Webwriting in Spanish Cast your bread upon the waters... I just ran across a Spanish website called elclerigo! that deals with a lot of web issues, and there was a post on how to write for the web, based on the Spanish translation of my book. The examples given were by Spanish students, dealing with Spanish subjects. This cheered me up. When I first read Escribir para la Web, I realized at once...
Cast your bread upon the waters...
I just ran across a Spanish website called elclerigo! that deals with a lot of web issues, and there was a post on how to write for the web, based on the Spanish translation of my book.
The examples given were by Spanish students, dealing with Spanish subjects. This cheered me up. When I first read Escribir para la Web, I realized at once that the examples and links were those of the English version. Native Spanish speakers would be likely to find my links irrelevant to their own needs.
(The translator, however, did an extraordinary job of echoing my writing style...it was pleasant but odd to read myself in such fluent Spanish, when my command of the language is really pretty weak.)
Well, I'm glad that the teacher and students found the book useful, and it's given me more food for thought about the fourth edition. And I'm adding this site to the Foreign-Language Resources list.
Indonesia pushes Wordpress for blogger's identity; Canadians beat up redheads Via the Jakarta Post: Govt to pressurize Wordpress into disclosing blogger's ID. The Department of Communication and Information has sent a formal request to blog hosting site Wordpress to cooperate in the investigation of a blogger allegedly behind a blog containing a comic of Prophet Muhammad. Telecommunication Technology director general Cahyana Ahmadjayadi said legal processing was to continue regardless of the blog's shutdown. "This is considered as a cybercrime," Ahmadjayadi...
Via the Jakarta Post: Govt to pressurize Wordpress into disclosing blogger's ID.
The Department of Communication and Information has sent a formal request to blog hosting site Wordpress to cooperate in the investigation of a blogger allegedly behind a blog containing a comic of Prophet Muhammad.
Telecommunication Technology director general Cahyana Ahmadjayadi said legal processing was to continue regardless of the blog's shutdown.
"This is considered as a cybercrime," Ahmadjayadi said, as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.
"Even in its terms of services it's clear that hate speech isn't allowed," he said, adding that he is confident the identity of the blogger would eventually surface.
"If Wordpress declines to disclose the blog owner's identity, we will trace the person ourself," said Ahmadjayadi, referring in particular to the National Police's digital forensic lab.
But it's not a simple issue of repressive Indonesians versus free-spirited bloggers. What happens if such a post leads to someone's being hurt or killed?
It's just happened here in British Columbia thanks to Kick a Ginger Day, a half-witted online prank that led to some redheaded kids being assaulted by their classmates. The BC Teachers' Federation is highly angry, and I don't blame them.
The tools of propaganda Via Poynter Online: Here's your handy-dandy propaganda detector. Excerpt: No politician, Republican or Democrat, would admit he or she is in the propaganda business. And no journalist I know would admit to being an enabler of the propaganda efforts of a particular political party. Like it or not, every scripted moment of every convention, every syllable of every campaign speech, is an act of political propaganda. It follows that to...
Via Poynter Online: Here's your handy-dandy propaganda detector. Excerpt:
No politician, Republican or Democrat, would admit he or she is in the propaganda business. And no journalist I know would admit to being an enabler of the propaganda efforts of a particular political party.
Like it or not, every scripted moment of every convention, every syllable of every campaign speech, is an act of political propaganda. It follows that to cover politics responsibly, reporters must come equipped with a tuned-up, turbo-charged propaganda detector.
In an anthology of essays on language, I stumbled upon a pamphlet titled "How to Detect Propaganda," published in 1937 by a short-lived organization called the Institute for Propaganda Analysis.
As you can imagine, the years leading up to World War II frothed with propaganda. The Institute, co-founded by Clyde R. Miller of Columbia University, was an early advocate of what we now called "critical literacy."
The pamphlet begins, "If American citizens are to have clear understanding of present-day conditions and what to do about them, they must be able to recognize propaganda, to analyze it, and to appraise it."
Seventy-one years later, the lessons are as relevant as ever. I was pleased to see the IPA's propaganda devices mentioned in Poynter, because I tried for decades to teach them to my students. With political websites like memeorandrum working as propaganda geysers, we all need to be aware of what they're spouting.
On the same topic, I recently published an article on Blogs for Election Junkies in The Tyee.
BEA Book Expo America: Good for Independent Publishers? Getting Your Book on National TV - 8 Tips Get aboard the Cluetrain again Via Inspecht, an Australian blog: The Cluetrain rides again. Excerpt: Almost 10 years ago Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine published a book that was going to change the way we saw the world, The Cluetrain Manifesto. The basic premise in the book is that markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, and honest, sometimes even direct. Basically you can’t fake it....
Via Inspecht, an Australian blog: The Cluetrain rides again. Excerpt:
Almost 10 years ago Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine published a book that was going to change the way we saw the world, The Cluetrain Manifesto.
The basic premise in the book is that markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, and honest, sometimes even direct. Basically you can’t fake it.
Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to engage in a corporate monotone of mission statements, product strategies and , marketing brochures.
However everything is now changing. People are connecting, and working together. The Internet is enabling these conversations and there is nothing corporations can do to stop it.
The blog post contain a slide show of the Cluetrain Manifesto's key points. Very much worth reviewing (for the old-timers) and discovering (for the newbies).
Thanks to Amy Gahran for the link.
Avoid cliché like the plague? Never Robert Fisk is best known as a journalist specializing in the Middle East. But today he turns his attention to another chronic problem. Via The Independent: Avoid cliché like the plague? Never. Excerpt: Opposite my apartment in Beirut there used to live an American-born English teacher called Marion Lanson. When she departed Lebanon, I inherited her 1949 Random House American College Dictionary, edited by one Clarence L Barnhart "with the...
Robert Fisk is best known as a journalist specializing in the Middle East. But today he turns his attention to another chronic problem. Via The Independent: Avoid cliché like the plague? Never. Excerpt:
Opposite my apartment in Beirut there used to live an American-born English teacher called Marion Lanson. When she departed Lebanon, I inherited her 1949 Random House American College Dictionary, edited by one Clarence L Barnhart "with the Assistance of 355 Authorities and Specialists". I like "authorities" and "specialists" very much because we have largely abandoned such words.
I was keen to look up Mr Barnhart's definition of that plague of modern journalism, the cliché. "A trite, stereotyped expression, idea, practice, etc, as 'sadder but wiser', 'strong as an ox'."
Alas, I fear these are imaginative expressions compared with the stuff we now consume. Mr. Barnhart's German translation of cliché – "klitsch" or "doughy mass" – seems more appropriate for the assaults on literacy that we commit today.
All this came to mind when I learned this week of the coup in Mauretania, where the army took power after President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi unwisely tried to fire some of his senior officers.
Would tanks "roll" into the capital, I asked myself? Tanks always "roll", don't they? I have never actually seen a tank perform this extraordinary act but, clichés being what they are, my eye sped down the Mauretania story for my friendly "roll". And sure enough – perhaps because Mauretania doesn't have a lot of tanks – there it was. The president, said the agency report, "was arrested after military convoys rolled through the capital Nouakchott".
Why do we use these dead words? There is a dictionary of clichés on my desktop in Beirut and I heartily recommend Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words by the Australian Don Watson.
It contains one of my most hated clichés: core. As in "core issues", "core business" or "core learning outcomes". Rather like "key speakers" – of which I always refuse to be a member – these clichés attempt to smother idiocy with deep learning (or "core" learning, perhaps).
What is this fascination with stale language? Let me rage. I hate all reports about wars where "the guns fall silent"; the retirement period for artillery being rather short, it's only a matter of time before the "clouds of war" begin to gather once more, when opponents are "pitted" against each other, when guns "soften up" their targets, and national governments complain about "terrorists" crossing (ergo: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan) "porous borders". In Iraq, we may experience a "spike" of violence, followed – of course – by a successful "surge".
By all means read the whole thing.
Obama: The first hypertext inaugural speech? I'm not a huge fan of Stanley Fish, but today in the New York Times he did the best parsing I've seen of Barack Obama’s Prose Style. Excerpt:... if you look at the text – spread out like a patient etherized on a table – that’s exactly what it’s like. There are few transitions and those there are – “for,” “nor,” “as for,” “so,” “and so” – seem just stuck...
I'm not a huge fan of Stanley Fish, but today in the
New York Times he did the best parsing I've seen of
Barack Obama’s Prose Style. Excerpt:
... if you look at the text – spread out like a patient etherized on a table – that’s exactly what it’s like. There are few transitions and those there are – “for,” “nor,” “as for,” “so,” “and so” – seem just stuck in, providing a pause, not a marker of logical progression.
Obama doesn’t deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate.
Of course, as something heard rather than viewed, the speech provides no spaces for contemplation. We have barely taken in a small rhetorical flourish like “All this we can do. All this we will do” before it disappears in the rear-view mirror.
But if we regard the text as an object rather than as a performance in time, it becomes possible (and rewarding) to do what the pundits are doing: linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication.
There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”
The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word.
Parataxis is what hypertext is all about: individual ideas, with no connections between them except those that the reader chooses to make. For much of my forty years as a teacher of writing, I pushed my students to make connections.
Lead your reader from one idea to the next, I told them. That "Next" or "Therefore" or "However" would put your reader into the right frame of mind.
But for close to two decades, we have increasingly read hypertext rather than print text, and made our own connections between chunks. Obama's own prose style is quite at home in print, where he's talking to us one on one. When he's talking to a million people face to face, and a couple of billion around the world, he settles comfortably into parataxis.
No one seems to mind.
Webwriters, meet your great-grandfather A fascinating article in The New York Times: The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web. Excerpt: On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels...
A fascinating article in The New York Times: The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web. Excerpt:
On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.
In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files.
He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”
Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”
Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.
Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough.
“The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”
For more about Paul Otlet, visit Wikipedia.
But I still insist that the true father of the internet was none other than Mark Twain.
Cartooning for the web In his Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw argues that News websites should make more use of cartoons (and infographics). He describes how a cartoon on OJR got 40,000 hits from around the world. The cartoon was also widely translated. It's a point worth considering, especially for webwriters and bloggers who deal with worldwide audiences.
In his Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw argues that News websites should make more use of cartoons (and infographics). He describes how a cartoon on OJR got 40,000 hits from around the world. The cartoon was also widely translated.
It's a point worth considering, especially for webwriters and bloggers who deal with worldwide audiences.
Why the Print Media Still Don't Get It We're having a federal election here in Canada, and The Globe and Mail is covering it very well. But this story by one of the paper's top reporters, Michael Valpy, shows why print text doesn't work online: Outlook gets gloomier for Tories, polls suggest. Here's an excerpt from the end of the story, with my comments and revisions between paragraphs: There have been a number of theories offered for Canadians'...
We're having a federal election here in Canada, and The Globe and Mail is covering it very well. But this story by one of the paper's top reporters, Michael Valpy, shows why print text doesn't work online: Outlook gets gloomier for Tories, polls suggest. Here's an excerpt from the end of the story, with my comments and revisions between paragraphs:
There have been a number of theories offered for Canadians' growing coolness toward Mr. Harper as the campaign progresses, most focusing on his response – or perceived absence of response – to the gathering economic crisis.
[A sentence of online text should normally run to 20 words maximum. This is 34 words, starting with the dead word "There."]
Observers suggest several theories for Canadians' growing coolness to Mr. Harper. Most focus on his poor response to the current economic crisis.
But a leading social scientist, speaking for background, suggested yesterday that Canadians see in Mr. Harper a Robespierre-type character, the French revolutionary leader who at first was embraced by the people for his unflappability, control and appearance of towering moral rectitude and then rejected by them for the same reasons.
[Fifty words in one sentence! Three sentences convey the same meaning more clearly:]
A leading social scientist, speaking on background, said yesterday that Canadians see Mr. Harper as a Robespierre. In the French Revolution, the people embraced Robespierre for his calm, control, and apparent morality. Then they rejected him for the same reasons.
“Because there was no sense that if he took his clothes off, he'd be the same as the rest of us,” the social scientist said.
[You've got to quote your sources word for word. I wish the source had said:]
"They didn't think he'd be the same as the rest of us if he took his clothes off," said the social scientist.
Pollsters said the possibility exists that the gap between the Conservatives and Liberals will widen again before voting day but it's less and less likely.
Pollsters said the Liberal-Conservative gap may widen again before election day. But they consider it unlikely. [25 words in the original sentence. Revised: 17 words in two sentences.]
In Quebec, the Liberals now have replaced the Conservatives as the federalist option to the Bloc. “There are no rabbits to be pulled out of the hat for the Conservatives,” Mr. Donolo said.
In Quebec, the Liberals have replaced the Conservatives as the federalist choice. "The Conservatives have no rabbits to pull out of their hat," said Mr. Donolo.
There are signs the Green vote, which is as high as 14 per cent in B.C., is becoming unstuck. And Mr. Graves said the three groups with the most aversion to Mr. Harper – young voters, low-income voters and NDP supporters in Ontario – have historically shown a willingness to swing to the Liberals.
[Another boring "There" sentence, plus a 33-word sentence. Consider this version with two sentences and 33 words total:]
The Green vote, up to 14 percent in BC, is weakening. Mr. Graves said three groups hostile to Mr. Harper are historically likely to vote Liberal: young voters, poor voters, and Ontario New Democrats.
Michael Valpy is a fine and thoughtful writer. But if his paper won't edit him for online readers, he won't reach the readers he deserves. And his paper won't survive online as long as it should.
BEA Info Reading speed on computer screens As I'm pulling together materials for the fourth edition of Writing for the Web, I'm finding it hard to update one important issue. For decades, it's been a given that reading text on a computer screen is harder than reading it on paper. The effect is that we read online text 25% more slowly than text on paper. Jakob Nielsen made that critical point back in the 1990s, and said...
As I'm pulling together materials for the fourth edition of Writing for the Web, I'm finding it hard to update one important issue.
For decades, it's been a given that reading text on a computer screen is harder than reading it on paper. The effect is that we read online text 25% more slowly than text on paper.
Jakob Nielsen made that critical point back in the 1990s, and said it was a problem with screen resolution. By 2009, he predicted, resolution would be equivalent to print on paper.
But Nielsen hasn't addressed the issue recently, and when I search for other studies, I find little or nothing published since about 2003. Can anyone point me to recent studies that indicate how quickly people read onscreen, using recent computers, compared to reading text on print?
Welcome to the White House—and the 21st Century (updated) Back in 2002, giving a workshop in Sao Paulo, I showed my students the current White House website. It was pretty dull, but it did offer a page in Spanish. Politically smart, I guess, except that the links on the Spanish page were still in English. Politics on the web was still pretty primitive.Last year I wrote an article about the gorgeous Barack Obama campaign website. Clearly, the upstart understood...
Back in 2002, giving a workshop in Sao Paulo, I showed my students the current White House website. It was pretty dull, but it did offer a page in Spanish. Politically smart, I guess, except that the links on the Spanish page were still in English. Politics on the web was still pretty primitive.
Last year I wrote an article about the gorgeous
Barack Obama campaign website. Clearly, the upstart understood the web far better than any other politician on the planet.
Webwriters, take notes. Barack Obama has raised the standard.
I've discussed the site in more detail on
The Hook, the politics blog of
The Tyee.
Update: Jimmy Orr at the
Christian Science Monitor has a good article on the site, written from his perspective as W's original website guy.
A new edition of Writing for the Web I dropped in to see my publisher yesterday, and he blindsided me by reporting that Writing for the Web 3.0 has practically sold out. But he doesn't want to reprint it—he wants a fourth edition. Well, that was welcome news, and I can think at once of several areas that deserve fuller treatment. Writing for blogs is an obvious one. Maybe some concrete advice on search-engine optimization. And certainly some...
I dropped in to see my publisher yesterday, and he blindsided me by reporting that Writing for the Web 3.0 has practically sold out. But he doesn't want to reprint it—he wants a fourth edition.
Well, that was welcome news, and I can think at once of several areas that deserve fuller treatment. Writing for blogs is an obvious one. Maybe some concrete advice on search-engine optimization. And certainly some more exercise material, both in the book and here on its blog, would be useful.
But this is an interactive medium, so I'd be grateful for your suggestions on what you'd like to see in a new edition of the book. Even if you haven't read it, tell me about what your concerns and interests are. If the present edition already deals with them, great. If not, even better—I'll be sure to address your issues in the new edition.
Writing the Web’s Future in Many Languages Via the December 30 New York Times: Writing the Web’s Future in Many Languages. Excerpt:The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States.The globalization of the Web...
The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many.
Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States.
The globalization of the Web has inspired entrepreneurs like Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer from outside Bangalore, India. Mr. Ram Prakash learned English as a teenager, but he still prefers to express himself to friends and family members in his native Kannada. But using Kannada on the Web involves computer keyboard maps that even Mr. Ram Prakash finds challenging to learn.
So in 2006 he developed Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad’s predictive engine converts them into local-language script. Bloggers and authors rave about the service, which has attracted interest from the cellphone maker Nokia and the attention of Google Inc., which has since introduced its own transliteration tool.
Mr. Ram Prakash said Western technology companies have misunderstood the linguistic landscape of India, where English is spoken proficiently by only about a tenth of the population and even many college-educated Indians prefer the contours of their native tongues for everyday speech.
“You’ve got to give them an opportunity to express themselves correctly, rather than make a fool out of themselves and forcing them to use English,” he said.
It's a fascinating article about an important development. I've added a link to Quillpad in the Webwriting Resources list.
George Orwell Blogs What a resource! The Orwell Diaries are the online journals of one of the 20th century's greatest writers, published 70 years to the day after he wrote them. I've put a link to them in the Webwriting Resources list.
What a resource! The Orwell Diaries are the online journals of one of the 20th century's greatest writers, published 70 years to the day after he wrote them. I've put a link to them in the Webwriting Resources list.
How we read online Via Slate: Lazy Bastards: How we read online.. It's based on Jakob Nielsen's principles, and it's old stuff to veteran webwriters, but it could be useful in explaining to others why some webtext succeeds and other webtext fails. In this connection, see also Is Google Making Us Stupid? in the July/August 2008 Atlantic.
Via Slate: Lazy Bastards: How we read online.. It's based on Jakob Nielsen's principles, and it's old stuff to veteran webwriters, but it could be useful in explaining to others why some webtext succeeds and other webtext fails.
In this connection, see also Is Google Making Us Stupid? in the July/August 2008 Atlantic.
Tips for a New Website It\'s not easy not easy to promote your website or get sales initially. Following the tips given in this column can at least give your Web site ..
Worst websites of 2008 I haven't visited Web Pages That Suck in a long time, but I did so this evening. Not sure it was a good idea. I clicked on the button for Contenders for worst web site of 2008 group 1, and no, it was not an exaggeration. I looked at the first ten, and decided not to go further. While HavenWorks.com ranks just #3, it was the only site that made...
I haven't visited Web Pages That Suck in a long time, but I did so this evening. Not sure it was a good idea.
I clicked on the button for Contenders for worst web site of 2008 group 1, and no, it was not an exaggeration. I looked at the first ten, and decided not to go further.
While HavenWorks.com ranks just #3, it was the only site that made me cry out in horror.
Here we are, well into the web's second decade, and people are still creating sites like this?
Not only that, people are still providing Websites That Suck with plenty of new material.
Some of these sites allow you to craft a resume, while others are networking platforms that contain job listings. By signing up for all ten, you increase your chances of getting a job and decrease the amount of time you’ll spend searching for a new one. Three of the listed sites can be combined with other sites to be more impactful. In addition to joining, creating profiles and searching for jobs, I encourage you to support these sites with either a traditional website or blog, so that you have more to present to employers, in addition to your profile.
From the acid-cloud haze of the Cash4Gold processing center steps forth a shadowy figure, fingers stained with orange testing fluid. It’s an ex-Cash4Gold employee and in-between tuberculosic wheezes he manages to pass you a yellow legal paid with 10 confessions about how his former employer taught him to rip people off. Then he evaporates leaving behind a pile of gold dust. You dip your finger in it and touch it to your tongue. Just as you thought: fool’s gold.
