he and his father thought it just said, 'Be safe.' To them, that meant getting away from the helicopters firing rockets and missiles. | 'A miscommunication with civilians,' said an Army report written Monday night."

--A Miscommunication with CiviliansMSNBC)

"Often the best reports were those that were carefully written and edited. Some were essentially radio reporting on TV. Technology made some reports stand out but got in the way when it was used for its own sake. Too often the rush to get information on air live created confusion, errors and even led journalists to play the game of 'Telephone,' in which partial accounts become distorted and exaggerated in the retelling."

--Embedded Reporters: What Are Americans Getting?Project for Excellence in Journalism)

Interesting... title of this study suggests either that Americans are the primary audience for the embedded reporters, or that the authors of the study did not choose to study other audiences. Why?

After my 1:00 class today I saw a colleague at the other end of a hall, struggling with a load of books that was about to drop. I momentarily interrupted a conversation with a student to try to pick up the items my colleague was dropping. The colleague looked at me with that familiar "I've-got-the-flu-please-kill-me-now" expression, and stumbled along his way. Later I got this e-mail:

"I was seriously ill this afternoon, and you took the time to help me. I wanted to thank you. You might not think that it's much, but it means a lot to someone who is in distress, as I was. I've heard that you've found employment elsewhere. I'm glad for you, but I know we're losing a good person, and for that, I'm sad. I wish you the best. Thanks again for your kindness. Thanks for being a good human being."

That made my day. So, what are you waiting for? Go on... be nice to somebody. -- DGJRandom Act of GratitudeLiteracy Weblog)