Writing: December 2006 Archive Page

--Antoine Bardou-Jacquet --The Child (YouTube)

Now there's an interesting idea for a text-based mod of Half-Life 2. Hmm....

In reporting a story for the Web, the interview process does not end with publication. When writing a piece, always include an invitation for knowledgeable readers to add more to the story. Writers who fail to do this invite suspicion that they are more interested in promoting (and protecting) their own point of view, instead of allowing their work to compete in the marketplace of ideas. --Robert Niles --Top mistakes made by new online publishers (Online Journalism Review)

This is an important concept. In the print world, once something has been published, you can more or less forget about it, because you are already deeply involved in the planning of the next publication. But publishing an electronic document is, ideally, just the start of your relationship with that document.

I still maintain web pages that I published years ago. If the site is popular, if I notice a teacher or student somewhere has found it useful in a class, or if I Google a subject and find my own work near the top slot, I will often take a bit of time to revisit what I wrote and refresh it. Typically that just involves checking the links, but sometimes my opinions have changed or my approach to the subject matter is more complex.

I recently wrote a bit about minimalism in video game design. While it only took a few minutes, I designed some bookshelves for a virtual living room, but now I've got to spend a lot of time designing stuff to go on the shelves. (In the picture, you can see I put a cylinder on the mantel... it might become a tankard or a candlestick, but I don't know.)

But I would have been better off designing closed cabinets. If I need to put a concealed object in this room, I can make one of the cabinets openable, and put the thing inside. All the other cabinets could just be facades.

In a similar way, it's important to learn to write an online document so that it has a long shelf life. I have handouts on basic skills such as how to write a thesis statement, or how to integrate quotations from academic sources. Nobody but my own students will need to read a specific assignment description, but I've re-used this explanation of "close reading" so many times in different classes that I should probably move it off the individual course blogs and work on a more substantial handout for my permanent site.

A few years ago when fiction blogs were still getting a lot of attention, I imagined that one summer I would pretend to quit my job, run away from my family, and blog as if I had joined the circus, and stumbled upon a centuries-old cult (or maybe got involved in an international spy ring, or found a government conspiracy, or whatever). To do that, I would need to plot out the work of fiction in some depth, so that I could seed my personal blog with details that would make the whole story seem to come together -- such as creating a fake website that had clues, then creating a fake blog that asked a question and attracted a comment from a fake visitor who linked to the fake website, so that later when the plot required me to Google something, I could link to it from my blog.

I never got much farther than the "what if" stage, in part because "she's a flight risk" was already doing this in 2003. Since then, commercial productions like "I love bees" and "Lost" have made those gimmicks fairly well-known.

It does take a bit of unlearning print media ways of thinking in order to keep a bank of old material fresh by pointing to it with new links. But blogs are great at contextualizing -- linking to contrasting, supporting, and amplifying material which will help readers gain a broader understanding of the subject. Most readers will just skim the entry, a few will briefly visit the sites, but a small number will read, think about, and comment on every item you have linked to.

Hammer, 3D Design, and the Virtues of Minimalism (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

For the past month, as preparation for teaching a brief Hammer unit in my "New Media Projects" course, I got pretty good at Hammer basics -- in part because I recorded a series of Flash tutorials, and doing so really solidified some basic design skills.

I hadn't really realized just how comfortable I'm becoming with Hammer until yesterday, when I roughed out this interior while my daughter was napping. Today (during another nap) I added some special effects (including snow, not visible in this photo). I had already sketched out the floor plan on paper, so it was really quite easy to implement it.



I'd have gotten a lot farther today, but for some reason when I loaded it up Hammer couldn't find where I had placed the custom textures that I had downloaded. I recall being so frustrated with the numerous steps I had to do in order to get a new texture into Hammer that I never even tried to teach that to my students. But at least now I think I understand the complex file system that Steam creates. (I'm also starting to max out my laptop's hard drive. Time to do some file-shuffling.)

I'm starting to feel more comfortable with lighting (I have four lights in the fireplace -- three of them flickering in different colors and a fourth that's a steady yellow-orange). I had made an automatic door a few months ago, and it only took me a few tries to refresh my memory.

When my students began programming text adventures in Inform 7, it took a while for them to learn that every concrete object they mention in the description of a room ("The professor's bookshelf is cluttered with a bewildering array of papers, notebooks, reference books, and letters.") means that the player is going to want to take, read, examine, smell, eat, and burn every one of them. To implement each and every object in a cluttered study would take forever, but mentioning an object by name and then refusing to let the player interact is sort of cruel to the player. Rather than come up with a long list of things that the player will want to interact with, it's better to write a general description that reveals the character of the person who uses the study. A player who reads "Everything is a bit tweedy and fussily organized, but just a bit sloppy around the edges, not unlike Prof. Sneedlewood himself. An ivory-handled letter opener catches your eye." will immediately take the letter opener, but will probably not bother trying to rifle through the professor's things.

In a similar way, while creating an environment with pixels rather than words, I've learned that instead of open (bare) shelves I should probably instead have more closed cupboards, with just a few decorative items to personalize the space.

Hammer (the Half-Life 2 map editor) is good for constructing anything that you could build out of wood in real life. While the world allows for subtle and complex motion and beautifully interactive physics (hinges, ropes, gravity, friction, etc.), the resolution of the world-builder is chunky and blocky.

I've got a kind of creative vision, too, but I've been frustrated by how restricted I feel when there isn't a good ready-made texture (the 3D colors that go on the flat surfaces) or model (the map of points and planes that make up an object, such as a chair). So I've spent too much time online surfing for ready-made models and materials.

I have taught myself Blender3D and am working with the XSI Mod tool, so I know I've got everything I need to design complex objects and import them into a Hammer map.

But wait, you might ask, don't people accidentally repeat each other's sentences all the time? It seems to me that this should not be unusual. Yet try plugging that last sentence word by word into Google Book Search, and watch what happens.

It: Rejected--too many hits to count
It seems: 11,160,000 matches
It seems to: 3,050,000
It seems to me: 1,580,000
It seems to me that: 844,000
It seems to me that this: 29,700
It seems to me that this should: 237
It seems to me that this should not: 20
It seems to me that this should not be: 9
It seems to me that this should not be unusual: 0

It seems to me that this should not be unusual is itself ... unusual. --Paul Collins --Dead Plagiarists Society (Slate)

After learning a bit about IF and playing a few games, you might think to yourself: hey, I could do this! And the best part is: you're right. The modern IF scene is so vibrant largely because it's quite possible for a single author to build a game from start to finish. It's easy for new authors to get discouraged, however, so here's some advice to make sure your creation makes it to the finish line. --Vestal and Maragos --Magic Words: Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century -- Make Your OwnBrass Lantern | 1Up)

A few months ago, I was looking for the illustration found on this page... I think it's a great introduction to the concept of attaching descriptions to individual objects.

When my students created IF games, they sometimes had trouble understanding the difference between a textual description of an event that should only happen once, a description that the computer would produce in response to a command such as "examine thing," and what to leave out (such as lists of things that are contained by other things, or the status of things such as doors and such) because the computer automatically keeps track of such things.

"I am seeking a new position as i have recently been laid." --Cover Letters from Hell (Killian Advertising)

That is... laid off.

Blogging this to save it for a professional development unit in "Intro to Literary Study" next term.

In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge --Bibliographia Literaria (1817)

I had never before bothered to look up the full context in which the term "willing suspension of disbelief" first occurs.

Underneath the veneer of "natural language," Inform 7 actually has a pretty rigorous syntax, and it can be very picky about how you word certain kinds of phrases. But then there are other areas where the syntax is very loose, and it's easy to be fooled into thinking that you can write your game in any sort of casual English, only to have it break down when you try to compile. This can be a source of frustration to both newcomers and experienced programmers who are accustomed to writing in languages with a more consistent syntax. However, I think that people will grow accustomed to this learning curve. Figuring out Inform 7 is not unlike figuring out how to play text adventure games for the first time: at first it seems like it will understand anything, but eventually you get an intuitive feel for how things must be phrased. --Mike Gentry --Interview: Mike Gentry (Game Couch)

The author of the acclaimed horror IF game "Anchorhead" offers an excellent assessment of Inform 7 (a robust programming environment designed specifically for the creation of text adventure games).

Our story about the the most popular Halloween costumes of the season, first published Oct. 14, misidentified the super-speedy The Flash and Boy Wonder superhero Robin as Marvel comics characters. In fact, they are DC Comics superheroes. We regret this error; it is against Bankrate's policy, and just plain unwise, to cause offense to superhumans and superheroes. --Bankrate editorial department corrections policy (Bankrate)

Best. Correction notice. Ever.

Parents trickled to the school later Tuesday morning to pick up their children.

Nearly three months ago, a 10th-grader at the same school, just outside Philadelphia, was arrested for allegedly bringing in a loaded gun. The boy showed the gun to another student, and word soon trickled to a teacher and then a security officer, officials said. --Pa. teen fatally shoots self at school (AP | Yahoo! (will expire))

The pressures of getting a breaking story published means sometimes one reads strange things that trickled through the editorial process.

The word "trickled" is unusual enough in a news story that I noticed it right away. When it appears in two consecutive paragraphs, its hard to ignore.

There is no clacking of keyboards in most classrooms at the Mary Erskine and Stewart's Melville Junior School, although there is a full range of facilities for computer lessons and technology isn't being ignored.

But the private school's principal believes the old-fashioned pens have helped boost the academic performance and self-esteem of his 1,200 pupils. --School shuns tech, teaches fountain pen (Yahoo! | Reuters (will expire))

I no longer see cases of blatant plagiarism as personal insults. They are, instead, the pathetic bleats of students who think they know enough -- maybe all there really is to know -- about how to read and think and write.

The paradox of plagiarism is that in order to be really good at it, you need precisely the reading and writing skills that ought to render plagiarism unnecessary. --Jonathan Malesic --How Dumb Do They Think We Are? (Chronicle of Higher Education)

"For more than 100 years journalism has been sustained by this virtuous circle in which the audience paid for their news, and the advertiser paid to reach that audience, and the publisher made a profit and paid his journalists and the society benefited into the bargain," said Michael Oreskes, executive editor of the International Herald Tribune.

"That whole circle breaks down on the internet. This requires wildly creative thinking on the part of media companies to preserve the base of support that's created quality journalism for all these years.

"And that's a subject that the whole of society needs to be interested in and not just those whose livelihood depends on it." --Papers battle online news sites (BBC)

Less intimidating and frustrating than the conference, more "human" than the margin note, audio commentary possesses the potential to become a space where real teaching and learning can emerge in the midst of feedback. --Sommers and Sipple --A Heterotopic Space

Haven't looked closely at this, but I'm blogging it for access later.

Since I find myself habitually editing and re-editing the notes that I type to my students, and since my handwriting is terrible, I have thought about working with audio.

During all of 2006, I was a paperless prof... as much as possible, I had students do their work online. We met in class as usual, of course, but all submissions were collected online, where they were date-stamped. This was very useful in cases when I asked students to refer to previous drafts (they didn't have to remember to bring hard copies with them), and there were very few ambiguous "the dog ate my homework" moments. If the system went down briefly, I knew about it, because I was probably online marking papers at the time. I usually set the deadline to be about 15 minutes before class started, so that students wouldn't hang around in the computer lab down the hall waiting for their pages to print out and then burst into class a few minutes late asking whether I had a stapler.

I liked the fact that I no longer had to juggle stacks of student papers. I liked the fact that students wouldn't flag me down in the halls in order to shove a late paper in my hands. But I also found it very tedious to give ALL my commentary by typing out words and sentences. Sometimes I longed just to circle two words, draw a line between them, and add a question mark.

Writing, in a radio story, has to be tighter and simpler than print: the beginning should hook listeners fast and hard, the way a song does. A succession of straightforward, declarative sentences (like those in the beginnings above) might feel a bit too clipped in a print story, but it's just right for radio. A reader can always go back and re-read part of a print story, or stop for a minute to think about a difficult section, and then resume reading. Radio has to be clear the first time around. Also, a radio story has to be a little sluttier with its charms: it can't be coy and get to the most interesting stuff a couple of minutes in. It has to frontload the drama, and not be too subtle about it. Bullcreek, in Dave's story, "hates" the nuclear waste proposition. Hate is a nice, strong word. Joe Roberts, in the Springsteen song, does not beat around the bush: his brother, Frankie, is no good. We, as listeners, know right away that this story will end in tragedy, but that doesn't spoil the ending for us, just primes us for it. In fact, giving away the ending at the start of a radio story can be a great strategy, especially if the story itself is a slow build. --Nancy Updike --Nancy Updike (on writing for the radio) (Transom.org)

I just taught the last regular class of the 1-credit "Media Lab" class that students take if they want to get credit for working on The Setonian, and I can't stop thinking about what I've got planned for next term. We're going to do some podcast journalism that we'll release for starters as part of the New Media Journalism program.

In the future, I'd love to see the Setonian have a podcasting editor, whose job would be to produce a 10-minute news magazine to go along with each issue of the paper. This would likely involve reading radio versions of stories already written for The Setonian, augmented by new audio interviews with principal sources, as well as original stories chosen for their value as a radio story. Stuff like a music therapy drumming session, the varieties of sacred music one might find at SHU (from organ music in a classroom, to guitars and folk songs at an informal Mass, to pop music with lyrics that students find spiritually meaningful), a story on avid videogamers (with bleeps and booms in the background), or a humorous neo-noir take on a mock crime scene investigation class in our forensic science major.

If you're doing a story on cafeteria food, we'd need to hear clattering plates and the crunching of celery and the painful chugging sound of the motor in the dispenser that pushes out a slow trickle of water in the cafeteria.

The 99 tips in this article make up the best in email practices. From how to ethically use the 'BCC:' to what attachments will make your mobile emailing compatible with everyone else's, this list covers everything you need to know about emailing. --Hacking Email: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips (IT Security)

I don't really care for the proscriptive tone of this document, but it has proved pretty popular online. I'm assuming it originated with ITSecurity, but the full text has been reproduced elsewhere.

I didn't find much new in the "Etiquette" section, but I particularly like the section on "Productivity, Folders, and Filtering."

Full disclosure: One reason I'm blogging this document is because tip 99 includes a link to Email: Ten tips for writing it effectively, which started out as a make-up project for one of my technical writing students many years ago.