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When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

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Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#61

Post by TravisLS »

aerovistae wrote: post #35

> So I threw in the entire text into Hemingway, an app that identifies poor or confusing writing. I found this interesting, because it seemed unbelievable to me that an app could be able to tell good writing from bad writing in a reliable or useful way. So I took excerpts from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and pasted them in. (For anyone unfamiliar with it, The Lottery is considered a masterpiece of a short story, an…

I like the Hemingway app, but it is very much designed to make you write like Hemingway (ie short, clear sentences _only_). Obviously most great writing is not in this style.

The Hemingway app is good for work emails and marketing copy, or if you happen to like that style. It is hardly the universal arbiter of "poor or confusing writing".

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#62

Post by kyle_martin1 »

offtop5 wrote: post #21

This is what happens when you spend decades demonizing journalism. Instead of giving us insightful articles, the New York times is competing against Facebook and Twitter to grab your attention immediately. I have a feeling most people don't read an entire New York times article, the entire point is just to create headlines you can share on Facebook or Twitter, keep those clicks and kpis flowing! In a way this is fant…

I agree. Centralized media equals a controlled narrative. Gone are the days of investigating prestige and bi-partisan reporting. Maybe it never really existing though...

It's clear that the majority of reporters lean center to far left politically. When it comes to topics that will make their "side" look bad, there's usually a lack of intellectual curiosity for the truth. This happens on both sides, of course, but the frequency and instances are much greater on the left-leaning reporting.

There's daily examples of where political narratives override digging in the truth. Project Veritas covers a lot examples of this: https://www.projectveritas.com/search/videos/?query=new%20yo...

No matter what you believe in, the publisher should be honest about their viewpoint instead of pretending they are not biased. Ben Shapiro is a good example of this. You know who he is and he clearly lays out the framework of evaluation. If you know where someone is coming from, you can then properly evaluate their points at a rational level rather than an emotional level.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#63

Post by legitster »

I write semi-professionally, and it amazes me how much you have to unlearn from your time in college, which required unlearning from your time in high school, which required unlearning from your time in grade school.

I still remember a horrifying 2-page (gasp!) paper from 5th grade where the requirements where so stringent (The 5th sentence has to be a thesis statement! Start each paragraph with a transition. Each paragraph has to support the thesis.), writing it mostly meant plugging in key words in the template like a mad-lib. And it really messed up my writing for a while.

When trying to convey nuanced topics, I often feel like a Neanderthal (no offense I guess?) trying to bang adjectives together hoping for meaning to appear. I think a lot of the stuff I was taught about composition and sentence structures was worse than not learning anything. And I wish I could go back and learn from an actual writer instead of a teacher.

I think we have a larger problem where our education system is laser focused on "knowledge" and often abjectly refuses to teach anything that can be called a "skill".

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#64

Post by keiferski »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #54
aerovistae wrote: post #35

> So I threw in the entire text into Hemingway, an app that identifies poor or confusing writing. I found this interesting, because it seemed unbelievable to me that an app could be able to tell good writing from bad writing in a reliable or useful way. So I took excerpts from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and pasted them in. (For anyone unfamiliar with it, The Lottery is considered a masterpiece of a short story, an…

It’s a great example of how people will use an easy quantification just because it exists. There’s a popular mindset that seems to think you can’t argue against numbers and math because they’re cold and scientific. Who cares if its a stupid number, it’s mathematically/scientifically correct!

New tools, same old tricks. We've just upgraded from turtle shells to web apps.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#65

Post by AlexandrB »

michaelhoffman wrote: post #3

Newspapers have been laying off copy editors right and left in recent years. A reduction in the quality and clarity of writing is an obvious and predictable outcome. https://j-source.ca/article/copy-editors-laid-off-more-than-... https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/by-dismantlin...

It's sad to think that the lousy state of journalism in the 90s and early 2000s might have actually been a golden age.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#66

Post by ghaff »

aerovistae wrote: post #35

> So I threw in the entire text into Hemingway, an app that identifies poor or confusing writing. I found this interesting, because it seemed unbelievable to me that an app could be able to tell good writing from bad writing in a reliable or useful way. So I took excerpts from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and pasted them in. (For anyone unfamiliar with it, The Lottery is considered a masterpiece of a short story, an…

I sometimes write for one of the online tech pubs. The tool you publish through has a reading difficulty score which I always fail. (I mostly ignore it; at most I might tweak a couple of things.) Also all sorts of SEO-related stuff.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#67

Post by Nimitz14 »

Just because you don't like a piece of writing does not mean the writing is bad.

> I have so many questions. > Is the person a writer for New Yorker? Is The Drunken Canal somehow related to the New Yorker? What is The Drunken Canal? How was she “regretting” something at that point in time? Vocally or otherwise? What publication was being stored in those unmarked white newspaper boxes? Wait, is The Drunken Canal a publication?

> Something like this would be more clear:

It's also more boring. There are people who like things to be a bit more entangled, as real life often is, and that's what that writing caters for.

--

People like this guy who seem to be believe there's only one correct way to write, who actually believe you can put writing that is supposed to be pushing the envelope into "an app that identifies poor writing" and use the results piss me off. Grammarly and similar have their uses of course, but I dread the day people actually use it to clamp down on anything that's slightly different than the norm (as this guy is doing), and everyone will be forced to write in a style that conforms with what an ML model says is okay. It is my personal nightmare.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#69

Post by cowboysauce »

aerovistae wrote: post #35

> So I threw in the entire text into Hemingway, an app that identifies poor or confusing writing. I found this interesting, because it seemed unbelievable to me that an app could be able to tell good writing from bad writing in a reliable or useful way. So I took excerpts from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and pasted them in. (For anyone unfamiliar with it, The Lottery is considered a masterpiece of a short story, an…

> Knowing full well what it would think of James Joyce, I skipped over him

I like to imagine that Finnegans Wake would result in a crash.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#70

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

michaelhoffman wrote: post #3

Newspapers have been laying off copy editors right and left in recent years. A reduction in the quality and clarity of writing is an obvious and predictable outcome. https://j-source.ca/article/copy-editors-laid-off-more-than-... https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/by-dismantlin...

Not only newspapers but even publishers of books. As a translator occasionally hired to translate works of literature, I do the best I can, but my manuscript still needs to go before a good proofreader and copyeditor to make everything just perfect before it is published. I have been dismayed at how now, publishers no longer use in-house staff but just hire an incompetent or lazy copywriter from the developing world off some freelancing platform. The same holds for typesetting. Sometimes the end result is worse than my original manuscript!

Sadly, publishers 1) are competing with e.g. books self-published on Amazon, and 2) noticed that the mass market consuming those Amazon self-published efforts seems pretty OK with content that is full of typos and bad-quality typesetting, so why even bother any more?

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