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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?

#71

Post by forrestthewoods »

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…

> Seriously, don't use this tool.

Horrible take.

I use the tool for all of my blog posts. It’s a stellar tool with a couple of killer features. I 100% promise if you the tool it will improve the quality of your writing.

That said, it does not identify “good writing” or “bad writing”. It is not sacrosanct. And it definitely can’t write for you.

It’s perfectly valid to leave in yellow or red sentences. But the tool helps make it a conscious decision when to do so.

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

#72

Post by duckerude »

TwoBit wrote: post #18
duckerude wrote: post #10

I fed the first tech article I could find on NYT's front page ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/technology/silicon-valley... ) into Hemingway: - Grade 12 (aim for 9) - 14 adverbs - 4 uses of passive voice - 7 phrases have simpler alternatives - 14 of 72 sentences are hard to read - 30 of 72 sentences are very hard to read That's very close to the score of the 2010 article, the biggest difference is the lower numbe…

Or maybe this Hemingway scoring is bunk.

I don't think it's a good measure of overall quality. But if the writing became less crisp (as the article claims) I'd expect the score to change.

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

#73

Post by aerovistae »

TravisLS wrote: post #61
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".

Oh wow it's almost completely okay with Hemingway. I pasted some of his work in and it had almost no complaint at all. Good point.

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

#74

Post by 8fGTBjZxBcHq »

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…

So I don't know anything about this app really or its evaluations but I think applying it to acclaimed fiction is not a criticism of applying it to a newspaper article per se.

News articles are meant to convey concrete information relatively concisely. So metrics like sentence length and complexity and adverb count are at least in theory valid things for it to measure and aim to reduce.

Now whether it effectively measures those things I have no idea or opinion about. I didn't know it existed until ten minutes ago but if I had I definitely would have predicted that most highly respected fiction would break its rules all over the place.

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

#75

Post by bko »

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…

Yes, the tool isn't great. But it provides a sanity check to confusing run on sentences or use of adverbs and passive voice.

I also pasted the first page of The Lottery, and it scored it a Grade of 11, Readability: OK, compared to a 14 on the Times article.

Do you find the times article mentioned easy to read or well written?

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

#76

Post by sleepydog »

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…

For kicks, I threw a few paragraphs from The old man and the sea to see if the editor displayed any deference to its namesake. Red all over, "very hard to read", "use of the passive voice".

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

#77

Post by Nullabillity »

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…

Yup, any kind of automatic quality assessment tool is made with the assumption that quality is even something that can be measured objectively.

Zoe Bee recently made a pretty good video about why this falls completely flat for grammar (rather than just appealing to "X is good, Y disagrees, Y must be wrong"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5rB9jDbTPU

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

#78

Post by AmVess »

underseacables wrote: post #25

Newspapers could be suffering from a race to the bottom in terms of hiring the cheapest (and probably less skilled) talent. With all of the financial woes compounded, hiring recent J-school graduates versus investing in those with more experience, may be showing the inexperience in print.

Talent costs money. Money most can't afford to pay. Back when papers actually had money, those at the top weren't paid well to begin with.

The major paper in the state I used to live in went completely out of business and had their building repossessed. It was resurrected some time later and is now 8 pages long. Most of that is AP news and cartoons and crossword. Last I looked, there was barely 2 pages of news including the AP articles.

Their pay is so low, one would make more money working at the supermarket as a cashier.

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

#79

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

Hemingway is designed for genre fiction - in fact a certain terse style of genre fiction - not for journalism.

Although I somewhat agree with the premise, especially with science and tech journalism.

Most is fine, but every so often there's an article which looks like it was written by someone for whom English is a fifth language.

Blog posts can be hit and miss too, but that's not such a surprise.

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

#80

Post by gxqoz »

keiferski wrote: post #24

Something that I think is rarely discussed when this topic comes up is the loss of prestige. Working for The New York Times or The New Yorker used to have some weight with pretty much everyone in the country. That is no longer the case. It hasn't been so for at least a couple of decades. Extremely erudite-yet-mostly-apolitical people like Lewis Lapham [1] went to literary magazines and high-end journalism a half-cent…

I'm not familiar with Lapham, but I'd consider many current New Yorker writers to be writing consistently interesting articles. Same with someone like Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books.
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