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Zachart Kanin in the New Yorker
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According to Jacob Nielsen, in a post of nearly 500 words, such as this one, readers can be expected to spend an average of about 45 seconds on the page, an amount of time in which they might read some 187 words, or less than three-eighths of the content.
In a study called “Not Quite the [...]

Overblown prose often springs up exactly where you would expect to find it. But shouldn’t this extraordinary opening by Peter Hartlaub to his review of Grand Theft Auto IV in the San Francisco Chronicle get some sort of award?
Cultural revolution often comes from seemingly imperfect people and unpopular places.
The most influential athlete was labeled [...]

This is pretty awesome. When Hillary challenged Barack to a “Lincoln-Douglas” style debate, Fox TV’s national news ran the following graphic.

I guess they thought she said “Lincoln-Douglass.”
What a debate that must have been!
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via Wonkette
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Conceivably Related PostsAn Economist Writes on LoveThe letter to the Financial Times went like this:
Dear Economist,

I’m looking for ”…Standards of JournalismPrint journalists [...]

Lies I’ve told my 3 year old recently
By Raul Gutierrez
Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the [...]

Some book titles feel so much a part of their texts that that the works’ draft titles seem like oddly fitted hats, discarded in the dressing room; others — including some forced on authors by their publishers — read like images aspired to but never quite met. And then there are the flat-out clunkers, to [...]

Recently there has been an uptick in talk about semicolons. Witness:

Hooray for the ;
I say! A subterranean semicolon!
FANBOYS and the Semicolon
Colbert on punctuation
How to Use Punctuation Correctly
Punctuation lives
The Elements of Spam
Semicolonoscopy

What does this signify? I’m not sure. Could it be another sign of the trend to the literate class becoming a cultural elite, eager to [...]

Conceivably Related PostsGoogle Translate, no longer using Systran software, goes head to head with Yahoo’s BabelfishSystran software has ruled computer translation for years. It has been the technology behind both Al…

The first rule of good writing is that there are no rules. If Elmore Leonard had written Ulysses, or Metamorphosis, or Remembrance of Things Past, or Death on the Installment Plan, or other of the modernist classics I don’t know if college freshmen would be studying them today.
They’d probably be pretty good reading though. Leonard [...]

Conde Nast commissioned a distinguished group of writers to nominate their favorite travel books. Participating authors included André Aciman, Monica Ali, Julia Alvarez, Tom Bissell, Geraldine Brooks, Vikram Chandra, Jim Crace, Jared Diamond, Linh Dinh, Anthony Doerr, Jennifer Egan, Stephen Elliott, Nuruddin Farah, Nell Freudenberger, Peter Godwin, Peter Hessler, Uzodinma Iweala, Sebastian Junger, Robert D. [...]

For the past couple of years amazon.com has been including a feature it calls “text stats” on many of its book pages. Among the statistics presented are “readability calculations” that estimate “how easy it is to read and understand the text of a book.” But there is also more raw data, including stats on the [...]

A while ago I asked for opinions about helpful books for writers and got some good responses. Commentators included Alan Bernheimer, Benjamin Chambers, Carol Peters, Christine Thomas, DMS, Edward Champion, Gonzalo B from Saddlebums, Gordon Hurd from After the MFA, Howard Junker, John Roderick Clark, K.G. Schneider, Lee, Nion McEvoy, Robert Peake, Robin Jacobson, Texts [...]

El Blogador at Inner Diablog (whose interesting posts I often consult in the context of my Buried Mirror research) cites Samuel Pepys and Jean Baudrillard as models for bloggish prose. These writers, he says, “pointed towards to a new style of writing that consciously moves out towards the edge of discussion (or the long tail [...]

Ms. Oates, rambling a bit, reveals that during “the first six weeks” of a writing project she is quite miserable. This is somewhat surprising to me, because I find beginnings exhilarating but bog down in the middles. Maybe she is working out the difficulties earlier on, and that accounts for how prolific she manages to [...]

The most popular pages on this website, in terms of sheer volume of visitors, are those in my guide to getting a book published. (They account for the site’s top eight pages by volume; my rendering of the Daode jing comes in at no. 9.) Compared to this blog, the guide is more oriented to [...]

The Guardian has an ongoing feature displaying writers’ workrooms. The common features tend to be clutter, piles of books, and undistinguished furniture. Shown is the room of AS Byatt, who says:
The objects in the room are in a way a metaphor of my mind. They are brightly coloured, or transparent, and are about intricate [...]

At Frisco Vista I’ve told the story of the Belgum Sanitarium, which was located in Wildcat Canyon above Richmond on the San Francisco Bay. It’s a romantic little narrative, a bit like something out of Lafcadio Hearn. Usually I save references to my posts elsewhere for my end-of-month roundups, but I hope that some of [...]

Print journalists criticizing bloggers is nothing new. So when Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University, wrote an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, in which he asserted that bloggers do no real reporting, it was difficult to suppress a yawn.
To bolster its argument — or to give it the appearance of specificity [...]

Ed Champion excoriates Karen Holt for writing in Publishers Weekly that includes passages such as this:
There was the time at BEA when I wanted to ask Margaret Atwood a few questions so she took my arm and steered me toward some chairs in the corner (”Margaret Atwood is touching me!”). There was my trip to [...]

The LAT covers the Mirthala Salinas affair.
UPDATE, Nov. 18, 2007: The above link (now removed) has gone bad. Here’s a summary of the story.
Conceivably Related PostsA message from Mr. D.
Standards of JournalismPrint journalists criticizing bloggers is nothing new. So when Michael Skube, a journalism professor…Friday Roundup | Link LoveFresh links
what’s virtually new

How Link Journalism Could [...]