Gawker’s List of Blog-Media Cliches and more online writing rules…

19 December 2006 | Online Writing, Internet | Comments

My friend Benjamin pointed me in the direction of this list of unforgiveable 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.