Writing Archives

Alphabet to Email

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

scholarly study of the history of writing and technology

What is the relationship between writing and technology – including the means by which it is produced? Is there a difference between writing with a quill on velum, a pen on paper, or onto a hard disk using a word-processor. Naomi Baron certainly thinks there is, and she brings considerable erudition from what seems to be an Eng. Lit. background to explore the issues. She begins with a pithy analysis of twentieth century theories of the relationship between the spoken and the written language, then goes on to show how the text as an object evolved – from scroll to codex to printed book, and the effect that this had on both the process of production and consumption of the text.

Taking the UK as her model, she traces the development of literacy in the UK from the eighth century, showing how literacy is linked to technology. She then discusses the development of the first writings in English up to the birth of print, pointing out that not all writers (including Shakespeare) embraced the technology of their time. Aristocrats writing in the early Renaissance thought it was vulgar to have one’s work printed and published. This leads into the history of notions of authorship – showing how plagiarism, quotation, and copyright are quite modern concepts. There’s lots of historical depth in her examination of the subject, and thought-provoking ideas emerge on almost every page. This is a serious, scholarly work, but readers eager for the email element promised in the title will have to be patient.

The next part of her study deals with the political, legal, and commercial history of book production and its effect on determining authorship and ownership of text. En passant she covers issues of literacy and how it is to be measured, the sociology of reading habits, and then the history of dictionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the centre of the book, there’s a a lot on the history of the English Language and its development, spelling reform, the history of writing as a physical activity, and the rise of prescriptive grammar and ‘received pronunciation’ in the eighteenth century.

Then suddenly there is a chapter which seems to have come from nowhere. It explores the development of educational theory in American Universities and the rise of the ‘English Comp’ class. She gradually makes contact with what is supposed to be her subject when a consideration of online and collaborative writing – but by the time we get to the development of the WELL and Netscape it’s rather difficult to see where her argument is heading, though she does come back to authorship, ownership, and copyright in an age of compositional hypertext.

Then it’s back to classical Greece and Rome for a chapter on punctuation, retracing our steps via the Renaissance in a consideration of the relationship between writing, punctuation, and how the language is spoken. This section ends with a glance at the punctuation of email – which at least brings the promised subject back into view.

There is then a chapter on communication technology – from the semaphore and the telephone through to email. Are we there at last? Unfortunately not, for having arrived at this point, her discussion expires into very distanced, sociological, and general observations. There are some interesting questions explored. Must we answer email as we feel obliged to answer the phone? But this is a question of etiquette, not writing. There is very little on the most revolutionary writing tool – the word-processor – no analysis of concrete examples, and there are no insights offered which a regular emailer would not come across several times a day.

Her writing is fairly lively, though given the subject matter she occasionally makes some surprising gaffes – ‘who was the audience?’, ”nearly almost’, and ‘Piaget, the Swiss philosopher-come-mathematician’. The study arrives with a good bibliography and a full scholarly apparatus, though there’s an annoying system of notation which sends you through two layers of bibliographic reference to check her sources.

The value of this work is in its historical depth and the connections she reveals between the words on the page and the means of getting them there. She’s at her most interesting in the Renaissance, but she doesn’t in fact have much to say that’s new about electronic writing. Apart from observing that the online world presents new problems for those who communicate by writing, the most useful parts of her exposition are concerned with the distant past, not the present. Nevertheless, anyone interested in the relationship between writing and technology will probably want to read what she has to say about these issues- if only because she covers such a broad historical span.

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Naomi S. Baron, Alphabet to Email: How written English evolved and where it’s heading, London/New York: Routledge, 2001, pp.336, ISBN: 0415186862

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Damp Squid: English Laid Bare

June 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how language is changing – and why

Truth be told, this is quite an advanced book on language use written from deep within the research vaults of the English linguistic history, but it’s written in a language that most people will be able to understand. Behind the apparently frivolous and amusing selection of examples in Damp Squid, Jeremy Butterfield is offering a serious update on how lexicography is conducted in the digital age.

Dictionaries are no longer constructed from contributions handed in on slips of paper by enthusiastic amateurs: they are compiled by software programs crunching vast stockpiles of words stored in databases – known as the ‘corpus’. This is a collection of examples of how the English language is actually being used, drawn from the printed word – from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines, and from Hansard to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs.

The complete database (of the Oxford Corpus) contains over two billion words, and is being expanded at the rate of 350 million new words every year. The Corpus reveals those words we use most frequently (the, is, to and) – but it has to be observed that these are based on written evidence – not the language we speak.

He looks at the origins of English language, which comes from a bewildering variety of sources – Old English, French, Norse, Greek and Latin, plus words borrowed from more than 350 other languages.

The current social activities generating most new words include information technology, lifestyle, media, sport, ecology, fashion, and cuisine. These new words are coined by making compounds from old terms (bedmate, streetwise) clipping and back-formation (advert, emote) portmanteau (chortle, podcast) eponyms (Biro)and foreign suffixes such as —ati (It: glitterati) —ista (Sp: Guardianista) and —fest (Gr: bookfest).

He has a good chapter on irregularities of spelling and pronunciation, culminating in a review of ‘eggcorns’ – understandable mistakes such as just desserts, free-reign, and baited breath – many of which are so widespread there is a danger of their becoming accepted.

He is a fully committed descriptivist. That is, his job as he sees it is to record the manner in which the English language is used, no matter how much it might change its meanings. Hence the title of the book. He argues that damp squid makes just as much sense as the original damp squib – because we hardly ever use the term squib any more. This might infuriate traditionalists and prescriptive grammarians, and it does neglect to note that a squid can hardly be anything other than damp, since it lives in the sea, so the metaphor loses all its force: it fails to make an imaginative connection between two disparate things.

In fact he takes things even further in his conclusion, where he delivers a vigorous critique of what he calls the ‘language Nazis’ – those people who write to newspapers complaining about the decline of the English language (and are aided and abetted by the BBC).

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Jeremy Butterfield, Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.179, ISBN: 019957409X

Essays on the History of Copyright

August 4, 2010 by Roy Johnson

This is a collection of academic essays that seeks to establish legitimacy for a relatively new intellectual discipline – the study of the history of copyright. The editors in their introduction maintain that new academic disciplines arise when it generally becomes felt that there is need for them. It is certainly true that many of the technological advances of the last twenty years (in the digitization, reproduction, re-purposing, transmogrification, and distribution of various media) have brought issues of copyright, ownership, and intellectual property rights into sharp focus. And it’s important to realise that this does not only affect the printed word: films, photographs, music, paintings, even simple trademarks and branding logos have all been the subject of amazingly expensive legal disputes recently.

The essays as you might expect take a long historical perspective. Issues of copyright (indeed, even of authorship itself) did not arise as a problem until the invention of the printing press made the mass production of an important cultural object (the book) available in the fifteenth century. So, the collection begins with the granting of the first patent in 1469 for a five year printing monopoly in Venice. It’s interesting to note that since many of the first books put into general circulation were versions of Greek and Roman classics, it was their formal appearance, font design, and physical shape that was protected, not their intellectual content or authorship.

It was only later, as the number of original published works started to rise, that individual authors began to apply for what we would now call copyright; and in their cases it was permission to print and sell a single edition of a work over a long enough time span (five years) to give them a chance to cover initial costs.

In 1644 Milton issued his Areopagitica as a protest against state censorship and in favour of freedom of the press. The important point to stress here is that he was explicitly championing the free circulation of ideas. The licence-free period that followed saw the establishment of English newspapers, with sales by 1711 of up to 70,000 per week.

Meanwhile, in America, the arrival of the first printing press in Massachusetts was greeted with prohibitions, censorship, licensing, and colonial control. It was only after the War of Independence that authors successfully applied for copyright to their work.

There are chapters tracing the slight variations in law that sprang up in France, Italy, and Germany. All sorts of different systems were tried, from temporary arrangements affecting only a single work, to ‘perpetual copyright’.

There are (understandably) quite a lot of legal and even philosophical issues at stake in some of these battles over rights and regulations. These become even more complex as the first attempts were made in the late nineteenth century to establish international agreements. It should be remembered that authors such as Dickens were forced to struggle to establish their rights in the USA.

Many of today’s commercial strategies were already in play in previous centuries – so long as the technological means to create copies and profit were available. The painter Benjamin West made £400 for his famous 1771 depiction of The Death of General Woolfe, but almost one hundred times more from the engravings that were made from it.

It is also worth noting that two other factors complicated the drafting of legislation on these matters. One was the fact that the law (in Britain) was also being framed to protect the interest of the owners or the public against possibly unscrupulous artists. The second was that the idea that a work of art should be ‘new and original’ was a surprisingly late consideration, introduced only to the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Bill.

There was also separate legislation covering copyright in works of dramatic art and performance rights. Amazingly, the nineteenth century world of theatre was rife with stenographers in the audience recording the text of new plays as they were acted out on stage. These were then sold on to other theatre managers, who often claimed copyright, rather than the original author.

What this impressive collection of articles does not do is bring the arguments up into the digital age. That is understandable when its very objective is to establish a long history on which to build a new discipline. But anyone with the slightest interest in these issues of copyright and intellectual property rights will be keen to know how digitization and ease of reproduction are changing many of the traditional assumptions. Mashups, print-on-demand, open source software, file-sharing, and the new ‘hybrid economies’ of eCommerce are changing the face of copyright, ownership, and commercial rights. To keep up with these issues, you will need to look beyond the traditionalists to the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow.

It’s an interesting book production in its own right. OpenBook Publishers are a new business supplying academic print on demand (PoD) titles. The books they publish are available, free to view on line as searchable PDFs – but a file can quickly be turned into a conventionally printed and bound book for those who wish to pay for it. This title, I must say, is a handsome volume you would be pleased to have on your shelves.

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Ronan Deazeley et al (eds), Power and Privilege: Essays on the History of Copyright, Cambridge: Open Book Publishing, 2010, pp.438, ISBN: 190692418X

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Form – how to understand it

August 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Form – definition

Form is a term which refers to the recognisable shape of a text or a speech act.

This shape may be either physical or abstract.

Examples

Spoken		Written
Conversation		Menu
Sermon		Letter
Announcement		Novel
Anecdote		Article
Joke		Poster

Use

The term ‘form’ is used in linguistics and in literary criticism as a technical term.

It is used when considering the shape, the construction, or the type of speech or writing.

An awareness of form can help to produce more efficient communication.

Keeping the ‘shape’ of writing in mind helps to clarify the type of end product required.

NB! An appreciation of form is developed via practice and experience.

Form is an important part of stylistic analysis – together with audience and function.

When studying a text we first try to identify its form. What type of writing is it? (Is it a letter, an advertisement, a timetable, or a novel?)

Then we might ask ‘To whom is it addressed?’ [audience] and ‘What is it doing?’ [function].

When thinking of linguistic or literary form, it’s sometimes useful to think in terms of material shape. For instance, a table is usually a rectangular horizontal surface supported by legs at each corner. That is the form of a table.

Similarly, a piece of writing which begins with a postal address and the words ‘Dear Sir’, then ends with ‘Yours sincerely’ – is likely to be a letter. This is the form taken by most letters.

It is possible for one form to contain another or several other forms. For example, a novel may contain a letter or a poem. A sermon may contain an anecdote.

Most poems have a form, but this varies a great deal. The sonnet is in part defined by its form which is the number of lines and the rhyme scheme.

Form in speech may be signaled by recognizable phrases, tone of voice, or choice of vocabulary.

For instance, ‘The train now standing in platform ten…’ would be recognised by most people as the start of a railway announcement.

Similarly, ‘O Lord, we beseech thee to …’ would easily be identified as the start of a prayer.

If someone says ‘My grandfather always told me that …’ we know that they are probably going to offer moral advice – a piece of homespun wisdom.

Beware! The term ‘formal’ has widened in its application to mean ‘serious’ — just as ‘informal’ has also extended its meaning to encompass notions of friendliness.

For instance, the greeting ‘Hi there!’ might be described by most people as informal. However, because it is part of a recognised verbal ritual, in linguistic terms [strictly speaking] it is ‘formal’ because it has a fixed shape.

The two terms, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ therefore need to be used accurately when applied to linguistic or literary analysis.

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Function – how to understand it

September 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Function – definition

Function is the term used to express the purpose of a text or of a speech act.

This function can be determined by the writer or by the reader.

Examples

Texts or spoken pieces might fall into one of the following broad categories:

WRITING

persuasion an advertisement

information a train timetable

entertainment a short story

instruction how to build a wardrobe

SPEECH

persuasion a sermon

information a radio weather forcast

entertainment a joke

instruction how to get from A to B

Use

The term ‘function’ is used as a technical term in linguistics and in literary criticism.

An awareness of function helps to produce efficient writing and speaking.

An awareness of function also results in efficient reading and listening.

NB! Function is one of the three important features of communication. The other two are audience and form.

The four general functions possess certain stylistic features or attributes:

Instruction the imperative mode and direct address
[Stir the mixture]

Persuasion emotive vocabulary
[beautiful, duty, militant, heart]

Information factual data
[time, locations, measurements]

Entertainment often breaks rules of grammar, spelling, pronunciation

Awareness of these in the production of speech or writing leads to effective communication and an appropriate style.

For instance, if we buy a product such as a chicken casserole from a supermarket we may be more interested in what’s in it than how to cook it. We may be interested in both these elements, but we certainly wouldn’t want them mixed together.

Food manufacturers for this reason present the list of ingredients [information] separately from how to prepare the dish [instructions]. This simple example shows the concept of function working efficiently.

If we receive a phone call from a close relative who comes to visit more often than we would like, we immediately try to ascertain the purpose [function] of the call. Is it –

an attempt to fix up the next visit? [persuade]
to tell us the possible dates? [inform]
to explain how their vegetables should be cooked? [instruct]
to tell us that the cat has learned to swim? [entertain]

In this example, the person who phones to arrange the visit may have every interest in obscuring the function of the call. As a recipient however, we are very interested in finding out what it is. Such is the crucial nature of function.

The National Curriculum for the teaching of English in Schools now states the importance of making children aware of the function of all the varied pieces they read and write.

Examining boards for A level English will only accept written work which has an authentic function. That is, it should be as close as possible to an example which could be used in real life.

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Graphology – how to understand it

September 7, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Graphology – definition

Graphology is the study of the system of symbols which communicates language in written form.

In its more popular sense, it is the study of handwriting.

Examples

This is an example of a pictographic symbol.

Use

In the English language, writing starts on the left and moves to the right. It begins at the top of the page and moves downwards.

This might seem rather obvious, but writing in some other languages is arranged differently. Hebrew moves from right to left in rows, and Japanese from top to bottom in columns.

NB! Graffiti is a type of graphology, but if you confuse the two you’ll end up in trouble.

Graphology in context. ‘Grapheme’ is the term for the smallest unit of written communication. A letter of the alphabet or a punctuation mark is a grapheme. A scientific, mathematical, or any other kind of symbol is also a grapheme.

English is an ideographic language. This means that the writing system is based on a set of symbols. These have no intrinsic connection with what they are expressing.

Chinese on the other hand is known as a logographic or pictographic language. This is because the characters of that language were historically pictorial representations of the object being expressed.

Over the centuries these pictures have been stylised to the extent that they no longer resemble houses, people or trees. They now seem, to the uninitiated, just as arbitrary in their function as the English alphabet.

In linguistic study, graphology is a level of analysis along with phonology, vocabulary, grammar and semantics. It includes the study of layout, the use of logos and any other feature of graphical communication.

Children learn to form individual letters and later to produce joined-up writing. Some students find it difficult to make the transition from upper case printing to continuous script. This can be a significant impediment to their studies.

However, with literacy and maturity, we develop our own style of hand-writing. There is commonly a variation in the way we form our letters which is subject to context.

For instance, we may form a flamboyant ‘s’ at the end of a word, but a conservative version of that same grapheme if it occurs in an initial or medial position.

It is important to be able to distinguish between upper and lower case letters in order to punctuate. This is not possible with printing. Continuous script can also be produced much more rapidly.

Continuous script is easier to read than printing, because the eye is led by the connecting strokes between the characters. This is the same principle as the use of sefifed fonts in the layout of continuous writing.

Approaches to teaching hand-writing have changed over the years. It is interesting to note that each generation seems to have its own style of handwriting. Our parents and their contemporaries seem to produce the same script style, while their parents’ generation also have their own similarly distinct style.

Perhaps parallel with the phenomenon of speech style, handwriting styles are easier to categorise from a distance. Our children may see our contemporaries’ handwriting as belonging to an identifiable style, whilst we ourselves consider each person’s handwriting to be idiosyncratic.

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Handwriting of the Twentieth Century

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

history and development of modern graphology

Rosemary Sassoon is a distinguished expert on handwriting, and a typographist celebrated for her font Sassoon Prima, which helps young school pupils learn to read and write. In her latest book, Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, she looks at the effects which various teaching methods and models of good practice have had in the period from 1900 to the present. She charts developments in the teaching and study of handwriting, showing how changing educational policies, economic forces and technological advance have combined to alter the priorities and form of handwriting.

Every page is suffused with a love of her subject and a concern for the people she is writing about. This ‘long and sometimes sorry story’ tells also of the sheer pain and hard work of children forced to follow the style of the day, and of the reformers who have sought to simplify the teaching and learning of handwriting.

What emerges very clearly is that handwriting styles pass through various fashions and styles – which is why we can put a rough date on examples – even including our own. The general process she illustrates is one of a gradual move from the ornate copperplate of the Victorian period, to various forms of cursive Italic which are common now.

The book is beautifully illustrated throughout with examples from copybooks and personal handwriting from across the world. She ends with a comparative study of developments in continental Europe and America during the same period – and where the lessons to be learned are exactly the same.

This book is a historical record of techniques, styles and methods. But it also a passionate study of everyday typography, informed by a deep knowledge of her subject. It will be of interest to educationalists, people in teacher training, plus cultural sociologists and historians – as well as typographists and graphologists.

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Rosemary Sassoon, Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, Bristol: Intellect, 2007, pp.208, ISBN: 0415178827

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How We Write

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a study of the creative process

If you are interested in the process of writing – the means by which we think of ideas, translate them into words, and record them as text – then this is a book you will not want to miss. Mike Sharples deals with some of the central paradoxes in this most intellectualised form of culture. For instance, he considers how writing is a demanding mental activity, yet some people appear to write easily; how it demands the constraints of grammar, yet creative writers break these rules; how most writing involves planning, yet it also makes use of ‘inspiration’ and chance discovery in the process of composition.

These are conundrums to which he offers interesting solutions, based upon the central notion of the writer as a ‘creative designer’. He starts with the ways in which ideas and narratives are conceptualized before they are committed to paper. Then he pursues the notion of creativity acting to produce results which are intelligible and acceptable, because they are enacted within a series of cultural constraints. The very encouraging part of this analysis is that as he points out, creativity is not something rare, but is quite normal. There are qualitative differences in the results, to be sure, but most ordinary people can come up with ideas, given a problem.

Next he deals with ‘Writing as design’ – which considers the physical context in which writing takes place, with some interesting comparisons between writing and and architectural design. He writes eloquently on the psychological pleasures of writing with a pencil – then goes on to compare the advantages of writing using different media – including word-processors.

Given that he obviously wishes to get close to the writing process, it’s slightly surprising that he doesn’t examine author’s notebooks, manuscripts and revisions. There are plenty of examples (Henry James, Virginia Woolf) where we can get fairly close to the creative process – though he does at one point look at some of Wordsworth’s drafts of his poetry.

He identifies three activities as essential to the writing process – planning, composing, and revising. Not surprisingly, as an academic he is a firm believer in planning, and he describes the advantages and shortcomings of lists, mind mapping, and outlining:

A draft text is itself a plan for further writing and…composing a free and unconstrained draft and then organising this into a more coherent text is one successful approach to writing.

On the process of composition he makes a brave attempt to deal with what constitutes good style, and practitioners of creative writing will be interested in what he says about how narratives are structured and developed. Dealing with the revision process, he encouragingly points out that writers are privileged in being able to revise their products so easily – unlike architects and sculptors for instance – and the advent of the word processor has made this process very easy indeed.

He also observes that experienced writers usually revise their work at a structural as well as a surface level – whereas the less experienced merely make changes at word and sentence level.

There are some interesting tips on making this process of revision easier – to which I would have added the best advice I have come across – edit in separate passes through the text for different purposes – because it’s less tiring than trying to keep several issues in mind at once.

The various strategies of creative writing are discussed using the metaphors of planning, building, discovering, and exploring. These analogies are thought-provoking, but it is quotations from practising writers which bring the arguments to life. This actually becomes a consideration of the psychology of writing, and the often pathological connection between creativity and depression, anxiety, and even suicide.

Next he deals with what he calls the materiality of the text – how it is printed and laid out. This involves choice of typeface, use of space, page layout, text decoration, and all the other aspects of what is printed and how it affects our interpretation of what we read.

This is a quasi-marxist form of interpretation which considers the relationship between writing and the society in which it is produced and read. He invokes the Russian formalist Bahktin and post-Structuralist literary theorists to argue that texts may not have fixed meanings, and that writers negotiate (even if unconsciously) with the cultural and moral frameworks of the societies in which they live.

A penultimate chapter on the various forms of collaborative writing will be of interest to those concerned with scientific writing – one of the few areas in which it is still regularly practised. And he ends, logically enough, with the new possibilities opened up by the digitization of text and electronic writing. Apart from writing for the Web, this involves the possibilities of hypertext fiction, writing in MOOs, and voice recognition as possible spurs to creativity.

The writing is fluent and accessible throughout. This is a humane and thought-provoking book which operates successfully at a number of levels. It offers wise counsel to aspiring writers; fresh approaches to the more experienced; and even new paths to be explored for those in academic research studying the relationship between thinking and its presentation as the written word.

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Mike Sharples, How We Write: Writing as creative design, London: Routledge, 1999, pp.224, ISBN: 0415185874

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Hyphens – how to use them correctly

September 7, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Hyphens – definition

Hyphens are short horizontal marks – (shorter than the dash).

Hyphens are used to show a link between words.

Examples

mother-in-law
re-enter
matter-of-fact
author-critic
president-elect
co-operation

Use

Hyphens are used to join words when forming compounds.

They are also used after prefixes – especially where it is necessary to avoid an awkward or confusing sequence of letters (as in re-enter).

Notice the difference between a compound word and the same terms used separately:

a fifteenth-century manuscript
in the fifteenth century

NB! The hyphen is not the same thing as the longer dash ( — ) but this distinction is rarely made in the UK.

Hyphens should be used where it is necessary to avoid ambiguity:

two-year-old cats
two year-old cats

They should also be used to distinguish terms which are spelled identically, but which have different meanings:

reformation – change for the better
re-formation – to form again

recover – to regain control
re-cover – to cover again

resign – to stand down
re-sign – to sign again

Hyphens are used when new terms are formed from compounds, but they are dropped when the compound is accepted into common usage. (This process is usually more rapid in the USA than in Europe.)

bath-tub -> bathtub
book-shelf -> bookshelf
club-house -> clubhouse

This phenomenon is currently visible in computer technology, where all three forms of a term may co-exist:

Word processor
Word-processor
Wordprocessor

Remember that the hyphen is not the same thing as the longer dash. A distinction between the two is commonly made in the US, but not in the UK.

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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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scholarly study of the history of writing and technology

how language is changing – and why

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Form – definition

Examples

Use

free pages from our English Language software program

Function – definition

Examples

Use

free pages from our English Language software program

Graphology – definition

Examples

Use

history and development of modern graphology

a study of the creative process

free pages from our English Language software program

Hyphens – definition

Examples

Use

contemporary journalism in an international context

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