Journalism

writing skills for print, radio, new media, and commerce

writing skills for print, radio, new media, and commerce

Essential Blogging

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

writing for the Web – a popular revolution

Blogs (it’s a contraction of Web Logs) are a form of personal diary kept as Web pages. They can record anything from the trivial details of your own life to online political manifestos. But why would anybody want to read them? Well, some people have transformed the personal diary into an art form, most sprinkle their pages with useful links, others develop what amounts to a one-person daily newspaper, and a few manage to spin out an entirely new form of instant journalism.

It’s so easy, you see. All you need to do is register with a Blogging site, type your thoughts into the templates they provide, and press the Go button. A few seconds later, you’re published on the Web. Of course there’s a little more to it than that – but not much. This book offers a tour of the best blogging sites, how to upload and maintain your pages, and how to configure the options to get the best effects.

A series of chapters, clearly written by enthusiasts, takes you through which Blog sites and software are available – from Blogger, Radio Userland (free software), Moveable Type, and WordPress. Some of these have developed rapidly beyond mere blogging tools into small-scale content management systems.

All this is expanding at a breathtaking rate. Some people even have blogs running alongside serious Web sites. When you come to look at the thousands upon thousands of blogs, you will be amazed at the variety and the skill of the best.

There’s an element of evangelical fervour in all this. Many bloggers seem like techno-Hippies, but the most thoughtful, such as Meg Hourihan, have made claims for blogging as a new form of writing:

Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of ‘page’), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.

And just in case you think this might all be a little trivial, these blogs are real Web pages. So they are tracked by search engines – and if enough people read them, they might therefore become ‘famous’. Many are already joining affiliate programmes and even attracting advertising.

If you want to join in this frenzy of personal expression, build your own soap box, or develop your own one-person newspaper – everything you need by way of instructions is in this one book.

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Cory Doctorow et al, Essential Blogging, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2002, pp.244, ISBN: 0596003889

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Essential English for Journalists

June 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guidance on good writing and editing techniques

Harold Evans was editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981 and then of The Times for a year. [He’s now a New York celebrity with a famous wife]. His earlier publication Newsman’s English was written in the 1970s and has now been revised and updated. Essential English for Journalists is a guide to improving the efficiency of your writing by a method which he announces at the outset as ‘a process of editorial selection, text editing, and presentation’.

In fact he gets off to a slightly shambolic start by describing the various responsibilities for writing in the newsroom, but then settles down to his main subject – the crafting of good prose – where he is quite clearly at home. There’s plenty of good advice on sentence construction, editing for clarity, choice of vocabulary, avoiding obscurity and abstraction, plus eliminating vagueness and cliche. He also includes explanations of words commonly misunderstood – such as chronic, disinterested, and viable (to which he might have added aggravate, which is mistakenly used in the text as a synonym for annoy) – plus some interesting comments on how speeches can be economically digested and reported.

The general tendency of his advice is to prefer the shorter, concrete, and Anglo-Saxon term to the longer, abstract, and Latinate expression which is all-too-prevalent: fire not conflagration, try not endeavour, end not terminate.

He also offers a long and entertaining list of common expressions which roll out of literary-cum-oral usage whose redundancies can be edited to produce a tighter result – ‘blue coloured car’, ‘crisis situation‘, and ‘in the city of Manchester’

Evans gives detailed advice on the structure of good writing. His pages on how to write an introduction will be useful to anybody who wants to make their writing more effective. [In fact I would urge the strategy on those who would like to make the arguments of academic writing stand more clear.] The basic rule is to strike out anything which is not absolutely necessary.

In the centre of the book there is a detailed exposition of how newspaper reports should be written – with critical comments on their structure and narrative strategy. Evans shows how the same basic facts can be arranged to create different emphases. This is an exemplary tutorial for anyone who wishes to acquire the skills of reporting and successful composition.

For all its subject, it’s written in a slightly inflated style which combines the short journalist’s sentence with the vocabulary of an Edwardian litterateur – very self-conscious and aware of its own rhetorical devices.

Readers have not the time and newspapers have not the space for elaborate reiteration. This imposes decisive requirements.

But the advice is sound, and it’s likely to make you look more closely at your own prose. In fact the book has at least three possible readers. It would be an excellent textbook for trainee journalists, especially given the number of clumsy examples Evans quotes and then rewrites as demonstration pieces. Second, it has plenty of tips for experienced journalists and editors trying to write more efficiently. Third, it is full of useful guidance for anyone – beyond the media – who wants to write more coherently.

Evans’ fellow journalist Keith Waterhouse wrote a similar and very amusing guide called Waterhouse on Newspaper Style which unfortunately often seems to be out of print. The two books would make an excellent pairing on any writer’s desk. It would be wise to grab Evans whilst he’s back in re-issue.

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Harold Evans, Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers, London: Random House, 2nd revised edn 2000, pp.256, ISBN: 0712664475

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Here Comes Everybody

October 22, 2010 by Roy Johnson

how change happens when people come together

Clay Shirky’s basic argument in Here Comes Everybody is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.

The classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.

A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.

There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.

The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.

The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.

Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.

There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.

The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.

The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’

Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.

He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.

His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.

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Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp.344, ISBN: 0141030623

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House Style

October 31, 2014 by Roy Johnson

an explanation and guidance notes

House Style is a term used to describe the rules laid down by a business or organisation to regularise the presentation of its written communications and documents. In some cases these rules might be summarised formally in a published Style Guide or Style Manual.

The purpose of codifying what can be written may vary from a desire to control a corporate image (business documents); a need to maintain standards and follow established conventions (academic writing); or a need for accuracy and precision (technical manuals).

Many different types of institutions, businesses, publishers, or public bodies will establish a house style in order to maintain their corporate or brand image.

International	United Nations, European Union
Corporations	Lockheed, General Motors, Microsoft
Publications	New York Times, The Economist
Institutions	University of London, Department of Transport
Retailers	Amazon, Marks and Spencer, IKEA

The origins of house style lie in the realm of printing, where newspapers and book publishers originally sought to establish guidelines for standardising their productions. The best known of these guides is Hart’s Rules, first written at the end of the nineteenth century for the Oxford University Press. In the twenty-first century, house style is also likely to include writing and presentation guidelines for what will appear on computer screens.

There are differences of approach in the rules of these various style guides. This should alert us to the fact that they are not only dealing with matters of fact and correctness – but are offering a series of conventions which should be followed by their authors.

They are likely to have policies governing such matters as

The notes given below provide illustrative examples. For detailed information on any topic, follow the links to the online style guides and the newspaper house style sites. Some of their guides are the size of small encyclopedias.

House Style – a real example

Microsoft’s Manual of Style illustrates the company’s rules for both print and screen writing, as well as their requirements for visual presentation and language use.

For instance, each topic they discuss is illustrated by an example of ‘Microsoft style’ and then an example of ‘Not Microsoft style’.

They also specify such fine details as how to present numbers; how to choose the names for toolbars and buttons; how to punctuate lists; how to size titles, sub-headings, and paragraph spaces; and where to use quotation marks.

The following is their table of contents for the topics covered in their house style guide – many of them in extremely fine detail.

Microsoft style and voice
Writing for web delivery
Writing for a worldwide audience
Accessibility issues
The user interface
Technical procedures
Practical issues of style
Grammar
Punctuation
Indexing and keywords
Acronyms and abbreviations

Style guides might now make distinctions between house style for print and for online purposes – because the two mediums are considered quite distinct, and may have different readerships and purposes.

Reading on a computer screen is more tiring than reading from a printed document. For this reason, style guides for digital use may specify shorter sentences and paragraphs, wider margins, and the inclusion of graphics.

House style manuals very often specify how the various departments and personnel in an organisation should be described. They are also likely to specify such details as the size and spacing of titles, headings, and sub-headings.

Spelling

Some words (in English) have more than one spelling. The term judgement can also be spelled judgment. House style rules help to create consistency throughout a document. And consistency is a key principle in creating ease of comprehension.

Newspapers also strive to use consistent spellings for foreign names such as Reykjavik (the capital of Iceland) and Nizhni Novgorod (a port in European Russia).

They are also likely to specify the spelling of names of important people – such as Ban Ki-Moon (Secretary General of the United Nations) and Aung San Suu Kyi (opposition leader in Myanmar – formerly Burma). This shows respect for the person.

American English and British English have minor differences in spelling, so documents aimed at both audiences need to be consistent.

British	centre, harmonise, travelling
American	center, harmonize, traveling

Printed style guides

This is a selection of book reviews featuring style guides published by a variety of organisations.

MLA Style Guide
English – Modern Languages Association – Academic

Microsoft Manual of Style
American – Microsoft Corporation – Business

The Chicago Manual of Style
American – Chicago University – Academic

New Hart’s Rules
English – Oxford University Press – Publishing

The Economist Style Guide
English – Economist Magazine – Journalism

Note of interest — it is said that the complete printed maintenance manuals for the Boeing 737 jet weighed more than the aircraft itself.

Vocabulary

The choice of vocabulary is important because it reflects the nature and the attitude of the organisation. The language you choose needs to be understood by the audience(s). It should be clear, unambiguous, and consistent.

It is now very common for organisations to specify the terms used to describe people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and issues related to gender.

For instance, the BBC specifies that people with learning disabilities should be used – not mentally handicapped. It specifies Muslim instead of Moslem.

The Guardian newspaper used to prohibit the use of the term regime to describe a government – because the term is clearly derogatory and suggests a bias against a government which might become legitimate in a few week’s time.

The Telegraph newspaper has a list of ‘banned words’ in its house style guide. These are not ideologically taboo words so much as lists of journalistic clichés used in tabloid newspapers – terms such as bloodbath, clampdown, jaw-dropping, and prestigious.

Online style guides

BBC News style guide
Detailed guidelines for print, online, plus radio and television broadcasting. Also includes rules on pronunciation and spelling of foreign names.

English Grammar
Comprehensive grammar guide, with downloadable lessons, interactive exercises, grammar checker, videos, and daily updates.

Purdue On-line Writing Lab
Purdue’s famous OWL, useful for general writing concerns, with links to American academic style guides and how to avoid plagiarism.

The Elements of Style
William Strunk, Jr.’s original 1918 classic. The ‘bare bones’ approach to common problems, with illustrative examples.

On-Line Study Resources
Style, grammar, essay-writing, citations and footnotes, plagiarism and presentation from the University of New South Wales.

alt.usage.english – Style FAQ
Mark Israel’s Frequently Asked Questions covers common English usage questions, word etymology, online and offline references, and more.

WebGrammar
Judy Vorfeld’s excellent site covers some of the most common writing mistakes, including spelling, grammar and homonym errors.

Capitalization

The correct use of capital letters is not quite so straightforward as it might seem. It is not always immediately clear if someone, somewhere, or something warrants a capital or not. The following are some of the more common instances.

days of the week	Wednesday, Friday
places	Scotland, East Anglia
rivers	the river Mersey
buildings	the Tate Gallery
institutions	the Catholic Church
firms	British Aerospace
organisations	the National Trust
months of the year	April, September

However, when such terms are used as adjectives or in a general sense as common nouns, no capital is required:

the King James Bible / a biblical reference

Oxford University / a university education

the present Government / governments since 1967

Capitals are used when describing intellectual movements or periods of history:

Freudian – Platonism – Cartesian – the Middle Ages
the Reformation – the Enlightenment

They are also used in the titles of books, plays, films, newspapers, magazines, songs, and works of art in general. The normal convention is to capitalise the first word and any nouns or important terms. Smaller words such as ‘and’, ‘of’, and ‘the’ are left uncapitalised:

A View from the Bridge
The Mayor of Casterbridge
North by Northwest
The Marriage of Figaro

UK journalism style guides

Financial Times Lexicon

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How to publish your writing

October 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guidance and resources for writers

If you wish to publish your writing, you need to learn about the publishing process, marketing your work, and targetting your audience. The web pages listed here deal with all those topics – and more besides.

The writer’s marketplace
This is a selection of best-selling writer’s guides. These list all the information you need for contacting publishers, agents, and editors. They cover book publishing, magazines, newspapers, and specialist outlets for photographers and illustrators. Most of them provide mini-essays and tutorials featuring advice from professional writers.

Editing your writing
Guidance snotes on editing, re-writing, and creating structure – plus basic advice on topics such as sentences, paragraphs, headings, titles, punctuation, and spelling.

Publishing on the Internet
A selection of guidance manuals on writing for the Web – showing the special skills for creating readable web pages, plus writers’ groups and specialist outlets for creative online writing.

ePublishing and eBooks
Guidance manuals on how to create eBooks on a budget, using email as a marketing tool, plus writing in other digital formats. This approach takes the cumbersome and expensive printing costs out of publishing your work.

Writing for the Web
Three excellent guidance manuals on crafting what you write so that it can be effective when read on line. Writing for the screen is different than writing for print publication: these books explain the differences.

Writing for magazines
Writing for magazines is probably the most profitable form of authorship in terms of payment-per-word. But weekly, monthly, and specialist publications are often neglected as a possibile outlet by aspiring writers. This selection of guidance manuals show what markets are available, and how to break into them.

Writing for newspapers
Newspapers are the most difficult form of journalism for beginners to break into. And if you manage to get a foot in the door, you will need more than just writing skills. These manuals provide the basics of law, copyright, plagiarism, privacy, and the relationship between the proess and the public.

Publish your academic writing
Lecturers in further and higher education are obliged to publish their work if they wish to be promoted. It’s a very competetive environment. These manuals will show you how to convert a piece of academic work into something that can be commercially published. They also show the new possibilities of online publishing – or ‘open access’ as it is starting to be known.

Blogging – publish your writing
Blogging is a form of publishing open to everyone – no matter what the level of your writing skills. But if you want readers to come back to your blog pages, it will help if you know some of the protocols of good blog behaviour. These guidance manuals will show you how to set up a blog: it’s easy – takes two minutes. More importantly, they will show you how to craft even a short piece of writing so that visitors will want to come back for more.

How to write book reviews
One way to break into publishing is to review the books you read. You can post the results on Amazon or on book fan sites. It’s good practice at showing engagement with your subject. These guidance notes show you what’s required.

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How to start blogging

September 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a quick guide to creating an online journal

Start blogging

A blog (short for the term ‘web log’) is a form of online diary or journal. It’s rather like having your own personal web site, but somebody else does all the technical work. All you need do is write the contents.

What do people put in their blogs? Answer: just about anything. Most are a sort of public diary where people record the events of their lives – occasionally adding a rambling commentary on the state of the world in general. Others can be a fairly serious record of professional work, with invitations for visitors to comment.

Belle de Jour claimed to be the diary of a London call girl, and was so successful it has now been snapped up by a publisher and turned into a book. The Baghdad Blogger became famous because he sent eyewitness accounts of what was happening during the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

Biz Stone’s Blogging: Genius Strategies is an enthusiast’s guidance manual. He hit the blogging scene running, and has made himself an expert overnight. He now works for Blogger, which is owned by Google. Biz takes you from the very first steps of creating a blog, through to the advanced possibilities of syndicating what you write and even making money from it. He’s something of an evangelist, but all his advice is perfectly sound. Good for beginners, but he takes you all the way through to more advanced topics such as content syndication and money-making affiliate programs.

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Content

What else can go into a blog? Links to other blogs you find interesting, pictures of your pet dog, observations left behind by your visitors, even snapshots posted from your mobile phone. Here come some examples. Go to an index such as Blogdex.net which lists the most popular and the most recent blogs. Try A Message from Albia, which is a very funny satire of English social and political life purporting to come from a mythical European country. BoingBoing.net is a very popular ragbag of entries, which when I just checked included an item on the youngest video blogger. Even newspapers such as The Guardian have their own blogs.

Blogging began as a medium for Web-based personal diaries, and most people still use it for this purpose. But some bloggers have started to develop the medium for what is essentially self-publishing. They might post notes reflecting briefly on a topic or discuss it with other bloggers, but they also upload essays, articles, or opinion pieces which count as serious pieces of journalism, expressing ideas and points of view which might not be available elsewhere.

It’s a fairly simple process to keep a blog going – once you’ve got it set up. The procedures for signing up and creating a blog are fairly similar in each case. Basically, you subscribe to a blogging service; you set up your blog, choosing from a number of ready-made templates; then you start posting what you have to say.

There’s no point spelling out the procedures in detail here, because online tutorials such as the excellent BlogBasics.com already exist. Read through their suggestions, print out the pages if you wish, then go to Blogger and get started immediately. What I’ll give you here are some general tips, additional support resources, and how to make money from your blog.

Cory Doctorow’s Essential Blogging takes you through all the options of free blogging or paying a small fee to get extra features and more control. It covers all the essentials you might need, and it’s presented in publisher O’Reilly’s impeccably high-standard style. Doctorow is a young guy who has made a big impact in the world of online writing, and he’s now an editor-in-chief at Boing-Boing as well as a successful writer of science fiction. Up to date.

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Procedure

Plan first — Before you start, think of a name for your blog, and decide what you are going to write about. It can follow a theme or a topic; it might be all about your home town or your favourite sports team; it could be a record of your trip around the world. I’ve just discovered that a lot of journalists have personal blogs where they record the gossip they leave out of their official reports. It doesn’t even have to be true: a blog is the perfect medium for an online soap opera.

Sign up — When you have decided on a name and a theme, you need to sign up for an account. These come in two flavours – free and subscription. Blogger.com is the most popular, because it’s free; but some people prefer MoveableType or DiaryLand because they offer additional features for a small charge. WordPress.com offers both a free and a commercial version.

Blog commerce — How can you make an income from all this? Well, it’s unlikely that you can do so directly. But there are all sorts of small possible spin-offs. Lots of bloggers sign up as affiliates at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and other commercial sites. You place advertising for Amazon on your blog, any they send you a (modest) residual income for sending customers through to their site to buy books, CDs, and software.

There’s also the possibility of micro-payments. This is a system in which people are prepared to pay a small amount for downloading an article of interest. There’s still some resistance to this idea, but it’s now fairly common in downloading music files – so it might catch on.

The most lucrative source of revenue for many blogs and web sites is the Google Adsense scheme. In exchange for letting Google put advertising on your blog or your web pages, they offer you micropayments each time your visitors click through to the advertiser.

Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook is a guide to creating your own blog. It’s a book for anyone who has ever thought about starting but isn’t sure how to post, where to find links, or even where to go to register. She certainly knows what she’s talking about, as you can see at her own blog rebecca’s pocket. She guides you through the whole process of starting and maintaining a blog and answers any questions that might pop up along the way, such as the elements of good blog design and how to find free hosting. She’s gone on to be a very successful professional blogger.

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Advertising

The Google Ads scheme has three big advantages. First, the visitors don’t have to buy anything: you get paid simply for their viewing the ad. Second, the whole thing works automatically. Once the code is in your pages, Google start paying money straight into your bank. Third, Google provide all the scripts and coding, and you can even customise the ads so that they blend into the design of your blog.

One of the cleverest features of Google’s scheme is that the ads are matched to the content of the pages on which they appear. So, if your blog is about music or fashion, the ads will be for CDs and iPod downloads, clothing and online stores. Whatever you write about, the ads will be on the same subject. This is good for Google and good for you, because readers are more likely to click through.

Companies such as Blogger have done everything they can to make the process of setting up a blog as easy as possible. It’s possible to set one up from scratch in just a few minutes. And yet everyone I know – including experienced users – has had some sort of minor problem in doing so. And that includes me.

If you get stuck there are FAQs to answer the most basic queries (“My blog has disappeared. Where has it gone?”). I found these very helpful when setting up my blog because they are full of genuine questions from beginners and answers from more experienced bloggers.

Brad Hill’s advice in Blogging for Dummies is aimed at getting you up and running as quickly as possible – though he begins with what blogs are – and what they are not. He explains the different types of blogs, and how and why they are different from web sites. The good thing is that he looks at all the options and draws up comparison charts which show the features, cost, and options offered by the various providers and software programs. This includes popular features such as the ability to display adverts and upload photos.

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GLOSSARY

Blog (noun) – a journal or diary that is on the Internet – Andrew Sullivan has the most popular blog on the Internet.

Blogger (noun) – a person who keeps a blog – Bloggers are revolutionizing the way news is shared.

Blog (verb) – to write a blog – I am going to blog before breakfast this morning.

Blogging (verb) – the action of writing a blog – Blogging is my way of sharing my passions with the world.

Post (verb) – to write and despatch an individual entry on a blog – I will be posting on this issue tomorrow.

Post (noun) – an individual entry on a blog – In yesterday’s post you mentioned that …

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How to Write

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

basic writing skills explained in easy stages

This is an introductory guide to writing, aimed at people who think they can’t write, or for whom writing is an ordeal. Broken down into short topic-based chapters on everything from beginning to revising, it demystifies the writing process by taking the reader through each stage necessary to bring a piece of writing to a decent finish. Follow the advice, and you will learn how to write. Alastair Fowler kicks off by considering the advantages and disadvantages of composing and editing directly on a computer screen.

Then comes a series of short chapters, each one dealing with a different aspect of the writing process: outlines, drafts, paragraphs, sentences, arguments, punctuation, researching, and grammar. His model is formal academic writing, but his advice will be of use to anybody who wants to understand writing skills and improve their own. He deals with those tricky issues that distress beginners, such as ‘making a start’, and offers tips which at first glance can seem counter-intuitive, but reveal a voice of experience:

For most sorts of writing, the best way to begin is not to. Or rather, to have already begun in the past.

He also covers how to plan what you intend to write, and how to create order in what it will contain; then how to flesh out your rough notes into a first draft.

Beginners will also find it reassuring that he shows how to get a feel for the scale of a piece of writing – how to assess the required length and thereby the scope of its content.

I also found his advice on paragraphs sound. Once you have grasped the concept of structure and rhythm in a paragraph, most other problems of construction and format should fall easily into place.

He goes into quite some detail on how to construct persuasive arguments. It is in this sense that the book really is fundamentally about writing essays, and I think on reflection that it’s for people who have mastered the basics of writing and who wish to hone their skills.

Next comes how to arrange the parts of a sentence to make meaning clearer, and then an explanation of all the common marks of punctuation, which he manages with being either pedantic or boring. (If you want advice on punctuation delivered in a humorous manner, try Lynne Truss’ excellent Eats, Shoots & Leaves.)

For those who really are brushing up their essay writing skills, Fowler has some useful advice on quotation – how to do it, and what real function it serves. The same is true of plagiarism, which he discusses in the light of re-working other people’s ideas in a legitimate manner.

He finishes with a conducted tour of the available reference books and guidance notes on writing skills – which is a lot more useful than just a bare, unannotated bibliography. It’s a short book, but probably all the more useful for that – and amazingly good value at the price.

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Alastair Fowler, How to Write, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.202, ISBN: 0199278504

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Information Age Journalism

June 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

contemporary journalism in an international context

This is a book which looks at the state of journalism (newspaper, radio, and TV) in the context of globalisation of media control and the Internet age of instant communication. Vincent Campbell starts with a look at the decline in newspaper circulation – a more-or-less universal phenomenon. The dangers he sees are the monopolisation of ownership, tabloidization, and the onset of the Internet which has thrown everything into a state of uncertainty.

He looks at the relationship between journalism and the state, arguing that whilst most people in liberal democracies want the removal of state controls, when they are replaced by the demands of the free market they do not diminish but simply change their form. This leads to a detailed examination of the concept of ‘press freedom’, with examples drawn from all over the world – only forty percent of which is ‘free’. He covers newspaper ownership, the role of advertising, and he also deals with the ethical questions surrounding the manner in which journalists gather information – their relationship with sources, and where news management ends and spin begins.

He includes a detailed analysis of the workings of a typical newsroom. This includes how news stories are discovered, selected, written, edited, then presented.

There’s a comprehensive discussion of all the ethical dilemmas commonly raised in journalism – invasion of privacy, naming and shaming, chequebook journalism, libel, blasphemy, and protecting your sources – as the editor of the Guardian, Peter Preston, spinelessly failed to do after printing Sarah Tisdall’s whistle-blowing revelations.

This leads logically enough into a consideration of objectivity, opinion, bias, and slant. Most of his arguments are illustrated by examples drawn from recent high profile cases from the print press and TV which most people will remember.

He then looks at various alternatives to conventional journalism – where one might expect to hear more radical views. These range from political satire, as in The Onion and Private Eye to literary journalists of the Tom Woolfe school.

Although it certainly makes his coverage comprehensive, I was surprised that he gave so much space to (so-called) reality TV such as Big Brother, sports journalism, confessional television chat shows, and the amazingly vacuous Cosmopolitan, which he categorises as ‘lifestyle journalism’.

The result of this is that the coverage of Internet journalism is squashed into a few brief pages right at the end of the book. No mention of blogging at all – which is strange after two hundred pages in search of something new and radical.

It’s a book which could do with a few more pictures to break up page after page of dense text. But it’s suitable for anyone who wants to make an in-depth study of journalism, particularly in an international context, or in its relationship to politics and the current ownership of mass media companies.

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Vincent Campbell, Information Age Journalism, London: Arnold, 2004, pp.306, ISBN: 0340763493

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Journalism – A Short Introduction

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Reporting for press, broadcast media, and the Net

Ian Hargreaves has worked in newspaper journalism, magazines, television and radio. He was director of news and current affairs at the BBC, deputy editor of the Financial Times, and editor of the Independent and the New Statesman. This breadth and depth of experience gives him a very well informed overview of contemporary journalism in print and broadcast forms.

He starts by sketching in a brief history of free speech and the press – Milton, Thomas Paine, J.S. Mill – then argues that newspapers had only just finished establishing themselves as the prime vehicles for circulating news in the early years of the last century when they were immediately challenged by new technological inventions. First the radio, then television, and most recently the Internet. This is an exposition conducted at a fairly high socio-political level.

He compares recent journalism in Russia and the USA for instance – both cases where freedom of expression is being compromised, even if for very different reasons. One possible solution he sees is a return to what he calls ‘civic journalism’ – of the kind discussed by Dan Gillmor in his recent book We the Media. Digital communication in the form of email, bulletin boards, blogs, RSS feeds, and web sites puts the power of communication and free speech back into the hands of individuals. We no longer need to own printing presses to circulate information.

He is certainly smack up to date – tracking the politicking and manoeuvring that goes on between governments, regulatory bodies, and media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner and their like. He also includes the Hutton report in the context of reporting during a war, which always puts ‘standards’ and the ethics of truth-telling to a severe test.

There’s an interesting chapter on tabloid journalism in which he easily exposes the excesses of The Sun and The National Enquirer – but he also argues that the concentration on ‘celebrity’ has had an injurious knock-on effect on serious media.

There’s also a chapter on press ownership where he argues that despite the Murdochs, Blacks, and Maxwells, the real power in press ownership is passing into the hands of business conglomerates. This is likely to be depressing news for those who believe in a ‘free press’. He also offers some gritty examples from his first hand experience of the relations between owners, editors, and journalists.

There’s a historical view of public relations and spin-doctoring which is more interesting than you might think – though the overall impression it gave me was that all journalists ought to keep in mind the mantra of Harold Evans who suggested that all journalists interviewing politicians ought to ask themselves “Why is this bastard lying to me?” He also includes an interesting chapter on the ethics of journalism – with a healthy critique of the toothless UK Press Complaints Committee.

He ends, logically enough, with the influence of the Internet, which has spawned all sorts of challenges to conventional media. He uses the example of Matt Drudge’s exposure of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal as a touchstone case, reminding us that Drudge was just an individual citizen, not a paid journalist. Digital information technology is changing so quickly, it’s difficult to know what will last or what will happen next – but he outlines all the important issues.

I found this a much more interesting and stimulating book than its modest title led me to expect. If you want to know what’s happening in journalism right now, it will bring you right up to date.

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Ian Hargreaves, Journalism: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN: 0192806564

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Microsoft Manual of Style

February 1, 2012 by Roy Johnson

guidelines for clear technical writing

Microsoft Manual of Style was produced in-house at Microsoft as the style guide for its army of writers who produce the help files and documentation for its products. Except that it’s been re-written for the public, and it’s completely non-prescriptive. They don’t say “This is the way it should be done”. They say “Here’s how we do it at Microsoft. You may find this approach useful”. It starts with a chapter describing the principles on which its house style is built – and these could profitably be adopted by any other organisation or business. Or any individual for that matter.

They are not at all particular to Microsoft, but aimed at producing seamlessly efficient communication. The principles include consistency of language, an empathetic attitude towards readers, precision, plain language, simplicity of sentence construction, a nod towards avoiding gender bias, and maintaining grammatical parallelism (which is very useful if you are writing instructions).

These issues are all illustrated by good and bad examples that show clearly the distinction to be made between for instance two apparently identical instructions::

Use this procedure to make any changes to your password.

Follow these steps to change your password.

The second has seven words instead of ten, less fuzz, and more clarity.

There’s a separate section on writing efficiently for the web. You should use the power of headings, sub-headings, bulleted lists, and well-chosen hyperlinks to maximise readability. There’s a specially valuable tip here. In each paragraph, put the conclusion first (what’s called the ‘inverted pyramid’ style) so that readers know if they wish to read on. People scan web pages rather than read them.

It’s not all about instructions and programs. The guidance assumes you might be using videos, blogs, and community-provided content such as wikis. It also keeps in mind that you might be writing for an international audience – but it points out that the guidelines for accommodating this are the same as for writing clearly and persuasively for English-speaking readers anyway. The maximum length of sentences should be twenty-five words.

For those people who will be writing about technology there’s a whole chapter on user interfaces – screens, menus, dialogue boxes, and toolbars – and how to write instructions that are clear and unambiguous. This is bang up to date, because to interact with contemporary devices you now need to include gesture (pich, swipe, zoom) as well as input via speech instructions and keyboard shortcuts.

More technical advice follows – on writing procedures (how to navigate through folders) how to describe cloud computing accurately, how to show code in support documentation, and fine details such as how to use filename extensions and when to use capitalization and bold.

There’s quite a lot on how to display numbers and when to use words (seven databases but a 24-hour day) how to show dates (February 12, 2012 – which is very non-standard) plus how to write captions and compile bibliographies.

On grammar and punctuation they understandably go for simplicity, clarity, and brevity. All the basic common sense rules are illustrated – but are then followed by some not-so-obvious but fascinating illustrations of indexing and list-ordering, including the order in which numerical entries will be listed. For instance 12-hour clock comes before 2-D charts.

There’s a huge list of acronyms with advice on when and when not to spell them out, and then the last half of the book is an alphabetical list of technical terms and commonly used words and phrases with illustrated explanations of good styling. They range from am/pm, through less and fewer, to ZIP codes and how to spell the plural of zero.

There are two indexes – one at the front and another at the back of the book – so it’s easy to find any detail you need to check. The latest fourth edition does its best to keep up to date with the ever expanding language of technology – app, cloud, and sync as well as terabyte (TB), petabyte (PB), and on up to yottabyte (YB). And it’s interesting to note that E-mail and Web site have now become email and website as these terms have now become part of everyday language.

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&copy Roy Johnson 2012

Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Manual of Style, Microsoft Press: Redmond (WA), fourth edition, 2012, pp.438, ISBN: 0735648719

Style guide links

Writing guides compared

Writing skills – an annotated bibliography

Editing and Revising Text

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Journalism

writing skills for print, radio, new media, and commerce

writing for the Web – a popular revolution

guidance on good writing and editing techniques

how change happens when people come together

an explanation and guidance notes

House Style – a real example

Spelling

Printed style guides

Vocabulary

Online style guides

Capitalization

UK journalism style guides

guidance and resources for writers

a quick guide to creating an online journal

Start blogging

Content

Procedure

Advertising

GLOSSARY

basic writing skills explained in easy stages

contemporary journalism in an international context

Reporting for press, broadcast media, and the Net

guidelines for clear technical writing

Style guide links

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