Live data from Hacker News

When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

mleverything.substack.com

261–270 of 307 posts

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

#261
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in a sense I realize why this is a problem in English: German an some latin languages have grammatical structure to make it easier to create and understand long phrases. English lacks much of that structure. So, long phrases are difficult to parse. Compare for example Proust novels written in English and in his French original. In English it is almost gibberish, even in good translations.

That's probably true. I would have had to work to parse the first sentence in that article. The other thing going on is that, for many situations, the use of punctuation within long sentences to help the reader has sort of fallen out of fashion relative to breaking long sentences up. It's probably also more acceptable to use sentence fragments in certain types of prose.

> The other thing going on is that, for many situations, the use of punctuation within long sentences to help the reader has sort of fallen out of fashion relative to breaking long sentences up.

Semicolons, colons, and dashes, are rarely used now days.

Heck I am impressed when I see a dash properly used, I myself cannot lay claim to such knowledge. I am almost 100% certain that their usage was not taught to me in either school or college.

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

#262

> 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".

You will write like a dog for no good reason.

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

#263
post #147

Summary: a blog about machine learning is criticizing the writing in a culture magazine for being too florid. His argument is that all writing, no matter the audience, should be written in a terse, declarative style at an 8th grade reading level. He attempts to justify this ludicrous opinion by using "Hemingway", a presumably-ML-powered robot copy editor app, to prove that this magazine is "hard to read". There, I sa…

You saved the reader time by writing clearly?!

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think much of the journalism of ideas is happening in podcasts now. Podcasts certainly more of a frontier right now, with lots of people (still!) trying out interesting things, compared to the shrinking world of print journalism. 'Rough Translation' with Gregory Warner is one of the best, imo. The idea of to take important stories in the US and find analogues in other countries, and look at how they've played out.…

This ignores the fact that journalism is a professional discipline with established ethical practices that is practiced by groups of journalists and editors together. Now there's definitely an argument to be made that it routinely fails to live up to those standards and that it has certain structural weaknesses and biases that need to be addressed. But it is, overall, a system of professionals who consider their work…

I worry that hardly anyone believes this anymore. Most of my acquaintance seem to think more highly of their favorite youtube "news" purveyor than any journalistic source. In their minds, journalism stopped being a practice some time ago, and now there are just media megacorps that produce check-the-box ideological hit pieces based on which billionaire owns the company at the moment.

I think that actual journalism is still alive in the hearts of many of the employees of those companies, but it's really hard to convince anyone else of that when there's no differentiation in placement or promotion between serious work and shoddy clickbait.

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

#265

> 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…

Did you try throwing any Hemingway in there? :)

I agree, Hemingway is a useful tool for editing, but it's not any kind of authority on what "good" or "bad" writing is. It's great for reducing your word count during final edit, but that's about it.

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

#266

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#267

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…

Aside: Oh Hitchens! There'l never be another like him. Every time I go back and read him, I get another take on the man and his messages; all not short enough, I'm afraid.

Each revision tends to oscillate wildly for me. I loathe him and I love him, rarely not at the same time.

Death, the artist, very slow; but you've heard that before.

His nom de guerre (l'auteur?) still rings true: A drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay. Rest well.

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

#268

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".

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.

It's Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog but for creative writing.

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it would be fun to create a version of this which pushes writing towards other recognizable styles like Raymond Chandler or David Foster Wallace. Maybe you pick a style from a dropdown and the analysis changes. You could possibly take it even further and automate some transformations of the input to stylize a piece of writing.

To satisfy a DFW style it'd need to understand 2 page long sentences with multiple footnotes per sentence. Haha. It would be a fun one to do though! (I say that loving DFW)
Post reply on HN