Writing: September 2007 Archive Page

http://ifcomp.org/comp07/download.html

The marketers and programmers at Google's Blogger.com are not speaking with each other much, or so it would seem.

The folks in charge of the home page love verbs. 

Here's a thumbnail I cropped from the blogger.com home page.








Verbs, verbs, everywhere verbs!  Create! Publish! Go! Post! Interact!  Take a tour! Name your blog!  Okay, well "Get" as they use it in "Get Feedback" is a bit lame, but it's better than "Feed!"

Bear in mind I'm analyzing just one tiny sliver of the site, but the designers know that every square inch on a home page is precious, and look at how much effort they put into using verbs.  For crying out loud, if you type the URL www.blogger.com, you're forwarded to a page named "start," and the inline title of that page is "Blogger: Create your Blog Now -- FREE"   

But have you tried leaving a comment on a Blogger site lately? Here's the message you get:

Your comment has been saved and will be visible after blog owner approval.

Oh! The pain!

This editorial from Pepperdine shows good, clear writing, unlike the four-word CSU editorial that has been in the news recently. It emphasizes the fact that the editorial does not simply contain a vulgar charge aimed at the president, but that...

When students at Colorado State University in Front Collins opened the Sept. 24 issue of the Rocky Mountain Collegian, their student newspaper, an oversized and attention-grabbing headline shouted at them:

"Taser this ... F*** BUSH."

In the space where a 600-word editorial should be, this ambiguous (and asterisk-less) phrase was printed instead. It was recklessly displayed with no accompanying story, no explanation of the editorial board's intentions and no rationale for the gratuitous display of profanity.

The editor's statements about wanting to support free speech would hold more weight if some of those arguments had been included in the 596-word lacuna.

I haven't looked into the charter for the CSU student paper, but if someone does have the authority to fire the editor, then he or she should seriously consider it. I would seriously question the journalistic integrity of an editor who not only passes off a four-word bumper sticker as an editorial, but who also manages to make it look like the editorial is somehow blaming Bush for the tasering incident. (If Bush were somehow exercising his diabolical influence on that security officer, wouldn't he have gotten the guy to taser Kerry?)  So this is either a Michael Moore-style implication that two different facts are related just because they are true (a kid got tasered and lots of people hate Bush), or the author does not have the basic compositional skills necessary to notice the seriousness of such a logical fallacy.

More likely, those responsible for the editorial were just, well, irresponsible.

Those were an expensive four words, in terms of advertising money lost, credibility damage to the paper, and to the editor's future career plans.

AP | Guardian

The morgue scene couldn't have been more grim: As doctors worked to retrieve evidence from 33 bodies riddled with gunshots, they were unnerved by the ringing of victims' cell phones, signaling loved ones seeking reassurance they would never get.

This haunting detail offers, after several months, a fresh perspective on the VA Tech tragedy.

NYT: a student helps a security guard tackle a student carrying a rifle:

The scene at the university yesterday underlined how campus security has been rethought in this country since April, when a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. Instead of fleeing out of classrooms and onto the street, students at St. John's were instructed, via text message to their cellphones, to stay where they were.

The messages went out so rapidly that Mr. Benson, a 21-year-old criminal justice major and police cadet, who held Mr. Hiraman against the wall, said he felt his cellphone vibrate with the information while he was restraining the gunman.

Fantastic little detail really helps give this "happy-ending" story some punch.

Full transcript, the very end of which is Columbia's Bollinger having the last word:

I'm sorry that President Ahmadinejad's schedule makes it necessary for him to leave before he's been able to answer many of the questions that we have or even answer some of the ones that we posed to him. (Laughter, applause.) But I think we can all be pleased that his appearance here demonstrates Columbia's deep commitment to free expression and debate. I want to thank you all for coming to participate. (Applause.) Thank you.

I understand that by inviting the leader of Iraq to speak in a public forum, Columbia's Bollinger risked fallout that could have affected his career. I was not surprised that he began with a speech that put Ahmadinejad on the defensive. And I was not surprised that Ahmadinejad twisted and dodged so much.

I am hardly an expert on linguistics, but I used to teach a freshman engineering writing course when I was in Toronto as a grad student,and from time to time, I had to teach students who had gone to high school in another language how to write college English. I remember learning that one way to translate the concept "learn" into Chinese is the concept "copy," so when I saw Mandarin speakers (many of whom were second-generation immigrants to Canada) struggling until I gave them the model, and then respectfully reproducing my work and expecting to be praised, I had to ask someone if there was a different word for Chinese "watch all the little components of what I do, so that you can improvise and do different things  as circumstances require". Oddly enough, when the students wrote their first personal paragraphs, they often wouldn't actually state the main point -- they thought it would be an insult to the reader's intelligence for a memo to spell out exactly what the client should do. (I told those students, if you don't insult your North American clients that way, you'll lose their business."  ("North America" is friendly Canadian slang referring to "Canada and that country south of us".)

Ahmadinejad's speech reminds me of so many different freshman papers I got from students with a Middle Eastern background. I don't want to start making generalizations, because I never really made a serious academic study of this (there is a whole field of English as a Second Language acquisition, so I'm sure this is nothing new), but the facial expressions that Ahmadinejad gave, the way he cheerfully evaded answers, even the way he responded (after behind reminded) to a the question of gender discrimination by saying "But as for women, maybe you think that being a woman is a crime. It's not a crime to be a woman." On the surface, coming right after his insistence that at there are no homosexuals in Iran, he looked intolerant and ridiculous -- how could he possibly think that the question accused him of thinking that being a woman is a crime? (Of course, he backed up his statement by giving only examples of traditional female roles, though elsewhere he did emphasize the role of women in science and government.)

I've been scanning the online coverage of the MIT student who caused a bomb scare when she walked into an airport wearing a blinking circuit board on her sweatshirt.

I'm dismayed by the number of headlines that unquestioningly repeat the authorities' line that she was wearing a "fake bomb."  Several headlines at least put the term in quotation marks, and a good number of them describe the device more neutrally (as a circuit board) or they avoid mentioning the object at all (with a headline that emphasizes that an MIT student caused a bomb scare, but leaving the cause of the scare for the body of the article).

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."

Several years earlier, in 1979, the "tongue-in-cheek" icon -) failed to make a similar splash.

Kaj Sand-Jensen:

Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to write consistently boring scientific publications. I then discuss why we should and how we could make these contributions more accessible and exciting.

A luminous group of anti-Stratfordians write:

Not one play, not one poem, not one letter in Mr. Shakspere's own hand has ever been found. He divided his time between London and Stratford, a situation conducive to correspondence. Early scholars naturally expected that at least some of his correspondence would have survived. Yet the only writings said to be in his own hand are six shaky, inconsistent signatures on legal documents, including three found on his will. If, in fact, these signatures are his, they reveal that Mr. Shakspere experienced difficulty signing his name. Some document experts doubt that even these signatures are his and suggest they were done by law clerks. One letter addressed to Mr. Shakspere survives. It requested a loan, and it was unopened and undelivered. His detailed will, in which he famously left his wife "my second best bed with the furniture," contains no clearly Shakespearean turn of phrase and mentions no books, plays, poems, or literary effects of any kind. Nor does it mention any musical instruments, despite extensive evidence of the author's musical expertise. He did leave token bequests to three fellow actors (an interlineation, indicating it was an afterthought), but nothing to any writers. The actors' names connect him to the theater, but nothing implies a writing career. Why no mention of Stratford's Richard Field, who printed the poems that first made Shakespeare famous? If Mr. Shakspere was widely known as William "Shakespeare," why spell his name otherwise in his will? Dying men are usually very aware of, and concerned about, what they are famous for. Why not this man?

Va Tech's guidelines for evaluating disturbing student writing, as a Word file and as filtered through an analysis by Inside Higher Ed:

The document also reflects the tightrope its drafters were walking, leaving ample room for intuition and judgment in identifying disturbing writing and offering a series of questions instructors might find helpful in distinguishing creative and literary explorations of themes like violence, drugs and suicide, from a threat or cry for help. Among the questions, geared for fiction, poetry or playwrighting courses:

• "Is the creative work excessively violent? Do characters respond to everyday events with a level or kind of violence one does not expect, or may even find frightening? If so, does the violence seem more expressive of rage and anger than it does of a literary aesthetic or a thematic purpose?"
• "Are the characters' thoughts as well as actions violent or threatening? Do characters think about or question their violent actions?..In other words, does the text reveal the presence of a literary sensibility mediating and making judgments about the characters' thoughts and actions, or does it suggest unmediated venting of rage and anger? If the literary sensibility is missing, is the student receptive to adding that layer and to learning how to do so?"
• "Is this the student's first piece of violent writing?..Is violence at the center of everything the student has written, or does other writing suggest that violence is something the student is experimenting with for literary effect?"
• "Are the violent actions in the work so disturbing or so extreme as to suggest they go beyond any possible sense of purpose in relation to the larger narrative?"
• "Is the writing full of expressions of hostility toward other racial or ethnic groups? Is the writing threateningly misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or in any way expressive of a mindset that may pose a threat to other students?"

"The danger," Falco says of the Virginia Tech document (which has received approvals from the university's counseling center, legal counsel and provost's office) "is that written guidelines can be misused....that a situation would come about where you hamper creative freedom because students are afraid to write something because they're afraid it will get them thrown into a system."