Gawker’s List of Blog-Media Cliches and more online writing rules…
My friend Benjamin pointed me in the direction of this list of unforgivable blog cliches from Gawker that is a must-read for any blogger or anybody writing online.
But the Gawker list is only a good place to start. Since the advent of email, blogs SMS and instant messengers, we have tranformed into a more writerly culture. This countered the trajectory we were on ever since the long-distance wars in the 1980s that made it easier to call than to write.
As more and more people write more and more, and as more and more people find themselves overwhelmed by how much time it takes to make a decision about what to read — let alone reading it — the importance of voice grows.
So if you’re looking for six basic writing rules that apply to all writing but are urgent for online writing — where at any given moment your reader can click away to a billion potentially more interesting things — there’s no better place to go than the list at the end of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” Here it is:
(1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(2) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I used to teach this essay at U.C. Berkeley, and it is ever-green in its usefulness. At times, looking back at things I’ve written with these six rules in mind, I find myself humiliated by the poisoned prose of my past.
Here are a few additional rules for online writing– not from Orwell, by the way, just me:
1) Don’t use adverbs unless the sense of the sentence changes without them; if it does, you should probably rewrite the sentence.
2) There is never a reason to use the word “very” in prose… just think of Lucy in the old “Peanuts” cartoon using 75 verys to complete a 100 word essay.
3) Unless you are quoting a person or book or referring a term or phrase as a noun (see the word “very” in quotes in the preceding rule), don’t use quotation marks. This is particularly true if you are using them the way certain insecure speakers use air quotes. If you can remove the quotes and the sense of the sentence is unchanged, do so.
4) Never mistake informality for imprecision: the web and email may be relaxed writing environments, but the more specific you can be about what you are saying the better your prose will be at accomplishing your goals.
5) Emoticons are only acceptable in instant messenger.
More to come on this.
5 Responses to “Gawker’s List of Blog-Media Cliches and more online writing rules…”
1 Joseph Carrabis 19 December 2006 @ 6:07 pm
As always, you are my teacher in these things. Interestingly enough, I was at a conference yesterday about blogging. The conference had a fairly heavy academic slant. The conjecture of some of the professors was that online writing (blogging, emails, IMs, etc.) was going to improve people’s writing skills simply because these individuals would be writing more often and for public display.
I was tempted to offer my own writings as an example of the contrary…
2 Tom Hespos 20 December 2006 @ 6:51 am
Gawker forgot a few:
1) [Unsightly thing][Reference to eye bleach] – It’s not even funny on Fark anymore.
2) References to “the Internets.” This joke needs to be dragged out back and shot.
3) Done-to-death Simpsons quotes, especially:
a) “Ze goggles! Zey do nossing!”
b) “Mmmmm…[insert desirable object here]”
c) “My cat’s breath smells like cat food.”
-TFH
3 Diane Gordon 17 September 2008 @ 5:45 pm
Brad, yo. – is this a joke…”unforgiveable” wtf?, lol, etc. etc. – if somebody is going to be presumptuous enough to tell other people what not to write in blogs, one hopes that person can spell. Either it’s a joke, or it proves the point that bloggers are bunch of illiterate troglodytes. The “unforgiveable” list isn’t that bad, though. But I would take exception to the use of “yo” and “oy,” unless these words wouldn’t normally come out of one’s mouth, in which case, don’t use ‘em. I do. Depends on the audience, too.
4 Diane Gordon 17 September 2008 @ 5:46 pm
whoopsies, just realized this is two years old.
5 Brad Berens 21 September 2008 @ 9:19 am
For the person who might get all the way to Diane’s comments and have them make no sense, she pointed out that I had misspelled “unforgivable” in the original blog post (
), a mistake that I have rectified.