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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?

#181

Post by iamatworknow »

legitster wrote: post #63

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…

>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".

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, especially in the context of news media. As an American public school millennial I distinctly remember covering the term "yellow journalism" in social studies classes in multiple years. But the moral I always took from those lessons was "Back in the past, like at the time of the Spanish-American war, the news media fudged the facts to push their own agenda". Yellow journalism was just a vocabulary term used for something that happened a long time ago. We weren't taught to apply the lessons to our modern lives, which would've been infinitely more valuable than memorizing flash cards. I can't help but think that the whole fake news thing would've been much less of a surprise to people of my generation had a bit more time been spent on learning applicable lessons using history as a context, and not just remembering trivia.

Likewise when we had research projects or essays to write, it was just as you said -- a fill in the blanks exercise. If you found a book in the library that had something relevant you could reference, well, it was a book in the library, so it was obviously true, right? You're going through the motions but you're not thinking for yourself. I didn't get a real introduction into how to actually do research until my first year of college.

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

#182

Post by vharuck »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #50
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…

It isn't just that journalism has become an ideological battleground. Even without the cultural warfare, once-mighty publications would still be seen as in decline. The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy. Due to the pressures of swiftly producing content that draws maximum clicks, journalists at even august publications are now forced to create articles little distinguishable from a minimum-wage content wr…

>There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices.

Have there been any studies to back up this pervasive idea of declining attention spans? I'm asking honestly, not combatively. It has some signs of "common sense" beliefs that aren't true or useful: generalizing over a large group, lamenting something lost, and focusing on something poorly defined. Of course, those qualities don't mean it's a false belief, but they do make me want hard data before I believe it.

Especially because I've seen signs of the opposite with TV shows. Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect.

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

#183

Post by watwut »

whoopdedo wrote: post #168
TravisLS wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I would say, no not really. The goal is to make writing readable to human, not same as Hemingway wrote. Those are two different goals, despite Hemingway being also readable.

Practically, I don't have problem to understand American major newspapers.

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

#184

Post by ghaff »

bko wrote: post #75
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?

That Times article is not great. Not sure if I'd have made it through the first paragraph. That said, these types of tools often seem to be about dumbing things down to increase "engagement."

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

#185

Post by tim333 »

alisonkisk wrote: post #166
kingofpandora wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The article mentions "8 use of passive voice" in the app's report.

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

#186

Post by avree »

It's funny that the author makes several mistakes in this piece criticizing writing.

The first jumped off the page at me:

"She is involved in The Drunken Canal, a regional print publication based New York City"

This is also bad writing:

“Honor Levy was conflicted about pulling her piece from The Drunken Canal, a regional New York print paper she began last year. She had several short stories published in the New Yorker, but this felt different.”

Regional is a redundant descriptor if New York is included. Just saying "regional" would make the sentence flow better. "Print paper" also doesn't have meaning, it's something the author made up.

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

#187

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

Barrin92 wrote: post #176
africanboy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

OP's point is that all numbers are arbitrary (to varying degrees). The act of quantifying always imposes some sort of framework on what you're trying to look at, and we live in an age of pretty vulgar scientism where this is associated with 'objectivity'. From 'personality scores' for applicants, to social credit scores, and in this case the quality of writing in a newspaper.

Right. The number 3 is inarguable. That 4+2=6 is inarguable. The applicability of a give statistic to a given situation or argument is a much more difficult proposition, but people too frequently treat a statistic as relevant just because it's easy to compute.

After all mercury is in retrograde, and that's a scientific fact.

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

#188

Post by xkr »

keiferski wrote: post #123
gxqoz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My approach is to take their weekly magazines (paper or digital) instead of browsing through the home page. Weekly editions still include an article or two on US politics, but in general are significantly more diverse.

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

#190

Post by Zelphyr »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #70
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…

A medical provider I know had a medical assistant that would write charts that were next to illegible. Little to no punctuation or capitalization. Slang. etc... The provider invariably had to go back and rewrite the charts because they didn't want that associated with their name.

It's no wonder more and more people don't care about virtually unedited published content. In addition to not caring, often times they don't even know the difference.

Which begs the question for me: what is it they say we're getting with all these standardized tests and the singular focus on teaching kids to pass those tests again? Because it seems to me we're about to have a populace doesn't read and can't write.

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