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”.

Adjectives for emphasis

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:

• They distract readers.
• They are an excuse for lazy writing – good funny or dramatic writing doesn’t need propping up.
• Once people start using exclamation marks, they usually overuse them – which makes writing look amateur.
• They hint at a gushing bygone world of “what-ho Jeeves!”, “lashings of ginger beer!” and “golly gosh!”. Your readers will wonder if they’ve stepped into a time warp.
• They make you and your writing appear unauthentic.

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:

billbennett.co.nz/data-brea…

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.

My smart and insightful observation that there is a similar vibe between the dumb billionaire behaviour at Chelsea Football Club and what is going on at Twitter will almost certainly be lost on an audience that never seems to discuss Premier League Football.   ⚽️

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.

billbennett.co.nz/wi-fi-6/

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.

There’s this thing about being a New Zealander that feels strange to someone like me who wasn’t born here. If I go overseas to another city and mention I’m from New Zealand, people will say, do you know X who lives there? At least half the time I do.

Likewise my late mother-in-law was visiting and travelled to the South Island for a few days where on two occasions she struck up conversations with strangers. When she told them she was visiting Jo and me… both people told her they knew us.

Someone should write an alternative reality novel where Google didn’t close Google+.

I’m certain our female cat, Poppy, has stopped trusting me after I sold her down the river to the vet surgeon who operated on her yesterday. She runs away and hides whenever she sees me.

By accident more than design I managed to sample a wide variety of Hot Cross Buns from Auckland bakers and supermarkets. There’s no science here, just an aficionado’s tasting notes.

The best all round buns I tasted so far in 2023 are from the Wild Wheat outlet on Hinemoa Street in Birkenhead. They are made sour dough style, have plenty of fruit and are well spiced.

They are somewhat puddingy, not that this was a real word until ten minutes ago. You could, at a pinch, warm them a little and eat them with cream or custard for dessert. I sometimes eat them with blue cheese, it’s an unlikely sounding combination that could change your life.

From memory they cost around $15 (sorry, I should have taken notes) for half a dozen. I found they last the longest and are excellent toasted.

My other favourite buns are from Ott Patisserie at the start of Birkenhead Avenue. Somehow the baker has managed to give them a different flavour without departing too far from tradition. It just works.

The buns are lighter in colour and in composition, you could even say delicate when comparing them with Wild Wheat’s robust buns. They are also lighter on the pocket. Half a dozen costs $10.

At $22 for half a dozen, Daily Bread’s Belmont shop has the most expensive hot cross buns I’ve seen this year. They are excellent, although as my Dad used to say: at that price they ought to be.

Like Wild Wheat’s buns, they are sour dough based and have plenty of spice and fruit. While I like the look and texture of Daily Bread’s buns, I prefer the taste of Wild Wheat and Ott’s offerings.

The other notable hot cross bun I tasted was New World Birkenhead’s non-traditional brioche style buns. These are quite different in look and taste. Despite that, they still feel like real hot cross buns. At $4.50 for six they are a bargain. Last year I used a pack to make a terrific bread and butter pudding.

The Hot Cross Buns from the Birkenhead Bakers Delight shop were among my least favourite buns. In terms of taste they are on a par with everyday supermarket buns, but at $12 for half a dozen they are more than twice the price.

There is nothing wrong with them. All the buns tested here are perfectly acceptable. They taste fine, but the are neither exciting nor in any way remarkable. In contrast, all the buns mentioned earlier are special.

The everyday Hot Cross Buns from New World are not at all bad. At $4.50 for half a dozen they are a fine alternative if the supermarket is out of the brioche buns. A $4.70 pack of six everyday hot cross buns from the Pak’n Save supermarket on Lincoln Road were the most ordinary tasting buns. They had less fruit, less intense spice and more of a soft roll feel.

Looking at the prices, Daily Bread’s buns are one and a half times the price of Wild Wheat’s, more than twice the price of Ott’s and close to five times the price of New World’s. They’re good, but there’s no way they are five times as good. I’d certainly make the trip back to Ott or Wild Wheat for a luxury treat.

Impressed by Simone Silvestroni’s De-brand blog post. It covers some of the things I’ve been wrestling with as a journalist.

My Bill Bennett micro.blog site was set up from the outset along similar lines. It’s hard to totally debrand the Ghost site because it’s a business. But let’s work on it.

If you have to ask a customer to leave a review on one of the big sites about your product or service, that’s a sure fire indication that you aren’t confident your customers are so happy they’d go and do it off their own bat.

Earlier this week I wrote about linkrot.

This post missed a similar annoying trend. Today’s link check of my site hit four 403 errors. There are a few every week.

Over the last year or so I’ve been killing the links when I find them because I fear lots of 403s can make my site look suspect to search engines. (I’d be interested to hear if my fears are real or imaginary).

The pages are there, you can click through to them all but something tells the bot that access is forbidden.

Often 403 means there’s a poorly maintained site at the other end. It’s not linkrot as such, but the growing number of 403s is a sign the web is deteriorating.

Have you seen a rising number of 403s on your outgoing links and, if so, how do you deal with them?

At least three quarters of the attempted phishing emails in my inbox aren’t really trying…