READING, NOT HEARING

Okay, students: today's lesson.

Most of us likely hear more news than we read, no matter how much we love print. I suspect that's why subjects have a tendency of wandering away from the start of a sentence in a lot of writing.

Broadcast relies on a structure that puts title, and often a descriptive phrase, before the subject. It needs to be that way, because broadcast news is written to be heard. Writing for readers is different and you can't extrapolate good writing from what you hear.

The best writing is simple (without being simplistic) and direct. Subject-verb-object is still a great base model for writing effective sentences. And getting the subject to, or close to, the start of sentence still works, because the front end of the sentence is where the action is.

So this...

Tom Johnson, a curly-haired, blue-eyed giant of a man, speaks softly.

...is more effective than this...

A curly-haired, blue-eyed giant of man, Tom Johnson speaks softly

And this...

The team, coming off a heart-breaking season, expects big things in 2004.

...works better than this...

Coming off a heart-breaking season, the team expects big things in 2004.

In two of those sentence we are presented with the subject right out of the gate. In the other two, we don't get to the real subject until we're halfway through. Readers expect the subject to be near the start of the sentence, and those backward sentences, where the subject meanders belatedly into the picture, are awkward, often unclear and they make for bad writing.

5:41:51 PM    

WHAT KEN SAID

Ken Layne is becoming one of the bloggers I most look forward to reading every day (or even a couple of times a day) and here's part of a post that shows why:

For all of you out there keeping track of the teevee media's Left or Right bias, I will tell you again that the only true bias is in the accounting office. Do you know how much it would cost to send a team to Haiti? Or to report on Iraq every day, from all over the country? To report from Afghanistan? We're talking about teevee trucks, satellites, video & sound engineers, on-air talent, producers, etc. Plus all that airfare, and renting Land Cruisers, and hotels and food and insurance and minders and translators ....

This is why your news programs spend 95% of the airtime interviewing swift boats, or bloggers, or campaign officials, or other journalists, or anybody or anything that will show up at the D.C. or NYC studio and sit there in the makeup chair and then go talk to the camera ... for free!

It's not just that I agree with a lot of what he writes, I admire the talent, style and humour he brings to blogging. With lines like...

It's glorified Cable Access, without the weird sex gurus and Native American flute dances and nutty end-times preachers. It's not news.

...what's not to like? Go take a read. Bookmark him. And check out Ken Layne & The Corvids for some crunchy rock and roll.

9:54:54 AM