pyrrhic victory

Yes, I know what a phrrhic victory is, although I'm not sure I could spell it correctly without looking.

A lot of readers wouldn't know. There are a lot of immigrants and a lot of people who might never had heard of it. Or a lot of people who heard of it and can't remember what it means.

I think if the writer can explain it or give an example, it might be worth leaving in. If you have to explain it too much, then no.

Writing something at an eighth-grade level doesn't and shouldn't mean that you are writing for a great unwashed ignorant mass of folks. An eighth-grade reading level, which might be explained by someone having dyslexia, doesn't mean you have an eighth-grade understanding of life. People who are old and maybe didn't get a great education or literacy will probably have a better understanding of life than some twentysomething person with a PhD in literacy.

 

Right. There's an assumption that eighth-grade reading means Beavis and Butt-head--level comprehension and mentality. And while I'm always up for the use of fartknocker, dillweed and I NEED TP FOR MY BUNGHOLE in stories, it's not necessary.

KISS: Keep Itfucking Simpleyoufucking Shithead.

 

God forbid we might actually TEACH our readers something from time to time. A skilled writer should be able to do it in a way where even if the reader doesn't immediately know what it means, it will become clear in reading the story.

The dumbing-down train may have already left the station, but I'm going to resist.

That doesn't mean being an asshole and using an 11-syllable word just for showoff purposes, but it galls me that there are people in our business who see writing intelligently as a vice.

 

That's fine if you have a skilled writer who can pull it off, but for every one you have of those, I'd be willing to be you'd have 10 "assholes ... using an 11-syllable word just for showoff purposes." Or at least people who think the key to brilliant writing is using the thesarus to jerk themselves off.

I keep flashing back to the episode of M*A*S*H when Radar took a writing correspondence course and used a whole lot of fancy words awkwardly in his daily reports.

 

Sometimes it helps to use an unfamiliar word or phrase in a sentence.


Sacrificing thought, complication, nuance and even language itself in order to make the newspaper safe for people who don't read the newspaper was just another Pyrrhic victory for newsprint in the short bloody war between newspapers and the internet.

 

Sorry, I'm opposed to running this business as if the vast majority of writers are a bunch of blundering jerkoffs.

Just as I don't believe in operating as if editors are nothing but a bunch of frustrated writers who couldn't hack it out in the field.

If our operating premise is that our people are incompetent, then we're sunk.

 

We're not going to 'teach' anyone anything by using phrases or words or references they don't recognize...they're not going to run for a dictionary, they'll just gloss the reference and miss the point.

Maybe their loss, maybe ours.

We all have those moments when we know we've nailed the perfect analogy or phraseology....and then realize we probably need to take it out. You make a judgment depending on the medium, and don't put yourself above the reader. It comes off as snooty. If the reader has to stop and think 'whatever the hell that meant,' we've failed.

 

Not so much incompetent as it is not yet able to handle certain tools -- like letting a buck private lead a batallion into battle or giving a newly-minted MBA the keys to a Fortune 500 company. Most of what we do we need to learn to do, not just in college but in our day-to-day work. Not everyone can pull off the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse lead, but instead of staying within their limits, they shoot for the moon and it either a) pisses off the copy editor who has to fix it or b) hits the street as is, looking like utter shit.

And to jgmacg: the way to revitalize the newspaper industry is not to talk down to your readers or treat them as though they don't count becuase you're too trying to Enrich Your Word Power. It has nothing to do with making "the newspaper safe for people who don't read the newspaper" and everything to do with understanding that as long as we're a product aiming at the general public, we have to assume that not everyone is going to have the same level of experiences or education as us and writing accordingly.

The daily or community newspaper exists to disseminate information. If you want to change the world, this isn't the place. A harsh blow to the idealists, but when I pick up the paper, I don't want to be told what should be, I want to be told what happened.

 

If I stumble or don't understand something in the lead of a story I'll usually stop reading and move on, unless it's a topic I have a great interest in. If you want to risk using words and phrases that many people may not understand, and risk losing them as readers, fine, but I don't think you're doing a good job. Your job isn't to teach people new words or about Roman history.

Yes, in a perfect world, you could write a brilliant story that would teach readers new words and phrases and the world would be a smarter, better place. But if you assume the reader is going to continue reading or go to a dictionary I think you're mistaken. Some will, many won't.

 

yes and yes
but I'm in the school of thought that thinks newspapers should start whoring themselves out to smart people who like to read.

 

Almost always, eight short words are better than one long one. The key word in that sentence is "almost." The Herald was and is a big city tabloid. In the course of my career there, I used references which assumed our readers were well-read and pretty much up to speed on Western history and culture. I'm sure many of them weren't. That's not the point. I wasn't going to patronize them by pretending I WASN'T as well-read and informed as I was (however well that was, everyone's knowlesge has wide gaps, I never used any physics references).
Naive child that I am, I always assumed people bought the paper to learn stuff. If they met a reference they didn't get, they'd try and figure it out because that's an important way to learn.
Skewing one's prose down is every bit as stilted as skewing it upwards. In my opinion, if a reader thinks the writer's voice is not genuine, that's how the reader is lost, not by the occasional brain teaser.

 

I've found the key to writing smart isn't using words people don't know, it's using words people forgot they knew.

Example: flummoxed.