Wasn’t sure about staying up late last night, getting up early this morning to watch the opening Ashes test from Edgbaston in England. English daytime cricket matches are played at brutal times when you live in New Zealand. When the Black Caps play in England I move my life to British Summer Time.
Judging by the first day’s play, this series is going to live up to the hype. And anyway, sleep is overrated. 🏏
Cold comfort for journalists
The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style.
Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
Companies, especially tech companies, will spend time and money on press releases that are predictable, dull and boring. I wrote about this 12 years ago in Predictable, unimaginative press releases
Companies, especially tech companies, will spend time and money on press releases that are predictable, dull and boring. I wrote about this 12 years ago in billbennett.co.nz/predictab…
Today’s Download Weekly newsletter looks at the impact Apple’s spatial computing is likely to have on data traffic and broadband networks.
Apple Vision Pro demands fast fibre
Short – cram the maximum amount of meaning into the minimum number of words. There’s no strict guide to ideal word length, but search engines only care about the first 64 characters. Make every word count.
Clear – good headline are unambiguous. They must be immediately understandable in any context. Not everyone reading your writing will be a native English speaker. Keep this in mind.
Straightforward – use mainly nouns and verbs. Remember your nouns will be keywords for people using search engines.
Use simple words – short, Anglo Saxon words are best. Everyone knows exactly what they mean and they help you cram more meaning into fewer characters.
Active – use the active voice.
Avoid – forms of the verb to be. Articles ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ are space wasters best left out of headlines. Use a comma rather than the word ‘and’. Try not to use pronouns.
Plain English – there’s a grab-bag of short clichéd headline words that people never use in real life – such as nix, slam, rap. It’s better to stick with everyday language.
Some experts will tell you lists, questions and commands work well in online headlines. All may be worth trying, it depends what you are aiming for. Either way, they’ll work better if you keep my earlier points in mind.
If you want to buy a fancy phone, the two best options at the moment are Apple’s iPhone 14 Pro Max and Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra. This blog post I wrote last month compares them:
The Mobile to satellite communications – update blog post was missing its embedded table. Fixed that now.
Spent some time this morning tinkering with my micro.blog theme (Kiko) to increase the contrast, font size and font weight after a visitor told me they had difficulty reading the posts. If you’re interested in making your micro.blog site more accessible, I can share my recipe. It’s not a secret.
As old school journalists, we were taught to write mainly with nouns and verbs. Editors let us use adjectives only if they make the meaning more precise.
And even then, subeditors would remove them as they tightened copy.
In Daily Mirror Style Keith Waterhouse describes the old school journalist’s view. He says:
Adjectives should not be allowed in newspapers unless they have something to say.
Writers think adjectives add colour to their words. They do. But colourful writing isn’t always easier to understand.
In volume one of Editing and Writing, another newspaper journalist Harold Evans says they give writing a “superficial glitter”.
He goes on to say:
Every adjective should be examined to see: is it needed to define the subject or is it there for emphasis?
Evans says “over-emphasis destroys credibility”.
Take care when using adjectives for emphasis. For example, the word ‘very’ adds nothing to a phrase. Most of the time you can lose the word without changing any meaning.
The same usually applies to words like really, actually, rather and quite.
It also applies to the f-word. It may be fashionable to use it in today’s writing, but nine times out of ten all it does is function as a synonym for ‘very’.
Often there’s a better, more elegant way of expressing the same idea. “The train crawled into the station” is better than saying it was “very slow”.
In practice many adjectives have no substance. You can remove most from your sentences. You won’t lose much, but you will gain clarity.
On a personal note, publishers and others have paid me for years to write by the word. Loading my copy with lucrative filler words including adjectives makes economic sense. Over the years they have paid off my mortgage.
Yet my writing would certainly better without them.
A quick refresher:
Nouns are names of people, places, things and ideas.
Verbs are doing words. They tell you what is going on.
We say Adjectives modify nouns. They tell you what kind it is, how many there are and which one is being talked about.
Adverbs do the same job for verbs.
Exclamation marks have almost no place in serious writing.
Tabloid journalists use them in headlines. You may need to use exclamation marks in reported speech or where they form part of a name or title.
And that’s about it.
It’s no accident many newspapers and publishing companies ban exclamation marks in their style guides.
They don’t add drama. They don’t improve poor writing.
They don’t tell readers a sentence was funny – although they may tell readers a sentence was supposed to be funny.
In the newspaper business, the exclamation mark is sometimes known as a shriek or screamer. This gives a clue to why they are disliked.
It is often used to add emphasis to sentences. It’s versatile, you’ll see it used to show surprise, anger or joy.
The exclamation mark is the punctuation equivalent of raising your voice – maybe hysterically. Hence the name ‘shriek’.
Here’s why you should consider avoiding them altogether:
When I was an editor, I told a reporter who used one in a story that was his year’s allocation gone. I was only half joking. If you must use exclamation marks, use them rarely. One a year is more than enough.
Jargon makes it easier to write about technology. Technical ideas can be quicker and easier to discuss using the private language of engineers and geeks.
Some technical terms pack a lot of meaning into a single word or a phrase. At times jargon is a useful short cut.
Even so, try to keep jargon under control. And only use it in context.
It can be a barrier to understanding. A lot is misused, ambiguous or confusing.
Jargon is often redundant. It’s simpler, less confusion and unambiguous to talk about Windows when some people might say ‘the Windows platform’ or ‘the Windows environment’.
Remember sometimes specialist language is used as a deliberate tool to hide meaning from outsiders.
Likewise, there’s no excuse for indulging in the robot-speak used by corporations and government departments.
Out of context, jargon doesn’t make you look smarter. It tells your readers you’re a pompous windbag.
Often it makes your words, and your meaning, harder to understand.
Remember, not every reader is a native English speaker. And not every native speaker is tuned in to specialised language.
Some pet hates:
Ongoing – and ongoing situation is worse. Going forward – if you mean in the future say so. Ground rules. Upturn. Outcome is a particularly nasty piece of political and bureaucratic doublespeak for result. Currently.
Apple AirPods Pro second-gen: Familiar looks, better all-round
They may look the same, but Apple’s new AirPods Pro have improved sound, noise cancelling and battery life.
The data breach fallacy:
The longer a company’s code of ethics, the more likely it is run by sleazeballs
he No Asshole Rule author Bob Sutton hits the nail on the head again. The quote comes from his post: The Enron Code of Ethics: Something Every Boss Should Read.
I originally posted this on my blog in 2009, but it’s well worth a rerun.
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press: Murder your darlings.”
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
This quote, or a version of it, has been attributed to many writers Quiller-Couch was the original source. It’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of him, so this Wikipedia page will help.
The key point here is that often when you think you’ve written something brilliant, you probably haven’t. This is something older journalists would knock out of juniors during training. These days the young ones don’t have time for fancy writing.
Using a word like Murder is a great way of making the message memorable.
Another way of putting the same idea is: Don’t try to be clever. Keep your writing as simple as possible.
This time last year I wrote about upgrading to Wi-FI 6. It’s a good move, but only worth doing if you have relatively new devices - at the time of writing I said devices that were 18 months old or newer would do it although it would pay to check first. Today that would be 2.5 years or newer.
When I was in my first term at university a friend who lived a couple of doors away in my halls invited me to play Dungeons and Dragons. I lasted 20 minutes before I got bored… made an excuse and ran away to the student bar where I met a girl and never looked back.
I’m giving the T2 Twitter alternative a test drive. It’s early days… I’m only 90 minutes in and I think it only opened beyond the first 1000 users overnight NZ time.
First impressions are favourable, what’s there is polished, but it is feature-poor for now.
I get phishing attempts every day. This one is unusual and, I think, quite specific. I have no idea what the people here are talking about.
Can anyone please point me at other journalists who are on micro.blog?
My other website ranks higher: @JohnPhilpin
This week we had dinner at a hotpot restaurant on Dominion Road and I realised this is the Chinese version of a fondue.
It turns out my other website billbennett.co.nz is part of the content used to train Google’s C4 LLM dataset.
So when you use Google’s AI, I’m in there somewhere.
Phishing, vishing, smishing and beyond is a story I wrote for NZBusiness about the most common form of online crime in New Zealand.
It’s written as a guide for non-technical readers so there’s less depth and more about the basic steps small businesses can take to not be the low-hanging fruit for criminals.