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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?

#161

Post by Grim-444 »

cuillevel3 wrote: post #139
kyle_martin1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Wikipedia says Project Veritas is a far right activists group, you could have honestly mentioned that.

They're a far right activist group according to the leftists who write that definition, yes. It's all so tiring, it's straight out of 1984. Isn't it interesting that you'll never once ever read the phrase "far left activist group"? Why does it only go one way?

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

#162

Post by idolaspecus »

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…

There's no modern Lapham because we don't "need" (quotes because I actually think we have a big problem here) one anymore. Lapham's role was as a representative of the learned readership at the institution. These days, we're our own representatives. It is quite trivial for me to curate a list of extremely interesting individuals who publish writing or podcasts or lectures or whatever.

Now, the reason I quoted "need" above, what I think is a huge problem with the world today, is that by democratizing production we've done the opposite with consumption. It's super difficult to access high-quality information these days unless you're already fairly well educated and have the tools to filter the noise. I don't really know what to do about this.

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

#163

Post by ghaff »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #145
ghaff wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how easy do you think it is for one journalist to produce content that 1000 people will pay $100/year for? (And that number is probably too low because you probably have significant marketing expenses if nothing else.)

I mean, there are a lot of people already doing it on Substack. The common marketing mechanism seems to be to make many of the articles available to non-subscribers (or do this after a time delay), and then they get spread around on social media which acts as promotion for the author.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are some substack newsletters that make that kind of money, especially if people brought a large audience from elsewhere. I doubt many of them are covering local news which is what this sub-thread was about. Personally, I doubt I'd pay $100/year for a newsletter unless it were making me money or really delved into some niche topic of significant interest not well-covered elsewhere. But I'm glad if some people are making a living off it.

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

#164

Post by iudqnolq »

akudha wrote: post #95
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…

Can anyone shed light on how it works? There is another one that comes to mind, PTE exam. The PTE exam is fully computer graded (as far as I know), including written essay. I wonder how they do it. The algorithm has to account for topic relevance, grammatical errors, style, clarity etc etc. Topic relevance alone can be quite hard, isn't it? If the question is "What is your opinion on making voting mandatory? Support…

You might enjoy this researcher's automated high scoring essay generator

> Our hypothesis was simple. If the AES machine consistently gave high scores to machine generated gibberish, we could surmise that 1) the construct being measured by the machines is not an essential component of human communication; and 2) students could be taught similar strategies to achieve high scores on computer scored writing tests by sprinkling their prose with long meaningless sentences composed of pretentious and irrelevant words.

> Our greatest surprise was how easy it was to fool all of the machines. We succeeded on our first try, demonstrating that rather than being elegant and complex manifestations of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, these engines could best be characterized as crude stupid machines.

EDIT (an example):

> We have now used the Babel Generator over twenty times to generate essays for the site, which, when submitted, receive top scores with comments such as articulates a clear and insightful position on the issue in accordance with the assigned task and sustains a well-focused, well-organized analysis, connecting ideas logically” for essays that read like this following opening paragraph:

> Careers with corroboration has not, and in all likelihood never will be compassionate, gratuitous, and disciplinary. Mankind will always proclaim noesis; many for a trope but a few on executioner. A quantity of vocation lies in the study of reality as well as the area of semantics. Why is imaginativeness so pulverous to happenstance? The reply to this query is that knowledge is vehemently and boisterously contemporary.

https://lesperelman.com/writing-assessment-robo-grading/babe...

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

#165

Post by kingofpandora »

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…

Any tool that uses passive voice as a heuristic for good versus bad writing is immediately suspect.

And any writer who uses such a tool for validation is unlikely to be a good judge of writing to begin with.

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

#166

Post by alisonkisk »

kingofpandora wrote: post #165
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…

Any tool that uses passive voice as a heuristic for good versus bad writing is immediately suspect. And any writer who uses such a tool for validation is unlikely to be a good judge of writing to begin with.

Is what you meant that it is suspect to have passive voice being used as a heuristic?

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

#167

Post by alisonkisk »

kevan wrote: post #155
prepend wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>>this area is most likely to value efficiency 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 provi…

What was the sneaky premise?

A premise is a hypothesis. We don't explicitly tag all our premises; it's up to the reader to decide if they agree with the premises.

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

#168

Post by whoopdedo »

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".

When it comes to newspapers isn't this the goal, though? Hemingway's writing is journalistic writing. "The [Kansas City] Star’s style guide formed the basis for his own style that ran against the elaborate tendencies of 19th century writers."[1] So if you're judging the style of a journalist's writing a preferable guide is how similar to Hemingway it is.

[1] https://mediahq.com/famous-authors-also-journalists/

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

#169

Post by africanboy »

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!

that's not how it works though...

you can't argue against numbers, you can absolutely argue against arbitrary numbers (like in this example the premise is that the app produces reliable results, which it does not and anyway it should be proved with good, hard to dispute, numbers)

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

#170

Post by munchbunny »

sanderjd wrote: post #124
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…

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…

Won't speak to literary/journalistic writing, but business writing definitely has a problem of quantity over quality. The exercise of really dumbing down the language helps with making sure you're actually getting the point across instead of just talking in vague abstractions. It also helps for communicating with ESL colleagues. In that sense, "more like Hemingway" is probably going in the right direction.
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