Writing: October 2007 Archive Page

Web guru Jakob Nielsen risks the wrath of the grammatical bluestockings when he suggests that the passive voice might be useful for headlines, but he's really talking about front-loading web titles, so that the first two words of a web heading will contain words that will catch the eye of people scanning the page. Since people usually search for concrete nouns, rather than verbs, it makes sense to get those content keywords in a prominent place.

Words are usually the main moneymakers on a website. Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project. Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations. Writing the first 2 words of summaries runs a close second.

Nielsen got plenty of attention for this claim, but it's a bait-and-switch. Passive sentences are not the only way, or even a particularly good way, of getting subject words to the beginning of web headings.  Consider "Passive Voice Can Boost ROI in Web Headings," or "Passive Voice: Surprisingly Useful in Web Headings." 

Also I cringed at one of Nielsen's examples of a good, scanning-friendly use of the passive voice: "13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization."  If somebody alphabetizes all the page titles on a website, that page is going to be alphabetized under "13."  

Professional writers know that the most meaningful part of a sentence comes at the end, when you're setting up for the idea that follows.  So the most significant part of this particular sentence is not that 13 design guidelines for tab controls were followed, but rather that other design choices hurt the site's usability.

Greg Beato, from Reason Magazine

Online it attracts more than 2 million readers a week. Type onion into Google, and The Onion pops up first. Type the into Google, and The Onion pops up first.

But type "best practices for newspapers" into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be. At a time when traditional newspapers are frantic to divest themselves of their newsy, papery legacies, The Onion takes a surprisingly conservative approach to innovation. As much as it has used and benefited from the Web, it owes much of its success to low-tech attributes readily available to any paper but nonetheless in short supply: candor, irreverence, and a willingness to offend.

While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn't ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire. It makes no effort to convince readers that it really does understand their needs and exists only to serve them. The Onion's journalists concentrate on writing stories and then getting them out there in a variety of formats, and this relatively old-fashioned approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful.

From Language Log:

Much of the blame for the public's poor understanding of science must go to a little studied but culturally pivotal genre: news report headlines. Short snappy headlines provide the lazy reader with just enough information to totally misconstrue a story.

There's a reason why the writing in newspapers doesn't look like the writing found in scientific journals. 

Newspaper readers have needs and values that differ from the those of the scientific community. Scientists require a huge level of precision in order to get their jobs done, and they are used to writing for other scientists (or perhaps college students who want to be scientists).  The documents that scientists point to as examples of clear, accurate writing presume an incredible amount of prior knowledge -- not just vocabulary words and factual knowledge, but abstract concepts like the scientific method and the relationship between applied and theoretical research.  Science papers are almost completely devoid of verbs other than "is," and science papers are almost all credited to large groups of participants (even though only a small number of participants will actually have helped write the document that bears their name).  I don't note these points in order to complain -- these are just features of the scientific world.

But science is a vast subject.  While a nuclear physicist might have a good sense of whether a particular animal study experiment is well-designed, the nuclear physicist might be unable to assess the significance of this or that particular animal behavioral observation.  So while scientists rely on their own specialized genres in order to communicate with others within their specialty, even a trained scientist must rely on a good science writer to produce generally-accessible representations of knowledge generated in distant scientific fields.

I used to write for an engineering newsletter, and I saw first-hand that few scientists are gifted with the ability to explain their work in terms that Joe Sixpack can understand. Back in 1992, when virtual reality was all the rage, I interviewed Randy Pausch, the CMU professor who recently became famous for giving an inspiring talk about how he is facing his impending death. But few people of any profession share Pausch's ability to communicate. 

Often, then, the journalists are often on their own when it comes to translating a two hours of academic rambling into an 800-word news feature that attempts to make the latest scientific discovery seem relevant to the average reader. 

But Language Log's complaint about headlines highlights another problem. Reporters generally don't write their own headlines.  For large papers, there might be a sub-editor whose job is to write all the headlines, but for middle-sized papers, the layout artists are the ones with control over the page.  They may scan the article quickly and come up with a headline that fits -- both in the sense of being appropriate to the topic, and also that fills the given amount of space.  When a story is sent out over wire services, so that hundreds of regional and local papers can reprint it, each paper will probably reprint it with a slightly different layout, meaning that the headline might need to be longer or shorter to fill the given space.

So, even if science reporters meticulously research an article, and check to make sure that their own original editors don't give the piece an inaccurate headline, once that story gets syndicated, the author has no control over the headline that will appear above the story.

Journalists have to write for a general audience, and news articles tend to simplify in order to make complex subtle points seem interesting and relevant to the general reader. A reporter who is writing on a deadline is far more likely to call up an expert on the phone and get some quick quotes than to sort through scientific studies that were written for an expert audience that does not include journalists.  Even journalists who specialize in science reporting may find themselves writing about astrophysics in the morning, human cell biology in the afternoon, and plate tectonics the next morning.

I just started a unit on science reporting in my introductory news writing class.  Tomorrow we'll start discussing It Ain't Necessarily So (which offers numerous case studies of incidents in which the media have distorted the public perception of science by latching onto a partial truth, sensationalizing, and/or editorializing).  Yesterday I invited SHU math professor Josh Sasmor to speak to my class yesterday. His final take-home message was that reporters have an obligations to be critical of the statistical evidence handed to them by their sources. (He said they should take each statistic with "that much salt," miming a something the shape of a salt lick.)

The Associated Press and other news syndicates have long made spot news articles generated by local newspapers, available to other publications. Now the NY Times is reporting on a new outlet that will provide original investigative journalism.

As struggling newspapers across the country cut back on investigative reporting, a new kind of journalism venture is hoping to fill the gap.

Paul E. Steiger, who was the top editor of The Wall Street Journal for 16 years, and a pair of wealthy Californians are assembling a group of investigative journalists who will give away their work to media outlets.

The nonprofit group, called Pro Publica, will pitch each project to a newspaper or magazine (and occasionally to other media) where the group hopes the work will make the strongest impression. The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeeds in government, business and organizations.

Nothing quite like it has been attempted, and despite having a lot going for it, Pro Publica will be something of an experiment, inventing its practices by trial and error. It remains to be seen how well it can attract talent and win the cooperation of the mainstream media.

TiddlyWiki is a complete wiki in a single HTML file. It contains the entire text of the wiki, and all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML goodness to be able to display it, and let you edit it or search it. Without needing a server.

I played with TiddyWiki a bit, but wasn't able to edit the pages in my browser, as promised. Perhaps the ad-blocker or some security feature on my browser is interfering with the operations. I'm blogging this so I can go back to it later.

Josh Olsson relates a fascinating tale of internet deception in the LA Weekly.

"Audrey, this is Harlan Ellison. It's imperative that I talk to you and Tania as soon as possible about Josh. I'm very worried. Tania's on her way to your house right now, and I'd like the two of you to come here."

Audrey asks if she can bring her friend Janna, and Harlan says no.

Audrey asks if she can bring her new puppy, and Harlan says no. You don't argue with Harlan Ellison; she says yes.

A project called StupidFilter is trying to weed out stupid internet comments. Hoax? At any rate, it's amusing.

Do you really expect to be able to detect and filter anything that's conceivably stupid?

No, of course not. You'd need real AI for that, and beyond a certain point it's simply subjective; after all, a sufficiently advanced AI would probably filter out the whole of human discourse, which isn't the idea.

So what do you plan to filter?

The idea is that the most egregiously stupid comments will also be the easiest to detect while remaining ignorant of context; comments with too much or too little capitalization, too many text-message abbreviations, excessive use of "LOL," exclamation points, and so on.

How do you rate stupidity?

Since we're trying to build a detailed database that serves as a very verbose example of What Not To Do, we look for comments whose prose style we can point to and say, "I don't even have to understand the content of this comment to know that it's stupid," -- based on the gross prose style alone, its stupidity is self-evident. It is then useful as an example for our parser to integrate into its database of stupidity.

Your grade for the peer-review exercise depends on the quantity and quality of the constructive feedback you provide to your peer. (So smile at the good and frown at the bad, but don't make your peer feel very sad.)

In the process, you will get specific, concrete peer feedback, which you can use to revise your paper (and perhaps raise your final grade). But for me, the real value of the exercise is that the experience of hunting for and fixing problems in a peer's paper will help you develop self-editing skills that you can apply to any writing situation.  ("Newswriting Peer Review Guidelines.")

After I teach a subject for the third time, I know enough of what to expect that I can start writing a detailed handout that encapsulates the lesson, so that when I teach the classes in future years, I can reduce the amount of class time I spend lecturing on a subject, and instead refer students to the handout as part of the preparation for a workshop. I don't generally use handouts as a replacement for classroom instruction, but when the handout is a detailed checklist, that can really help students as they revise.

I feel a sense of accomplishment getting this handout posted, since I managed to get it to the students in time for it to be useful.  The revision of the first full-length news article is due Friday, so I'll have something substantial to evaluate before midterm grades are due next week; students will be able to revise again (if they wish) after the break. 

The stress level always goes up before midterms, but I'm feeling better than I've felt in weeks -- the pneumonia that laid me flat is finally tolerable, to the point where I'm well enough to feel guilty about all the tasks I permitted myself to put off while I was sick.  Tomorrow I'll turn 39, and I'll spend most of the day grading papers. Such is life.

Mark Dery, on 10 Zen Monkeys

Reporting -- especially investigative reporting, the lifeblood of a truly adversarial press -- is labor-intensive, money-sucking stuff, yet even The New York Times can't figure out how to charge for its content in the Age of Rip, Burn, and Remix. To be sure, newspapers are hemorrhaging readers to the Web, and fewer and fewer Americans care about current events and the world outside their own skulls. But the other part of the problem is that Generation Download thinks information wants to be free, everywhere and always, even if some ink-stained wretch wept tears of blood to create it.

Lawrence Lessig talks a good game, but I still don't understand how people who live and die by their intellectual property survive the obsolescence of copyright and the transition to the gift economy of our dreams.

The Denver Post:

The Colorado State University editor who used the F-word in the student newspaper will keep his job.

My biggest reaction to the editorial was not simply that it used the F-word, it's that the editorial was so poorly framed -- it consisted entirely of four words, "Taser this ... F*** BUSH."  I'm sure the phrasing was simply intended to be topical, but it nevertheless seems to suggest that Bush was somehow responsible for the recent incident in which security guards used a Taser on a student who disrupted a speech by John Kerry. There are plenty of less sloppy, more coherent ways to make a statement about politics. 

I feel for the other students who lost their jobs after the paper lost advertising income over the incident, and I don't think McSwane showed good judgment, but the whole point of having a student paper is to give students the opportunity to make decisions on their own, and to take responsibility for those decisions. McSwane and his staff have certainly had the opportunity to learn from the experience.

Game Career Guide has an interview with some writers who work in the games industry. Hurrah for the liberal arts!

I already knew in high school I wanted to work in entertainment, so I attended some special workshops called the Media Workshops in Hollywood. There I was advised to major in whatever I wanted in college because I would learn everything I needed to know my first six months in entertainment. Taking this advice to heart, I chose to major in Archaeology.

While I continued to study programming and art in college, auditing a class in C and taking more art history classes, the archaeology emphasis has had the greatest influence on me. Combining soft knowledge like art, history, and mythology spanning the globe, with hard knowledge like biology, statistical analysis, economics, and urban planning has helped me the most in my game career.

I created a new handout that focuses on the efficient use of quoted material in MLA-style papers. Some of this material used to be part of a more general handout on using sources, but I think it will be more useful if I pull it out and create a new handout.

An MLA-style paper does not ask you to give the full name and credentials of your sources in the body of your paper, or even the full title of your source. (Save that information for the Works Cited list.)

In high school, where you might write a whole paper using only one or two sources, you got points for calling attention to the fact that you found a good source and were able to use it successfully in a paper. But in a paper you write for college, you may use three or four different sources in the same paragraph, and you may refer to several additional sources without actually quoting from them. If you bring your essay to a screeching halt in order to introduce the full name and credentials of each author, you will bury whatever argument you were trying to make.