A reminder of Wolcott Gibbs’ points about good writing (from James Thurber) January 19, 2010
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentJames Thurber noted 31 points about good writing made by New Yorker editor Wolcott Gibbs. They include the following (via Charles Miller on the CoJo blog):
- Writers always use too damn many adverbs. On one page recently I found 11 modifying the verb 'said'. 'He said morosely, violently, eloquently, so on' … It is impossible for a character to go through all these emotional states one after the other.
- Word 'said' is OK. Efforts to avoid repetition by inserting 'grunted', 'snorted' etc are waste motion and offend the pure in heart.
- Our writers are full of clichés, just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliché undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.
- The more 'As a matter of facts', 'howevers', 'for instances' etc, etc you can cut out, the nearer you are to the Kingdom of Heaven.
- On the whole we are hostile to puns.
- Try to preserve an author's style if he is an author and has a style.
How to: write for the web (part 2) — Journalism.co.uk October 20, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentChristian Dunn, digital editor of NWN Media (N Wales and Chester), offers some solid advice on writing for the web, including the following reminders about headlines online:
"Firstly, don't use puns, metaphors or wordplay. Use your keywords in the title instead – in may not be as exciting, but it works.
Secondly, keep headlines short: evidence suggests that Google pays greatest attention to the first 60 characters of any headline and many RSS feeds cut the headline off after this too.
Google likes place names and people search for places a lot online. Google News will find it easier to pick the stories up, categorise and send out as news alerts if there is a clear location.
Finally, make sure you try different phrases to see what gets a response on your site."
Good writing makes the difference — Opinion: The top 10 best-written blogs October 19, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , 1 comment so farOn the importance of good writing in blogs, from Computer World's 'top ten' list:
" 'People get bored pretty quickly with sloppy writing and sloppy thinking, and that's true whether you're publishing online or in print,' [Nicholas] Carr told me by e-mail and, as always, he makes a good point.
Stringing together a sentence with a strong noun and verb combination might not seem all that difficult, but many bloggers write like they are on the school bus using a crayon."