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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?

#301

Post by sanderjd »

munchbunny wrote: post #170
sanderjd wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess it's that I've always thought this is a misunderstanding of what Hemingway was doing. He wasn't trying to write simple language comprehensible to busy business people trying to get their jobs done. He was trying to write good literature as he saw it. Any alignment of the two things is accidental at best but often just a misapplication. He left things out in order for them to exist in the reader's own imaginative journey through the book; his spareness was a way of welcoming the reader into the story. That is not a good thing in business writing!

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

#302

Post by sanderjd »

prepend wrote: post #133
sanderjd wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But my quibble is that I don't think Hemingway valued efficiency. It would be much more efficient to write "There was a man in the hospital who had lost his reproductive organs and this resulted in a tragically failed romance" but that is not how he wrote the story, because it's bad literature. But if someone at work asked me to write them an email about it, that's what I would write, because it's much more efficient than a whole novel.

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

#303

Post by MrMan »

keiferski wrote: post #90
gxqoz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to be a big reader of The New Yorker. To me, they've slipped even more than the Times over the last decade, probably because they were on a higher perch.

WSJ, Economist, New Yorker have all been hollowed out.

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

#304

Post by MrMan »

bww wrote: 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…

I was going to run your comment through the Hemingway app but when I googled it I got to a site which has an expired SSL cert, and then instead of it being a harmless free hobby project where you paste text in, they want me to buy a 20 dollar app. Nice try, growth hackers critiquing NYT.

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

#305

Post by jfengel »

oe wrote: post #259
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried to get into podcasts more times than I can count. I just can't get there. Besides the advantages you describe, I can "consume" the content SO much more quickly on a page than a podcast, even if I speed it up, which seriously degrades the medium anyway.

I feel like many if not all podcasters are my “friends” who I chat with, only I don’t need to speak. I don’t see why they should convey their ideas any faster. I enjoy whatever time we spend together and it’s usually enough to fill the time on my commute or washing the dishes.

I do listen to my podcasts at about 1.4x, with an additional feature to shorten silences (like pauses, and even between words and sentences) that bumps it up to about 1.5x-1.6x. To me, that makes them feel peppier without feeling rushed. (Compared to the standard pacing associated with radio broadcasts, which is what many podcasters aim for.)

As you note, this is used to provide distraction during time that my hands are busy but my ears aren't: commuting, running, etc. I suspect that at least some of the others in this thread are listening to music under similar circumstances. Or maybe they're just better than me about getting lost in their own thoughts.

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

#306

Post by jfengel »

inglor_cz wrote: post #244
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.

Writer here, reasonably competent, because people pay me for writing (in Czech; forgive me my English errors). Passive voice in narration is ... strange most of the time. It kicks the reader out of the situation, like Out-of-body experience, only it is an Out-of-book experience. "John was killed by the assassins, his body was later discovered by a cleaning lady, carried out by morticians and dissected by pathologists…

Just for comparison, in the active voice:

"The assassins killed John, the cleaning lady discovered his body later, the morticians carried him out and the pathologists dissected him."

It is better, though not massively so. It's tighter. (Personally I'd break it into four sentences, but that's just me. I also would have used an Oxford comma, for that matter.)

The real problem is that the passive voice can be used for:

"John was killed, his body was later discovered, carried out, and dissected".

It's definitely punchy, and as the beginning of a thriller novel its vagueness could be exciting. But any place else you're left mostly with questions. It would be terrible in a newspaper account. And in an actual police report, it would sound like somebody was covering something up.

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

#307

Post by SeanLuke »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #250
SeanLuke wrote: post #132

I've found editing, not writing, to have gone right down the drain in modern newspapers. It's clear many stories are poorly edited if at all. I don't want to be That Guy, but I've also noted a huge increase in terrible, incredible examples of the need for the Serial Comma, all by clueless editors. One big one was last week in the WP: > Jackson’s former colleagues vastly disapproved of his conduct and leadership withi…

Your example seems perfectly cromulent to me. Obviously an uncharitable reader could interpret it differently, but human language is inherently ambiguous and readers are used to determining how to read lists in context.

I'll bet you also say that to your parents, Ayn Rand and God.

The serial comma is meant to remove ambiguity. This passage is not just ambiguous, it's most obvious parse is completely wrong. I think it's a great example of why the serial comma is so important.

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