Richard's Online Journal
Citizen Journalism
“Wow! I can’t wait to get online and find out what it is!”
(To answer the question: A massive, building-shaking fire just down the road from our office, with the bad taste to burn on a day when I didn’t have my good camera. Touched up iPhone pics just aren’t the same…)
$%&^ing Toilet Seats Again
From the BBC’s Blindly Obvious Department:
Some computer keyboards harbour more harmful bacteria than a toilet seat, research has suggested.
Oh, good grief, not this old yawner again. Yes. Yes, keyboards are dirtier than toilet seats, the reason being that toilet seats are not dirty. By reading this site, your buttocks are automatically not only declared officially clean, but also surprisingly fragrant. But not somewhere that germs particularly congregate. The floor? Ick central. Under the bowl? Nice knowing you. The seat? You could eat your dinner off it, and I’m reliably informed that there are clubs in Soho where you can do considerably more.
Any company that releases any bit of marketing comparing the cleanliness of toilets and any second entity, but especially keyboards, ever frakking again will find this out soon. I’ve already petitioned the government to enforce a new ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy, where the strikes are conducted with a length of birch, and the ‘out’ to be outed from consisting of the entire of civilised society.
You have been warned, lazy press release writers. The revolution begins shortly.
Spilling Be
Getting letters and e-mail is great. It’s not so hot when you’re dealing with an increasing pile of drive-by smirking about a typo or glitch on the third page of a four page feature. It’s fine when someone’s spotted something funny (nobody in the office noticed that we’d printed a picture of a ‘SEX AMBULANCE’ in a story about Essex, for instance). It’s fine if there’s a serious flub that needs to be corrected. It’s fine if the letter writer disagrees with an argument. No problem at all with that kind of thing.
But usually it’s just a missing apostrophe, or a character substitution, or something equally trivial, and really, what’s the point? What do the people sending these emails expect? A groveling apolohy, written in blood? The whole print run to be pulped and replaced with a corrected version? The writer to immediately jump into a time machine, rush back, and fix it, like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap?
My time machine is reserved for far more exciting errands. Ask my pal Beethoven.
Sigh. At the very least, they could throw in a few words of comment along with the “Aha! Gotcha!” bit. Something to make it seem that it had more impact than an English essay under a particularly anal English teacher’s evil red pen.
One thing that probably won’t come as a surprise — every time I get one of these letters, there’s always at least one glaring oopsie buried in the righteous indignation. Oddly, the accuracy hounds never seem to appreciate having this pointed out to them.
In short, feedback is essential. One of the toughest parts about being a writer is that most things you do get very little response, and getting nice comments is one of the best ways of reminding yourself that everything you do isn’t just being shot into a black hole somewhere in a distant galaxy. It’s good to hear from readers, even if just a quick “Thanks, I enjoyed that article” or “Did you know…”
But please. Talk about the work, or the subject.
Not the bloody typos.
(The official typo of this post was the word ‘apolohy’. If you were planning to crow about spotting it, please slap yourself around the face and neck with a small shovel. A spade will also be acceptable. Best to avoid the pitchfork…)
On Game Scoring
All this fuss over Kane and Lynch (The last post poked fun at the story, but it’s worth pointing out that nobody involved has outright said what happened, so everything’s still very much guesswork and secret-source level gossip), and subsequent talk about scoring, really makes me nostalgic for Daily Radar’s wonderful system.
Scores, in a word, are useless. No matter how you try to explain your workings, nobody listens. Even if you think 6/10 means ‘mediocre, but okay if you’re into this kind of game’, most people are going to see it as a fail. Especially since most people talk about scores without even mentioning the review text itself. For my money, the best rating system around remains poor old deceased DR’s — which went something like this:
Dud. Miss. Hit. Direct Hit.
And that was it. Technically, not that far different to a score out of five. But much better as a stamp to put on the end of a review, and much less prone to mis-interpretation. And since ‘Miss’ especially could be anything from ‘doesn’t do anything new’ to ‘tries but fails’, it’s much harder to go off on one without taking the text into account.
Writing Irritations: Gender Assignment
Yes, it’s the continuation of our epic series “Things In Writing That Are Really Annoying Richard Right Now”, parts 1–52 of which are now available in the epic guide Who’s Whom: Your Guide To Pedantry.
In today’s exciting instalment, writers who assume their reader’s gender, and why it’s a bad idea. Worse, why it’s one of the most irritating habits in writing, especially on the internet. Almost invariably, the assumption is that the reader is male, and that’s usually a bad idea regardless of how true it’s likely to be. Much like assuming race or nationality, it rarely adds anything to the piece, and only serves to make the reader feel less welcome if you’ve guessed incorrectly.
But let’s stick with gender. What do I mean? It’s not big, sweeping issues or outright sexism. Those are other issues. It’s the little details; the accidental slips. Articles talking about their reader’s wife/girlfriend, reviews that recommend movies because the lead actress is hot, feminine/non-violent elements in video games being decried as ‘gay’, technology being compared to a beautiful woman, captions about not drooling over the page, phrases like ‘a kick in the balls’ used to add emphasis…
The list is pretty long, and the problem self-explanatory. Everybody takes their creative cues from culture as a whole, and historically speaking, most entertainment has assumed a male gaze. Just look at how many romance movies/chick flicks are about a guy getting the girl, instead of the other way around. However, the wider social issue isn’t relevant here; politically correct or not, it’s a simple matter of good writing. Hell, not actively excluding half the world’s population isn’t even feminism; it’s just common sense. You never know who ‘you’ is going to be, but you can guarantee that whoever they are, they’ll want whatever they’re reading to speak to them.
Sadly, too many writers produce work that does exactly the opposite; pushing the reader away instead of drawing them in. And yes, women are just as guilty of it as men. It’s sometimes more subtle, but often not — for instance, while you’ll rarely get exact mirrors like ‘with your boyfriend’ in the tech press, you’ll frequently see lines like ‘as a woman, I…’ that do much the same job. A lot of the press releases I get in are agonising — over the years, I remember three female PRs sending general invites to paintball or other gun-related events* with tag-lines like ‘shoot your load’ or ‘burst your balls’, even knowing full well that there were several women on their invite list.
(* I didn’t go to any of these events. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my balls to remain in one piece. Sorry about that mental image there.)
Obviously, there are always exceptions to the rules. If a particular piece relies on speaking to one type of reader, fine. If you’re writing in the first person, or otherwise telling an anecdote or story from your point of view, it’s silly not to use terms and situations that square with that. It’s simply a question of remembering that there’s a difference between “This game was like taking my girlfriend to Disneyland” and “This game is like taking your girlfriend to Disneyland”.
Individual slips may not count for much, but they build up. Writing for a demographic is a matter of style more than anything else — the words you use, the level of complexity, the ebb and flow of your sentences, the amount of humour you include. You can never be sure of the specifics, and even if the reader doesn’t notice, or simply does identify with the group you’re highlighting, it’s a slippery slope to those race, nationality, and other differentiating factors mentioned back at the start.
In short: stop doing it. If indeed you do.
The good news is that fixing the problem is something that any writer can do, and not only does it greatly improve many articles, it couldn’t be easier. Just a little thought, and a couple of mouse-clicks. And if you really, really can’t think of a metaphor that doesn’t involve breasts, you’ve likely got bigger problems than the couple of minutes it takes to edit the odd sentence here and there. Bromide may help.