“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) Similar:Avoid static, wordy nominalization. Prefer compelling verbs.New graphic for a handout I first posted…EssaysDoes the phrase "based off of" make you shudder……
“Mosaic wasn’t the Web’s first browser. It wasn’t even, as it’s so often been described, the first browser to sport a graphical user interface. Tim Berners-Lee’s “WorldWideWeb” was the first graphical point-and-click browser, followed by Pei Wei’s Viola browser.|But for most people, Mosaic was the easiest browser to use. It installed easily, and allowed people…
“A company is making two versions of the same product… One has a little more gold and foil on it, but they’re essentially the same. One is $14.95; the other is $18.95.” Not surprisingly, the $14.95 item is selling better. It’s also the lower-profit product.|”Then a competitor comes in with a third product. Again, it’s…
Robert Frezza writes: I ran across an interesting passage in a book about the native peoples of Siberia called “The Shaman’s Coat.” In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of well-educated Polish revolutionaries were exiled to eastern Siberia where they acquired a certain reputation among the natives. As one of them put it:…
“For all the glitz surrounding the unveiling Monday of Apple Computer’s new music service, a quick look suggests that it’s a solid, but hardly revolutionary, addition to the market….The integration between the one-click purchase service, Apple’s iTunes music jukebox software and the iPod player goes well beyond what any other music service has done. It…
One of several paintings that were, according to a spam I received Sunday, stolen from a museum in Manchester, England. WARNING: Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin have been stolen in UKE-Mail) When I went online to check the validity of this spam I found a BBC story which reports “The paintings – Van Gogh’s The Fortification…
“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.” Know your reader Take…
“For years Slashdot has had an abundance of game related content. Unfortunately, we’ve also had limited space to post those stories. We strive to cover a wide range of tech news, and this often means passing on a good game story because something else is more important. But today I get to announce the creation…
“The pundits are blogging. The journalists are blogging. And now the candidates are blogging.| Who needs television? Let’s just eliminate the middleman….Candidate gives speech. ABC News reports speech. ABC’s Note blogs speech. Then candidate blogs his own speech, knocking down any negative interpretation by other bloggers. And we blog the whole incestuous process.” —Modem MadnessWashPost…
“The anti-science movement in health promotion has arisen as part of the humanistic perspective within the discipline that positions itself in direct opposition to a science-based approach that it terms ‘positivism.’ According to this view, the application of the scientific method — that is, an approach to the world founded upon experimentation and hypothesis testing…
“[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…
“In an enormous blow to the music and motion picture industries, a Los Angeles federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against file-sharing services Grokster and StreamCast Networks Friday, saying that they can not be held culpable for illegal file trading done over their networks. | The ruling, made by U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson, represents…
“A world population that peaks at 9-10 billion is not one in which we have to worry about Parson Malthus, the English 19th century economist who prophesied a future in which people multiply faster than the resources needed to sustain them and hence starve to death by the millions. Indeed, it comes as somewhat of…
“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,…
That’s a good one. Via Microdoc News. —What is the best search engine?Ask Jeeves) Similar:How Facebook and Twitter control what you see about FergusonOn Twitter, I see tear-gassed civilians,…CultureThe Great Works of SoftwareI realized that each one of these techno…AestheticsSPJ Journalist’s Toolbox Tools of the Month: Transcription favoritesTechnology is wonderful. My journalism s…JournalismThe Protagonist’s Best…
“Forty percent of students lack basic reading skills, and their academic performance is dismal compared with that of their foreign counterparts. In response to this crisis, schools are skilling-and-drilling their way ‘back to basics,’ moving toward mechanical instruction methods that rely on line-by-line scripting for teachers and endless multiple-choice testing. Consequently, kids aren’t learning how…
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…
Google: “switch[ed] to Blogger“: 165. Google: “switch[ed] to Movable Type“: 534Blogger vs. Movable TypeLiteracy Weblog) Similar:What is Technical Writing?I noticed an uptick in traffic to an old…AestheticsAs CRT Supplies Vanish the Classic Arcade Machine is Virtually DeadIf you understand the environment in whi…CultureThink Before You Tweet In the Wake of an AttackSobering analysis. Would I…
“Forty German authors are hoping to set a record on World Book Day on Wednesday by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours. | Each of the authors has two hours in which to write two pages of the book.” —Authors Plan ‘Fastest’ BookBBC) Similar:Google overtakes Apple in the US classroom Google in…
“TypePad is the first new consumer-grade weblogging product in more than a year, but it shows a change in the marketplace: grabbing the new middle ground of users who want all the advanced features of a self-hosted weblog, but none of the tears of having to learn about Linux or Perl or FTP. This should…