by JCM | 22 Feb, 2020 |
Complaining about nonsense business-speak may be futile, but this piece – a review of a memoir about life in startup land – does a good job of summing up why spewing out business bullshit is not just intellectually offensive, but actively harmful:
“I like Anna Wiener’s term for this kind of talk: garbage language. It’s more descriptive than corporate speak or buzzwords or jargon. Corporatespeak is dated; buzzword is autological, since it is arguably an example of what it describes; and jargon conflates stupid usages with specialist languages that are actually purposeful, like those of law or science or medicine. Wiener’s garbage language works because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly…
“But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words — their facility to warp and impede communication — is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.”
In short, if your ideas are good, don’t bury them in garbage. If they’re not, the presence of garbage is a good indicator.
by JCM | 16 Aug, 2014 |
Nothing new, but this is worth a read on web writing and hate-reading – that old trick of being as controversial as possible in order to get an extreme response, purely because extremes get more attention, and in a pageview-driven business model, controversy is seen as good purely because, based on the metrics, it’s the controversial stuff that’s driving engagement.
This infantile attitude of provocation to get attention is increasingly being combined with ream upon ream of cheap content, because the more content you’ve got, the more potential PVs you can attract. We end up with the most depressing (and false) equation of online publishing:
Cheap content + Controversy = Clicks = Cash
It’s an attitude that’s lazy *and* massively short-termist in thinking – over the long term, quality can and should trump quantity. But even if it doesn’t, cheap, crappy content is a turn-off for audiences. The more sites that start to rely on hastily-produced, poorly-checked copy, or lazy semi-plagiarisms of things that desperate teams of poorly-paid hacks with deadlines and quotas to hit have found elsewhere, the less distinctive sites get, and the fewer returning visitors you’ll get. As that linked article puts it:
“With a business model based on a ton of cheap content, Web publishers can rely too heavily on acid-reflux-style aggregation, in which young writers destroy the savor of interesting stories and an interesting world by constantly regurgitating the news with added bile.”
There’s also an interesting point made from John Waters in the Irish Times (now behind a paywall), on the impact of comment sections under online articles: “Because everything written specifically for online consumption is written in the expectation of addressing a hostile community, the writing process demands, as a prerequisite, either a defensive or antagonistic demeanor.”
Having learned my online publishing trade in the realm of message boards, chatrooms and blogs, I’m incredibly aware of the vast levels of bile that exist in comment sections. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With careful community management, it’s perfectly possible to build online communities that are supportive, friendly, and constructive, rather than the supposed default of objectionable and offensive. Check out the likes of b3ta, imgur and Metafilter for some prime examples of sites with vast *positive* communities of commenters. And then contrast those with the comments sections of pretty much any national newspaper site – packed with trolls and maniacs.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
by JCM | 5 Jul, 2014 |
We still don’t know why, though…
“There are many more listicles of length 10 published compared to other numbers. This is primarily because BuzzFeed is selling the 10-length listicle to partner brands, such as the Michael J. Fox Show, Nordstrom Topman, and Buick. The second most popular length is 15, followed by 12. Listicle length drops off quite rapidly in the 20’s, although surprisingly, lengths 11-21 are far more popular than those under 10…
“If we look the bar chart by audience score we see a completely different picture?—?odd number length listicles… tend to have a higher audience score on average, where in our dataset, the number 29 tends to have an advantage over the rest.”
by JCM | 28 Jun, 2014 |
I usually hate tips for writers – writing, to me, should be a natural thing. But having seen a lot of very bad writing, more concerned with showing off the writer’s linguistic skill or subject-matter expertise than enlightening the reader, this approach strikes me as vital to keep in mind at all times:
Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else’s attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? “When you write,” Pinker says, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, and that you’re directing the attention of your reader to that thing.”
Perhaps this seems stupidly obvious. How else could anyone write? Yet much bad writing happens when people abandon this approach. Academics can be more concerned with showcasing their knowledge; bureaucrats can be more concerned with covering their backsides; journalists can be more concerned with breaking the news first, or making their readers angry. All interfere with “joint attention”, making writing less transparent.
This isn’t a “rule for writers”; it’s a perspective shift. It’s also an answer to an old question: should you write for yourself or for an audience? The answer is “for an audience”. But not to impress them. The idea is to help them discern something you know they’d be able to see, if only they were looking in the right place.
by JCM | 11 Jun, 2014 |
A great set of guidelines.
A few I especially like – largely because they apply far more widely than just in the newsroom – partly paraphrased:
– gather data relentlessly, but learn how to use it (and when to ignore it)
– evaluate fads, don’t chase them
– reward good failures
– ask “why would anyone see value in this?”
– you can’t judge success if you don’t know what it looks like
