151–160 of 307 posts
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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!
A measure that becomes a target often stops being a good measure.
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I started reading about 10 years ago so don't have a great reference for earlier writing. But just looking at some of ones from this year highlighted on longform, there was some great stuff here: https://longform.org/archive/publications/new-yorker For instance "Trolling the Great Outdoors", "Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?", and "Fish Farming Is Feeding the Globe. What’s t…
It's not that they are universally terrible now, just that they've fallen into the same political-hype blackhole as everyone else. I remember looking at their home page a few years ago and seeing the top 10 articles all being about Trump. That obsession with politics didn't really happen in previous eras and even when it did, it was counterbalanced by some legitimate literary criticism. Looking at their home page now…
The thing is, it seems like Mr. Remnick has been a very good administrator of the magazine, guiding it through a very rough time for print media, so the chances that he will be replaced or step down anytime soon are slim.
That said, I am looking forward to a fresh perspective for the magazine in the future even if I still mostly enjoy it now.
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 personally think it's post-modernism and the adjacent ideologies are responsible for this. Since everything is subjective and there's no objective notion of truth and it's all moral relativism, one has the license to do anything they want. That's why activism and ideologies took over professional integrity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...
> 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 pasted some excerpts from a paper I was reading and it gave the 'Post-Graduate' reading level. Does not mean it's bad writing, just hard to read (it's probably inevitable at that level).
It's probably a great tool for daily work, some people at my workplace used Grammarly, but it's paid, so this could be a good alternative.
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But I've always wondered: why should business writing be like Hemingway's writing? He wasn't writing for that audience. Seems like it would be better to find examples of good writing for a business audience and use those. Same thing for journalistic writing: that's not what Hemingway was doing. Maybe take all the Pulitzer winning journalism from a few decades and use that or something. But it just seems weird to pick…
It’s a good question and one I don’t know how to answer absolutely. The reason why I think it most generally applies to “business writing” is because this area is most likely to value efficiency over others. I don’t think it’s meant to say business folk should write like Hemingway, but that Hemingway is the most popular writer in this style.
Agreed. The general style values simple sentences which helps reading speed and comprehension, especially for audiences that don't share your native language. And it reduces fluff. Adverbs, for example, generally don't help make a point in business writing - data does.
See the example in that last sentence? I snuck a premise instead of stating it as a hypothesis or providing data to support it. At best that causes confusion for the reader and at worst it can mislead people that aren't carefully watching out for pitfalls like that.
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Well, I suppose you could read some critical analysis of it if you're interested in why it's considered great; I'm no expert. For what it's worth I agree with its status in the canon: it's a powerful and carefully articulated story in a very compact form with a unique, exciting, and thought-provoking premise. The perfect short story.
Yes it is good entertainment, but wouldnt then the kids read those anyways?
Cherry-picking ten bad sentences from tens of thousands written per day seems like a long-tail metric or anecdotal at best.
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 pa…
If she had learned and practiced the 5th grade style that you learned, this persuasive essay in high school would have been a piece of cake. She’d be able to structure her thinking and communicate a point.
> 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 am a bit surprised about: " The Lottery is considered a masterpiece of a short story, and is widely taught in American high schools." Really? I have difficulties understanding this. Is it because it is interesting for the kids through its shock value and manageable length? But this then looks to me like declaring ketchup to be vegetables so enough veggies are eaten at the canteen.
For the latter it’s because issues students deal with in school directly parallel those in the story.