Writing

Attack of the Blogs – the cover story on Forbes magazine, wins this week’s award for shoddy tech reporting.  The article’s lead foreshadows its vague and pompous angle.

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.

Firstly, let me say that I do not spew forth invective – I’ll give an author credit where credit is due. I'll extend the olive branch, and freely acknowledge that “Invective” is a great vocab word. Using it in a sentence is sure to impress the high school English teacher. Nevertheless, the author's mastery of advanced vocabulary words doesn't make up for the article's lack of Substance (with a roman S).   I give Forbes a D minus; but not an F, because there were valid – and good points made. And I’ve listed those below:

Just ran across this well done online lesson on writing. You only have to click through slides to do it, and it takes about 20 mins. However, I gotta say: you will learn something.

How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly and Learn Complex Material More Easily

I've decided that I finally need to build a site for my professional work in web design and development. Being young and foolish, I figured I could find some good examples of how to "do" a professional website. What I found instead, I present tonight. What you read is real. It may shock you. It may anger you. It may confuse you. However, I'm allowing this filth to be broadcast for one reason, and one reason alone: To educate the public on how NOT to write:

Note: As the reader will notice, in my own prose, I often provide examples of bad, sloppy writing. I do this to help educate the masses. The idea that I might just be lazy is just crazy talk

By George Orwell (1940)

Attractive young woman sometimes accuse me of being a phenomenal writer. However, I always seem to  wake  up before  I  get a chance to fully respond to their compliments. As  a  result,  I've  decided  to  improve   my  writing  in  the  real  world.  Will some  work, I'm confident that Poynter  Online's  collection  of  50  writing  tools  will  turn  my  dream  into  a  reality[1].

Link: 50 Tools for Writing

1. KW, the irony was intended ;-)

According to a friendly film reviewer who I spoke with in the SXSW press suite,  I am the only blogger at SXSW with press credentials. Now, on the one hand, that  means absolutely nothing other than I got a free badge, and have access to the press room. However, on the other hand, I know that nothing is truly free in this world. If I am in fact the only credentialed blogger at the conference, then I feel it’s my responsibility (for better, or for worse) to leave the SXSW people with the impression that bloggers are a legitimate and valuable part of the press.

 

Thus, the mission I seem to have accepted is to ensure that more bloggers get press credentials next year. Now, this means I will have to ::shudder:: produce something that will be considered legit journalism. And by Journalism, I don’t mean reporting what happened; rather, I see journalism as an institution dedicated to enriching the public’s understanding of events which they are unable to see with their own eyes. If I was only interested in reporting who/what/when/where/why, I’d simply cut and paste some press releases. That said, there are a few big problems…

 

What valuable, and unique function can I serve when nearly 60 percent of conference goers are going to blog it anyway? Taking detailed notes of the sessions at the conference simply doesn’t seem to cut it. The conference sessions already produce more than one set of detailed notes. Pretending to be a reporter for wired might get me a good grade in a journalism class, however the reporters for wired, and the multitude of other tech publications present already fill that niche… and clearly they will do it better than I.

"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." - Hunter S. Thompson

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen -- in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all -- and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money .
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4. Political purpose -- using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

By George Orwell

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious—i.e. seriously intended—writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’—a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s ‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.