Writing for the Web

More on Blogging in China

Here's another item on blogging behind the Great Firewall. The New Scientist has a good article on the blog revolution sweeping across China. It's still tough for people in China to get access to blogging sites outside the country (notably TypePad). But a lot of services have now sprung up inside the country. The article also has some links that I want to follow up on when I get a minute.

An Interview Revisited

Over a year ago I was interviewed by Raquel Recuero of Projeto Casulo, a Brazilian website, about blogs as literature. I've just revisited Projeto Casulo // Interview: Crawford Kilian, and for once I didn't disagree with myself too much.

This is also a reminder that I need to revisit the Brazilian Web. When I taught Webwriting in São Paulo in 2002 (scroll down to July 7,2003), my students struck me as immensely sophisticated and imaginative users of the medium. If anyone can recommend some good new sites (Ronaldo?), I'd love to hear about them.

Blogging the Ukraine

Here's an English language blog, apparently in Kiev, with photos and commentary about what's going on in the semi-revolution under way in the Ukraine: Le Sabot Post-Moderne will be worth repeated visits.

Imagine how history might have been different if we'd had blogs from the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, or Kabul when the Russians moved in...or from GIs in Vietnam during the 1960s.

Blogging in China

An estimated 600,000 bloggers in China? Where are they? I found a few English-language blogs during the SARS outbreak last year, but the Great Firewall of China poses a barrier both ways: TypePad sites, for example, are inaccessible to Web surfers inside China. Dan Gillmor has a fine article on the state of Chinese blogging: a lot of interest and activity, but not in the political area. Too dangeours. So China Bloggers Emerge, But Not Too Loudly.

How Readable Are You?

Reading text on a screen is a lot harder than reading the same text on paper. Most Web surfers scan text rather than reading word by word. So you need to keep your text as clear, concise, and readable as possible.

You can get the readability score of any website from Readability.info. In fact, you get several scores based on different tools. And you can find out what the scores mean as well. Most define readability in terms of a grade level.

"Writing for the Web" scores fairly well, with grade levels ranging from grade 6 to 11.5. The Flesch Index is 68.5, where 100 is dead easy.

I was also happy to see that my average sentence length is 16.1 words. Twenty would be pushing it. Almost half the sentences here are no more than 11 words, and only 17% are over 26 words. My paragraphs average 4.5 sentences.

A shocking 25% of my sentences, however, use the passive voice. I'll have to work on increasing my active-voice sentences.

Readability.info could itself use some revision. The text sprawls clear across the screen, making it hard to read, and it could benefit from careful proofreading. But the scoring is very fast and very informative.

Blogging Fallujah, Part II

After all the uproar Kevin Sites generated by videotaping a US Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque, he's now written an Open Letter to the Devil Dogs that describes how he got to the mosque, what happened there, and what happened afterward.

Whatever your views on the Iraq War in general, or the shooting in particular, you should read this account.

Fallujah in Pictures

These are the pictures the mass media don't provide. Please be prepared for some shocking and heartbreaking images. Whether they are maimed babies or dead Marines, we should grieve for them all. This didn't have to happen: Fallujah in Pictures.

I post this link here not just for the pictures, but for the text, especially the comments. Usually I hate white text on a black background, but in this case it seems appropriate and effective. The style and tone of the comments are appropriate also; even the disagreements seem more sober and solemn, written in grief rather than anger.

Am I a Nanopublisher?

Maybe so. According to an intriguing site, The Word Spy, nanopublishing is an inexpensive means of reaching a targeted audience, especially by blogging.

Then again, a word like "targeted" implies an old-fashioned instrumentalist communication model, where the message is strictly one-way and the subtext is always "Do what I tell you." Online communication operates on the two-way, conversational constructivist model, where the subtext is "Is this what you want?" It's much more interactive, at least in theory; most blogs have the potential for back-and-forth comment, though most are (mostly) monologues.

The Rise of Global English

As a novelist, I know that you show the truth about your characters by putting them under stress that threatens their identity. As a writer and editor, I know that nothing stresses writers and editors more than confronting issues around "bad English," "improper usage," and sloppy punctuation.

Such confrontations usually happen in private when the editor and writer lock in deadly embrace over a stray semicolon or whether it's all right to write "alright." But the Internet has brought these quarrels out into public scrutiny.

America and Britain, Oscar Wilde once observed, are two great nations divided by the same language. Now the division affects the whole English world, and countless foreign countries as well.

Blogging Fallujah

The writing could use a good editor, but the errors actually add to the immediacy of the Kevin Sites Blog as he follows the Marines into Fallujah, posting his experiences complete with photos.