I wish someone had taught me to write in college. Really write.
All we were instructed to do was to write papers. Most of us thought if we wrote terribly long, convoluted sentences that we’d sound smarter than the actual words and meaning on the page. So, I learned to use semi-colons and em dashes and all kinds of devices to look brainier. I even used British spellings because colour was so much sexier than color.
Sure, we got comments back. But no one ever held us accountable. No one ever said, “Hey, try this if you want to write better.”
In fact, they shoved books in front of us with 100-page sentences, such as the one that kicks off Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury. Or dazzled us with completely indecipherable Joyce.
What we were supposed to think?
And then they patted our little backsides and sent us out into the world.
My first job was as a newspaper writer. The long sentences and Brit spellings hit the skids immediately. But still — we were somewhat rewarded for quantity. Not in pay, but generally having a longer story meant that we could use less of the canned National Geographic copy that was written to fit any space (it could be cut at the end of virtually any sentence! It was amazing stuff).
Even so, my editor allowed me the occasional semi-colon and awkward sentence structure. He couldn’t possibly fix everything wrong with my writing.
Then I found television. Or, it found me. I took at job at age 24 researching and occasionally writing for a live television news show for PBS. Within five months, I had been bumped up to Head Writer for the show — but not because my writing was that great. Our head writer left the show and no other show writer knew anything about farming and agribusiness.
Writing for television is the best thing that ever happened to my writing. My words became few and well chosen. A :30 story had five, maybe six sentences, and they had to be understood by the ear. They had to work with sounds, such as music and sound effects.
Plus, I had to learn to rewrite. At first I rewrote to make the timing right. Then, I learned to choose simpler words. Then, I learned to choose words that complemented, not repeated, the video on screen. I rewrote even :30 stories a dozen times. On an IBM. An IBM selectric typewriter, that is.
Learning to write well has been a long and arduous process. And I’m still at it (the learning part, that is) every single day.
And the web has helped me. First, by letting me publish virtually anything instantaneously. What a relief after getting my master’s in design when most typesetting machines still used metal letters! Second, by allowing me to tweak to my heart’s content.
I taught writing for ten years at a variety of colleges and universities. That was the second great thing that happened to my writing. I came to understand the process even more by teaching others. And I forced every student in every class to rewrite.
At first, my students hated the insinuation that their first attempts weren’t any good. Then they felt pride that, after several rewrites, their stories, ads, and features were good enough to go on the air. And every single student left with a portfolio of their writing that many used to get their first jobs.
Now, wouldn’t that be nice if all students learned that valuable lesson of rewriting? It doesn’t happen in every English class. My effect on teaching rewriting? Ten years times 30 students per class times 2 classes per semester? A mere 600 students or so. Think how many could have benefited from rigorous attention to their writing. And still could.
Aug 7, 2011

I get this question a lot.
And I find the answer is a lot like those for “What do I need to be a video (or film) writer?”
- Great vocabulary
- Great writing skills
- Economical writing
- Ability to write to visuals
- Key word savvyness
- Compelling writing (you need to get readers off of the home page! And, the most important!
- A willingness (nay, furious need) to rewrite
Can everyone become a web writer? No. It’s just the way the world works. We can’t all be rocket scientists, either.
If you’re writing your own web copy, and you’ve never been paid to write, chances are you’re fouling things up. Writers are trained to be objective, and if you’re running a company and doing your own web writing, you’re not objective.
Something else you need to be a web writer: stamina when quoting your prices. $25 an hour is not enough, no matter where you live. $50 — phooey. Don’t you deserve to make at least as much as your plumber?
My prices begin at $100 an hour and go as high as $150, depending on complexity, research, and a few other factors.
If I could go through the rest of my life, subsidized, I would spend my time letting people know that writing is a skill much more subtle than construction, or banking, or even lawyering. People need to spend years learning it, and even then they will spend the rest of their lives working at it. That’s the challenge and appeal of writing — every task is different and fascinating.
Can’t say that about plumbing, either.
Jul 9, 2011

Image via Wikipedia
You have to make people care. No big surprise.
But you can’t make people care about your organization. Organizations are made of brick and wood. (more…)
Jun 15, 2011

Image via Wikipedia
Welcome to Internet piracy.
Why is my blog posted on a Chinese web site?
Your blog can be “scraped” by illicit web bandits and posted elsewhere.
What is scraping? No more than plain vanilla cutting and pasting — by really fast computers that don’t care what they steal, so long as it’s somewhat popular. Scraped postings usually end up on web sites with advertising.
Stealing is bad enough, but this kind of stealing is worse than bad. Google and some other search engines penalize content that appears more than once.
You never want to have two identical web sites, for instance. I’ve known businesses that have done this, thinking that their content would be found twice as often. In fact, both web sites invariably end up at the bottom of the heap in search engine results.
Guess what? You can’t do much about scraping after the fact, especially if you’re a small business. And if your content has been scraped by an overseas thief … well, I hate to tell you this … but you might be SOL.
Unfortunately, we don’t think that Google’s algorithm yet identifies who the original poster is, so as to give the original web site priority over another. Right now, it appears that both web sites fail.
HOWEVER, in April 2011, Google did start penalizing content “farms” — sites that offer more ads than content. That has been a help, but we’re not sure how much. Check out NPR’s story on content farms.
We hope that piracy is righteously penalized in the famed Google algorithm one day.
For now, check out plug-ins for your blogs. One is WP-Protect (for WordPress). With WP-Protect (free), or a similar product, you can disable text and photo copying. This doesn’t mean that a smart pirate can’t come into your web site and figure out a way to download your stories, but at least it won’t be automatic. These plug-ins are a great deterrent. Whatever your CMS platform, please do a search for copy protection plug-ins. You won’t be sorry.
Go ahead … try to cut and paste even one word from this blog. You’d have to go through several laborious steps to extract any text. And yet … my blog can still offer linked copy, and is still searched by Google’s spiders just fine.
Software like Wp-Protect is, still and always will be (perhaps), a deterrent. Like your home, it is nigh impossible to keep out someone who wants to break in. At least we’re well on the way to creating a burglar-proof web site.