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

New Hart’s Rules

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style and text-presentation rules for writers and editors

New Hart’s Rules started its life as the house style rule book for editorial principles at Oxford University Press. It was written by Horace Henry Hart who was Printer to the Press, and first published in 1893 as quite a slim volume. But it has become so popular ever since that it grew in size and eventually reached a thirty-ninth edition. Now it has been enlarged even further and completely re-cast in a new format, adapted from The Oxford Guide to Style, but retaining much of the content and the spirit of the old Hart’s Rules.

New Hart's Rules The guide deals with the typographic details of assembling writing ready for its appearance in printed form. This includes punctuation, capitalization, italicization, abbreviations, and the presentation of numbers. The latest edition also has completely new chapters covering law and legal references, tables, illustrations, indexing, plus copyright and other publishing responsibilities. Each chapter has been given far more illustrative examples.

For instance, my edition of the old 39th edition has less than 200 pages: this new version has more than 400. The beauty of this book – in common with other style guides which have become classics – is that it quickly establishes the general rule, then all further examples are the difficult, awkward, and obscure cases. For those people endlessly puzzled by spelling-checkers, there is an explanation of the rules governing -ise and -ize. OUP have always favoured -ize, so surprisingly it’s criticize yet compromise, and agonize yet televise.

The principles underlying the need for consistent conventions remain as important as ever. The presentation of money, time, dates, and even the points of the compass are included, as well as temperature, Latin plant and animal names, capitalization of titles, word breaks (hyphenation) and such wonderfully arcane details as the need for a possessive ‘s’ in Roman following an italicized title – as in the Dreadnought‘s crew.

There’s an explanation of proof correction (with examples) and a guide to punctuation, symbols, and the presentation of scientific equations and formulae. Then in the centre of the book there is a section dealing with the alternate spellings of ‘difficult’ words (colander, haemorrhoids, skiing) then a very useful explanation of the rules on the tricky issue of doubling consonants at word endings (billeted, compelled, travelling) and plurals formed in non-English words (bacilli, errata, matrices).

Hart then takes on the topic of language change in listing those words which have progressed from compounds to single words (a process which is usually faster in the US than the UK) – antifreeze, lifetime, tonight – though it is hard for a book of this type to keep up with contemporary developments in this respect. Do we write word processor, word-processor, or wordprocessor, for instance? However, Hart has no hesitation in recommending birth-rate, copy-book, and test-tube.

Guidance on how to deal with foreign languages include sections on French, German, Italian, and Russian – plus Welsh, Dutch and Afrikaans which have been added in the latest edition.

The latter part of the book includes a complete checklist of topics to be covered in preparing a book for publication: text, footnotes, illustrations, bibliographies, tables, and even how to deal with plays and poetry. And finally, since it’s quite hard to locate items in such a tightly-compacted work of reference, there’s an excellent index.

This is a source for anyone interested in the preparation of text for print. If you have a research paper, an article, or a book which you hope will see light of day as a publication, then do yourself a favour and buy this marvelous guide to the small details which make all the difference between an amateurish and a properly edited piece of writing.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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New Hart’s Rules, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.417, ISBN: 0198610416

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New Oxford Spelling Dictionary

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spellings, hyphens, capitals, and presentation of terms

Unlike a conventional dictionary, the New Oxford Spelling Dictionary lists words without giving their definitions. So – you might well ask – if there are no explanations of meanings, what information does such a book contain? Quite a lot, as it turns out. For instance, it shows distinctions between words which might easily be confused – as in hare/hair – and it also indicates grammatical parts of speech – as in double fault used as a noun and double-fault used as a verb.

New Oxford Spelling Dictionary It also makes firm recommendations where there are variants in possible spellings (use judgement), shows where capitals are required in names, gives American spellings, and shows where logical word breaks occur for hyphenation and compounds. Entries run from aa (lava) and Aachen (which used to be Aix-la-Chapelle) to zymotic and zymurgy. This particular guidance makes it an ideal reference tool for those working with printed or word-processed text.

The reference data is based on the reputable scholarship of the Oxford Dictionary of English. It contains over 110,000 words and names, and in the latest edition includes a large number of compound words as well as very basic information about people and places. So, for instance, Enver Hoxha is the Albanian prime minister, and Santa Catarina is a Brazilian state.

A typical entry on proper nouns shows the variants on a personal name, with the pipe (these things – || -) showing the word breaks.

Kath|er|ine also
Cath|ar|ine,
Cath|er|ine,
Cath|ryn,
Kath|ar|ine,
Kath|ryn

And the same presentation of typical word is rendered thus:

tar|tar + s
(deposit on teeth etc.;
violent-tempered person;
in ‘cream of tartar’.
‡ tartare, ta-ta)

This last detail is an injunction that the term should not be confused with tartare or goodbye.

Of course you still need some idea of how a word is spelled (or spelt) in order to look it up. But this dictionary makes the job less distracting than using a normal dictionary, because it eliminates all that interesting stuff. Less may not be more, but it’s certainly faster.

This will be of most interest to authors, editors, proofreaders or typesetters, for whom it provides an ideal way to ensure the best spelling practice working on any sort of text – newspapers, magazines, reports, theses, or even websites. It has also been produced to team up neatly with the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors and New Hart’s Rules to form an ideal reference set.

© Roy Johnson 2005

New Oxford Spelling Dictionary   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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New Oxford Spelling Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.596, ISBN: 0198608810

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New Oxford Style Manual

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compendium of writing skills PLUS  specialist dictionary

This New Oxford Style Manual is the result of putting together in one volume the Oxford Guide to Style [formerly Hart’s Rules] and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. It starts from ‘parts of the book’ then moves on to punctuation, names, capitals, and numbers. The editor covers all other aspects of text presentation – such as how you should deal with music, mathematics, quotations, lists, tables, and even illustrations. There is even a special section on foreign languages which begins with the thorny issue of UK and American English – but it also covers Latin, European, Asiatic, Classical, and even Sanskrit.

New Oxford Style Manual Works such as this reveal the small but important conventions which academics, journalists, and professional writers need to know – but which are hard to remember. How do you punctuate a reference given in a footnote for instance? How are abbreviations shown in foreign languages? Where do spaces go when showing degrees of temperature? It deals with special subjects, plus linguistics and phonetics, translations, audio and visual broadcasts, and electronic data. In addition, it also incorporates the most recent changes in citing digital media, and details on the submission of materials for publication.

The second part of the book is a specialist dictionary for writers, journalists, and text-editors. It offers rulings on words and spellings which are commonly problematic. For instance, do we write Muslim or Moslem, customise or customize? It covers the names of well-known people and places, foreign words and commonly-used phrases such as petit-bourgeois and persona non grata.

The editor Robert Ritter also covers abbreviations, capitalization and punctuation. Only today, I’ve looked up amendment [one ‘m’] superseded [yes – it is spelt with an ‘s’] and manageable [it keeps the ‘e’]. It can also be used as a quick guide to many niceties of writing (the difference between hyphens and dashes) and as a potted encyclopedia for historical names (and their dates).

It should certainly be amongst the reference tools of anybody who takes a serious interest in writing. The single volume is even 25% cheaper than buying the two books separately. Fantastic value. Make sure you get the new revised edition which has materials gleaned from OUP’s latest researches into the Oxford English Corpus – a gigantic database containing hundreds of millions of words in current and historic use.

© Roy Johnson 2012

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Robert M. Ritter (ed), The Oxford Style Manual, Oxford: Oxford University Press, new second edition 2012, pp.861, ISBN: 0198605641

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On Writing Well

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best-selling guide to sharpening your writing style

William Zinsser is professional journalist (former writer and editor on the New York Herald Tribune) who manages to express a love of writing and an appreciation of good style without ever dragging readers into the swamps of grammatical nit-picking and rule-governed instruction. In On Writing Well he expresses himself in an urbane and conversational style typical of popular magazines. This is a reassuring approach for those who want a guided tour of writing issues, held by the hand of someone experienced in the craft. It’s rather like having a writing coach at your shoulder as he talks you through what writers think and the decisions they make.

On Writing Well He’s particularly alert to the fear of those who lack confidence. The first part of the book is taken up with his principal recommendations. These are to cultivate brevity and clarity, and to omit any form of ‘clutter’. He has some wonderful examples of equivocation, ambiguity, and deliberate obfuscation drawn from American public life – including such gems from Alexander Haigh as “at this juncture of maturization” [that is ‘now’] and “We must push this to a lower decibel of public fixation. I don’t think there’s much of a learning curve to be achieved in this area of content.”

He then covers the means by which this clarity is to be achieved. It involves, logically enough, choosing your words carefully, and developing a unity of approach and subject matter.

The third part of the book deals with different forms of writing – such as reportage, interviews, and travel writing. It also covers scientific writing, business and even sports. These chapters are aimed at aspiring journalists, but there’s much to be learned from such details as his sharp-eyed analysis of the travel cliché: ‘villages nestling‘ and ‘byways half-forgotten‘:

Half the sights seen in a day’s sightseeing are quaint, especially windmills and covered bridges

The latter part of the book relaxes into its real subject – journalism – on which Zinsser speaks with feeling about its craft and techniques. In fact he ends by giving a paragraph-by-paragraph account of writing a travel article, explaining the subject options, the choice of vocabulary, and the strategies of approach which he tried and rejected. There’s a certain amount of patting himself on the back after-the-event in this, but aspiring writers might find it interesting to be taken through the generation of a piece of work in this way.

At its best, this approach will make readers sensitive to the effects they produce, and at its weakest it’s like a well-written guidebook on ‘How to Write Stories for Magazines’. But on balance, more people are likely to improve their writing by becoming conscious of rhythm and structure than are likely to fall into the abyss of verbal entertainment which fails.

© Roy Johnson 2006

On Writing Well   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (6th edn), New York: Harper, 2006, pp.336, ISBN: 141775057X

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Oxford A-Z of English Usage

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short guide to intermediate language skills

Do you know the past tense of the verb to dive? Is it dived or dove? Don’t worry – most other native English speakers wouldn’t know either. The same is true of the verb to dream. Is it dreamed or dreamt? That’s slightly less of a worry – because both options are correct. This guide offers straightforward, up-to-date guidance on questions of English usage, all affecting the language we choose.

Oxford A-Z of English Usage Common confusions such as uninterested and disinterested are explained, differences between British and American practice are highlighted, and it takes a realistic attitude towards famous examples such as splitting infinitives, ending a sentence with a preposition, and when it is correct to say you and me or you and I.

There are highlighted mini-essays on issues such as case agreement, Latin plurals, and the endlessly vexed issue of -ise and -ize. Editor Jeremy Butterfield also deals with issues for writers, such as how to punctuate bulleted lists.

There’s a strong element of political correctness at work here in definitions to do with race, colour, and disability, yet he doesn’t offer alternatives to the contractions BC and AD, and he suggests that the equivalent of African-American in the UK is black, which some people might challenge.

There’s an interesting section on what he calls ‘electronic English’, and he does his best to reveal folk etymologies – explaining where and why an expression has become distorted and replaced the original – as in slight of hand, which has successfully transplanted the original sleight of hand.

He takes the trouble to distinguish terms which are often confused in English because their spellings are so similar, and they are very often pronounced almost identically – such as discrete and discreet. And he unravels words which are often mistaken for each other – such as blatant and flagrant.

I would say that this is a book for intermediate to advanced users of English – writers, editors, and students who want to make an effort to get things right. It’s the latest addition to a series which includes Oxford A-Z of Grammar and Punctuation, Oxford A-Z of Spelling, and the Oxford Guide to Plain English – all of which have been very successful.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Oxford A-Z of English Usage   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Jeremy Butterfield, Oxford A—Z of English Usage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.172, ISBN: 0199231532

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Plagiarism, Copyright, and New Media

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how digitization affects creative work

Plagiarism

Plagiarism Copyright New MediaStrange thought it may seem, it’s not possible to copyright the title of a creative work. There is nothing to stop you writing a novel called Where Angels Fear to Tread, making a film called Gone with the Wind, or composing a musical show called A Little Night Music. In fact all of these examples have taken their titles from works of art which preceded them. You might be criticised for lack of originality; you would certainly risk creating confusion, but nobody could stop you. Copying somebody else’s title is not the same thing as plagiarism. This isn’t particularly well known, but it’s a fact.

Ideas

It’s also not possible to copyright an idea. You can have the idea for inventing invisible steel, but you can’t copyright or patent the idea itself. Copyright and patent applications are required to be detailed descriptions for the manufacture and implementation of new ideas. That is, you can only copyright the process of actually making invisible steel.

In the creative arts, it’s not possible to copyright the idea for a new series of television programmes, the plot outline for a new opera, or the concept for a new video game or iPhone app. You only have copyable rights to such a product when the thing itself has been produced. That’s why proposals for new works such as these are kept under tight wraps by production companies. They don’t want their rivals to get in first.

Music

The issues of ownership in recorded sound are increasingly complex since the arrival of digitization. But there are two fundamental distinctions to be made which affect plagiarism and copyright:

  1. Melodies can be copyrighted
  2. Chord sequences can not be copyrighted

In 1970 the Beatles guitarist George Harrison published a song called My Sweet Lord which went on to become a big hit. The problem was that it was note-for-note identical to a song called He’s So Fine recorded by an all-girl black group called The Chiffons. Harrison claimed that it was a case of ‘subconsciously’ copying. A court case ensued in which just about everyone’s reputation was damaged and a lot of money changed hands.

Similar cases have arisen elsewhere, but now with less frequency, since it is relatively easy to prove the similarity between two melodies, even if they have different underlying harmonic sequences.

In the case of harmony and chord sequence, the case is quite different. Any number of tunes have been written based on an identical harmonic sequence. George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm has a relatively simple chord progression which has been a great favourite of jazz musicians because it provides a comfortable sequence on which to improvise. New songs composed to fit on top of the original harmony include Ah-Leu-Cha, Allen’s Alley, Anthropology, Lemon Drop, Lester Leaps In, Red Cross, Salt Peanuts, and Squatty-Roo.

Sampling

PlagiarismSampling occurs when one part of a song or a musical performance is taken and re-used as part of a different composition or performance. This is often done using electronic equipment and software programs. The sampled portion can also be edited or played back continuously in a ‘loop’ to form the background for a new composition. This practice has been widespread in popular music for the last twenty years.

It’s currently a vexed area of copyright and plagiarism, and many successful court cases have been fought by artists claiming that their work was being used without recognition or payment. Some have been successful even though the original sample has been edited and changed almost beyond recognition.

The argument in favour of sampling invokes the concept of ‘fair use’ in copyright law. This recognises the right of one person to quote from the work of another when creating an original work. [This happens all the time in academic scholarship and research.]

Open Source supporters such as Laurence Lessig and Cory Doctorow argue that sampling and fair use should be tolerated in favour of creative expression. Detractors argue that if the newly composed work relies too heavily on the original sample for its effect (such as a recognisable guitar riff in pop music) it falls into the realm of plagiarism.

Mashups

A mashup is the fusion of two separate sources of digital information to form a new entity. The following example shows the combination of a geographic map with information on flights in and out of Schipol airport Holland to produce a real-time (and interactive) data presentation program.

In this case it’s likely that permission has been sought to use these sources of information. But thousands and thousands of mashups are created in the world of pop music where the lyrics from one song are overlaid on the instrumentals or the melody of another. These instances raise issues which the copyright laws have been unable to resolve.

Defenders of mashups claim ‘fair use’ arguments, and point to the fact that the new product is ‘original’ in that it did not exist before. Critics have pointed to unacknowledged use of material, but the court cases they have brought have rarely been successful, because the people being sued rarely have any money. Pop music mashups is a minority sub-culture in which people produce things just for the hell of it – or just because it can be done.

Film

In the realm of film, literal copying and even plagiarism are rare – for the simple reason that access to the original materials would be difficult and permission to quote expensive. Rare exceptions include Woody Allen’s Play it again, Sam which includes reconstructions and direct imitations of films featuring Humphrey Bogart and in particular Michael Curtiz’s 1942 film Casablanca.

Sometimes films include re-makes of an original story. For example, The Big Sleep was originally filmed by Howard Hawks in 1946, based on Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel of the same name. It was re-made in 1978 by Michael Winner and the setting transferred to England. In both cases, these are ‘interpretations’; of Chandler’s original story.

In 1998 Luc Van Sant created a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, which was itself taken from Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, based on a true-life Wisconsin serial killer. Although many of the camera angles and shots are very similar, the cast is different, the setting updated, and the theme music re-orchestrated. It was not particularly well-received, but nobody accused Van Sant of plagiarism: the film was seen as more of a hommage to the original.

Video

Because much video is now digitised, it is much easier to copy and ‘quote’ than a film printed on a 35mm celluloid strip. Consequently, much video footage is now used in mashups. These are often created for comic effect – with visual materials from one source counterposed with audio tracks from something entirely different.

A popular case in point is the short sequence from Joachim Fest’s 2004 film Downfall about the last days of Adolf Hitler. This has been used as the basis of any number of satirical parodies. The original video footage and the sound track of Hitler’s furious rant about the war being lost is retained – but new sub-titles are inserted with reference to anything from English football managers being sacked, Hitler’s plans to invade Ireland, his rage at having been banned from Microsoft’s arcade game Xbox. and even rants about the frequency and quality of Downfall parodies themselves. In this example (ranting about the new iPad) he finishes his rant with a request not to put the video clip onto YouTube.

What makes these clips funny is the fact that the film remains the same, but the subtitles are re-written to provide ridiculous and completely inappropriate subjects for his rantings, often focussed on trivial contemporary events. Why is this not classed as plagiarism? For two important reasons. First – the people who make these parodies don’t suggest for one minute that they have made the original Downfall footage. Second – they are not attempting to profit from their re-use of the visual material. Their object is to create fun which is freely available to anybody.

Joachim Fest has endorsed the production of these parodies on the grounds that they reinforce his original message – that people who become too powerful should be exposed by revealing their megalomania, with mockery if necessary.

Blogs

Blogging is rather like the Wild West of the Internet. Anybody can write whatever they wish and publish it to a personal blog for the rest of the world to see and read. There is virtually no control over content, no censorship, and no monitoring of who says what.

Nevertheless, bloggers are on the whole respectful and they attribute the sources of any materials quoted, with web links to the original and hat-tips acknowledging the authors. Some people break these conventions and steal other people’s news items, but they are often found out and held up to ridicule. That’s because once something is put up onto the Internet it’s easy to check its origin and the time and date it was put there. Anyone claiming an ‘exclusive’ or lifting someone else’s copy can be found out if the same material exists in an earlier published version. Even a string of words less than a sentence long can be traced via a Google search in less than a second.

It was common only a few years ago for people to deride blogging as no more than a form of vanity publishing. Now, every self-respecting business (particularly news-related publications and broadcasters) have their own in-house bloggers.

Web sites

In their earliest manifestation, web sites were specialist repositories for scientific research papers and archives of academic materials. Since the democratisation of the Internet, the Web is also now big commercial business. Some online companies exist for the sole purpose of throwing up web pages which will attract the attention of Google searches.

As a consequence of this change, an enormous amount of copyright infringement and plagiarism occurs on web sites. That’s because some people will shamelessly copy existing web pages and take already-syndicated articles to give their own sites more ‘content’. There are even programs that will automate the process. (These are called ‘page scrapers’.) Shady business companies adopt this practice to attract visitors with a minimum of effort and make money from advertising on the site.

However, they do so at their peril, because Google ranks any ‘duplicate material’ as ‘redundant pages’ and demotes them in its page and site rankings.

A similar lack of original content occurs on web sites known as ‘link farms’ or ‘portal sites’. These are sites which merely provide lists of other web sites – usually in categories with multiple sub-menu options. That is, they are empty of any original content. These too are downgraded by Google in its rankings.

Newspapers

Most established newspapers now have their own web sites, and they employ journalists to write the news items and articles that they publish both in print and on line. Copyright and plagiarism is almost never in question. Even when a newspaper uses a photograph or a short report supplied by an independent news agency such as Reuters, the fact will usually be credited and the original source named.

However, a recent case shows that there are always possible exceptions. Johann Hari was a journalist writing for The Independent. He specialised in radical issues, and in particular he wrote in-depth interviews with controversial political figures. Recently, he has been accused of breaking the journalist’s code of ethics. By comparing the text of his articles to previously published work it has been possible to show three primary instances of plagiarism.

  1. He used quotations from other people’s work – without attribution.
  2. He re-wrote other people’s articles, using the structure, sequence, and the arguments of the original.
  3. He used quotations from other people’s interviews – as if the words had been addressed to him personally.

Hari at first strenuously denied these charges of plagiarism, but then it was discovered that he had adopted a false identity (‘David Rose’) and used it to maliciously edit other people’s Wikipedia entries, besmirching their reputations and boosting his own. He was suspended from the Independent, and then eventually admitted his guilt.

Magazines

The only time copyright issues occur in magazines is when one publication decides to re-print an article from another. But this is usually acknowledged, with a footnote along the lines of ‘This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Harper’s Bazaar‘.

However, the recent success of The Huffington Post has raised a number of copyright issues. Arianne Huffington created her online news service in 2005-2009. It offers a combination of a frequently updated digital news service with magazine-style articles written by specialists. It has been very successful, and now has versions covering Canada, America, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

But much of the content of the HuffPo is generated by bloggers who are not paid for their articles. They’re encouraged to contribute on any subject they wish; and their work is mingled with product placement articles and other junk journalism. There have also been recent accusations that armies of HuffPo staff are being employed to re-write other people’s original work to escape any accusations of plagiarism.

Copyright cases

Wikipedia has a useful list of copyright case law in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States. This takes account of historical rulings and recent cases involving digital works, trademarks, photographs, peer-to-peer file sharing, definitions of originality, distribution, and even ‘what is not a sculpture’.

© Roy Johnson 2011

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Print Culture bibliography

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book history, bibliographic studies, and textual culture

Abdurgham, Alison. Women in Print: Writing and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria. London: Allen & Unwin, 1972.

Altick, Richard Daniel. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. 2nd ed. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998.

Armbruster, Carol, ed. Publishing and Readership in Revolutionary France and America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Anderson, Benedict R. O’Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991.

Anderson, Patricia. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1991.

Armstrong, Adrian. Technique and Technology: Script, Print, and Poetics in France 1470-1550. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Barker, Hannah and David Vincent. Language, Print, and Electoral Politics, 1790-1832: Newcastle-under-Lyme Broadsides. Rochester, NY: Boydell P/Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust, 2001.

Baron, Naomi S. Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading. London: Routledge, 2000.

Barton, David and Nigel Hall, eds. Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000.

Bazerman. Charles. The Languages of Edison’s Light. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1999.

—. Shaping Written Knowledge. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.

Bell, William, Laurel Brake, and David Finkelstein, eds. Nineteenth-Century and the Construction of Identities. New York: St. Martin’s P, 2000.

Besnier, Niko. Literacy, Emotion, and Authority. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Blaney, Peter W. M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, DC: Folger Library Publications, 1991.

Bobrick, Benson. Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. 2nd ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp.295, 1999.

Borgmann, Albert. Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

Burke, Sean, ed. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995.

Cadman, Eileen, Gail Chester, and Agnes Pivot. Rolling Our Own: Women as Printers, Publishers and Distributors. London: Minority P Group, 1981.

Carlson, David R. English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475-1525. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993.

Cavallo, Guglielmo and Roger Chartier, eds. A History of Reading in the West. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Chambers, Douglas. The Reinvention of the World: English Writing 1650-1750. London: Arnold/Hodder Headline Group, 1996.

Chambers, Douglas. The Reinvention of the World: English Writing 1650-1750. London: Arnold/Hodder Headline Group, 1996.

Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.

—, ed. The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

—. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.

Chaytor, H. J. From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature. London: W. Heffer and Sons, 1945.

Crain, Patricia A. The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

Crosby, Alfred W. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Cuddihy, John Murray. The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon P, 1987.

Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York: Norton, 1995.

Darnton, Robert and Daniel Roche. Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

DeRitter, Jones. The Embodiment of Characters: The Representation of Physical Experiences on Stage and in Print, 1728-1749. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994.

Dock, Julie Bates. The Press of Ideas: Readings for Writers on Print Culture and the Information Age. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s P, 1996.

Dolan, Frances E. Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.

Eberly, Rosa A. Citizens Critics: Literary Public Spheres. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1992.

—. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1979.

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Jordan, John O. and Robert L. Patten, eds. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Kaestle, Carl F., Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and William Vance Trollinger, Jr. Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Kaufer, David S. and Kathleen M. Carley. Communication at a Distance: The Influence of Print on Sociocultural Organization and Change. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993.

Keller-Cohen, Deborah, ed. Literacy: Interdisciplinary Conversations. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 1994.

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Kilgour, Frederick G. The Evolution of the Book. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Kintgen, Eugene R. Reading in Tudor England. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1996.

Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Kramnick, Jonathan Brody. Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Culture of the Past, 1700-1770. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

—. Literacy and the Survival of Humanism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.

Laspina, James Andrew. The Visual Turn and the Transformation of the Textbook. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998.

Leith, Philip. Formalism in AI and Computer Science. Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood, 1990.

Logan, Robert. The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow, 1986.

—. The Sixth Language: Learning & Living in the Internet Age. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 2000..

Love, Harold. The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998.

Luke, Carmen. Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism: The Discourse on Childhood. Albany: State U of New York P, 1989.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Marotti, Arthur F. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.

Marotti, Arthur F. and Michael D. Bristol, eds. Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relationships of the Media in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2000.

Martin, Henri-Jean, The History and Power of Writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, trns. Lynda G. Cochrane, pp.591, ISBN 0226508366

—. Print, Power, and People in Seventeenth-Century France. Trans. David Gerard. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1993.

Mayer, Thomas F. and D. R. Woolf, eds. The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,1995.

Mazzio, Carla and Douglas Trevor, eds. Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 2000.

McGrath, Alister. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

McIntosh, Carey. The Evolution of English Prose: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998.

McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

—. Oral Culture, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand: The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington, NZ: Victoria UP, 1985.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962.

—. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Melendez, A. Gabriel. So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834-1958. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1997.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1939.

Milton, John. ‘A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic Conformed to the Method of Peter Ramus’. Ed. and Trans. Walter J. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger. Complete Prose Works of John Milton: Volume 8. Ed. Maurice Kelley. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. 206-407

Mitch, David F. The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.

Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

—. Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Founding of Harvard College. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
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—. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1936.

Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1996. Also see Yeo; Rechtien.

Oliphant, Dave and Robin Bradford, eds. New Directions in Textual Studies. Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, U of Texas.

Ong, Walter J. The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

—. Faith and Contexts. 4 vols. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992-1999; now distributed by Rowman & Littlefield.

—. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

—. ‘Literature, Written Transmission of.’ The New Catholic Encyclopedia. Ed. William J. McDonald. 15 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. Reprinted in An Ong Reader; Challenges for Further Inquiry.

—. An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, forthcoming.

—. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

—. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

—. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958.

—. Review of Butler’s The Origin of Printing in Europe. The Historical Bulletin 19 (Mar. 1941): 68.

—. Review of McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy. America 107 (Sept. 15, 1962): 743, 747. Reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry.

—. Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971.

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—. Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789-1799. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

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Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

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Yeo, Richard. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Includes commonplace books.

Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

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© Roy Johnson 2009

Reproduced with the permission of the author –

Thomas J. Farrell, Associate Professor, Department of Composition, University of Minnesota at Duluth; Duluth, MN

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Print Journalism

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essays on journalism – from print to the Internet

More than 12.5 million national newspapers are sold in Britain every day. The figure goes up to 14 million on Sundays. And for every copy of the Guardian sold each day, ten copies of the Sun cross the counter – which is what led former Sun editor Kelvin McKensie to rather cruelly call the Guardian ‘the world’s worst newspaper’. This publication covers every possible aspect of print journalism, and I suspect it has been produced in the hope of becoming a standard text in departments of journalism and media studies.

Print Journalism The chapters are written by ex-journalists now teaching at four universities – City London, Sheffield, Cardiff, and Lincoln – so it seems there must be a regular career path leading out of the Street of Shame and showing other people the best way to get there. Articles in the first section deal with the history, structure, and the financing of print media. Who owns what; which titles sell most copies; and how they make a profit.

There’s a certain amount of overlap and repetition here, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, because the newspaper and magazine publishing business is a lot more complex than it appears on the surface. The second section gets straight down to practical advice for would-be journalists: how to be a reporter; how to conduct interviews; what makes a good news story; how to write good introductions and structure paragraphs.

Then, moving into the newsroom itself, there are chapters on the role of news editor, what sub-editors do, and how pictures are captioned. The individual essays could profit enormously from more illustrative examples, and almost every page is crying out for graphics.

The would-be journalist is given a detailed breakdown of news features, and more importantly how to successfully pitch your ideas to editors, then how to write them if and when they are accepted.

Once you have written your piece and checked it several times over for style, content, accuracy, spelling, and grammar, it then goes to a features editor who will edit it all over again. There’s a whole chapter explaining this process. It’s a tough world, and this is required reading for anybody who wants to make a success of freelance writing.

You are unlikely to be invited to write comment or opinion pieces, but you could break into print via reviewing. How to write them is explained in detail – and these days its as likely to be reviewing radio and TV programmes as traditional books and theatre performances.

Print journalism is now as we know being challenged by the online world – though you are even less likely to earn income from it. There are essays which analyse the differences between newspapers’ print and online versions, and technical advice on how monitor screen and web browsers affect how and what we read on screen.

There’s also advice on writing blogs and wikis, before the collection winds up with essays on the ethics and law in journalism, copyright, and intellectual property rights – which is one of the best short explanations of a complex issue I have seen for quite some time.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Richard Keeble (ed), Print Journalism: a critical introduction, London: Routledge, 2005, pp.347, ISBN: 0415358825

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Publicity, Newsletters and Press Releases

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beginner’s practical guide to promotional writing skills

Oxford University Press have just brought out a series of short beginner’s manuals on communication skills. Their emphasis is on compact, no-nonsense advice directly related to issues of everyday life. Alison Baverstock’s guide shows you how to generate effective publicity and promotional writing skills through careful writing. It’s aimed at anyone who needs to publicise an event, an organisation, or a cause – whether it’s a big commercial business or just your own hobby. She starts from the position that the written word is powerful and important, and that different standards of correctness or informality are required depending on the medium – be it email, letters, press releases, or company reports.

Publicity, Newsletters & Press ReleasesNext comes what she calls ‘promotional writing’ – copy which is trying to persuade, sell something, or convince readers. Her advice is to avoid jargon, and to choose short, clear expression, rather than writing which is striving to impress. You should check your grammar, and avoid the common pitfalls of weak writing – such as split infinitives, misplaced apostrophes, and inconsistent tenses.

She shows how to write press releases to gain publicity, and how to angle a story to make it more appealing. The secret is to make clear distinctions between different media, and she gives plenty of examples, showing how to contact people to advantage in a way that’s more likely to get your story accepted.

The general advice is quite logical. You need to make your appeal for attention attractive, accurate, and functionally effective. This means going into a lot of detail and being rigorous about names, phone numbers, and contact details.

On newsletters she emphasises the importance of the relationship with subscribers. As a newsletter editor myself, I was interested to see that she places maximum importance on the interest of the reader, not on the writer or editor. Obviously, the newsletter should be interesting, and she explains a number of strategies for hooking the reader’s attention.

There are also lots of excellent tips along the way, and examples of good and bad practice based on real-life situations. This guide will be of use to anybody who wants to engage with the world of public writing.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Alison Baverstock, Publicity, Newsletters and Press Releases, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp.98, ISBN: 0198603843

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Publishing on the Internet

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a selection of resources

What if your ambitions are for publishing on the Internet? After all, many writers now launch their work in writers forums, creative writing groups, and even in personal weblogs. The Internet has made it possible to reach a worldwide audience with just a few IT skills – and it’s all for free!

You have the chance to place your work in writers’ groups, you might create your own web site, or you could start blogging. In addition, you could promote your work via a personal website and an email newsletter. Whichever route you choose, you should be aware of the difference between writing for the screen and the printed page.

What follows is guidance and resources covering all these new possibilities. You need to know what is available for writers on the Internet, and where to find it. eBooks and email publishing are a very attractive and cost-effective option you can learn about easily. Blogging is cost-free and currently very hip. And knowing the difference between writing for the screen or for print will show that you know what you are doing.

Publishing on the InternetThe Internet: A Writer’s Guide
The main strength of Jane Dorner’s book is that she is a professional writer who practices what she writes about. She writes for both print and screen, and promotes her work via a personal web site. This book explores both the new opportunities for writers created by the Internet and the practicalities of publishing on your own site.

She touches on writing groups which exist in the form of mailing lists, websites, newsletters, chat groups, and conferences, and she also deals with eBooks plus annotated lists of all the sources a writer could possibly wish for – from libraries to bookshops, dictionaries to writing circles, newspapers to writing style guides, electronic publishers to free Internet service providers.
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Creative Web Writing - book jacketCreative Web Writing
If you are mainly interested in traditional creative writing Jane Dorner has another book which shows you the skills you need if you want to put your writing onto the Internet. She is speaking to those people who have been creating poems and stories in their back rooms and getting nowhere. This guide covers collaborative story-telling, research online, interactivity and flexible text, as well as the nuts and bolts of styling for screen reading. Most importantly, she explains the range of new markets, new technologies, and how to apply them.

Creative genres are covered, including autobiography, poetry, broadcasting, screen-writing and writing for children. She also describes how to look carefully at contracts, how to submit your writing to an electronic publisher, and how to deal with Print on demand (POD) outlets. There’s a very useful survey of the various delivery methods and payments for eBooks. This is one of the most popular methods for aspiring authors to reach new readers. This section will be required reading if you are thinking of venturing into this world.

The central part of the book deals with new forms of writing using Web technologies. This is one field in which she has clearly done her homework. She shows examples of writing in the form of Blogs (Web-logs) email (epistolary) narratives, fictions illuminated by graphics, the weird world of MUDs and MOOs, Flash-animated writing, and phonetic poetry.
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The Internet Writer's HandbookThe Internet Writer’s Handbook
Karen Scott’s book is a detailed guide to publishers of the two formats which are most digital – e-zines and e-books. It’s in the form of an international A-Z of the best websites for writers to target, with full contact details for all websites listed. She offers plenty of detail on how to submit your work , how much publishers will pay, and even how they are most likely to respond. The topics these eBook publishers cover range from poetry and fiction, through non-fiction feature writing, to specialist technical and hobbyist publications.
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© Roy Johnson 2009

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