Writing for the Web

Blogging the Internet Marketing Conference

This morning I took part in a panel on webwriting, part of the Internet Marketing Conference. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. One thing I learned: Miss 604, also known as Rebecca Bollwitt, is a very speedy blogger. She summed up my presentation (on concise text) with admirable concision and accuracy.

The tools of propaganda

Via Poynter Online: Here's your handy-dandy propaganda detector. Excerpt:

No politician, Republican or Democrat, would admit he or she is in the propaganda business. And no journalist I know would admit to being an enabler of the propaganda efforts of a particular political party.

Like it or not, every scripted moment of every convention, every syllable of every campaign speech, is an act of political propaganda. It follows that to cover politics responsibly, reporters must come equipped with a tuned-up, turbo-charged propaganda detector.

In an anthology of essays on language, I stumbled upon a pamphlet titled "How to Detect Propaganda," published in 1937 by a short-lived organization called the Institute for Propaganda Analysis.

As you can imagine, the years leading up to World War II frothed with propaganda. The Institute, co-founded by Clyde R. Miller of Columbia University, was an early advocate of what we now called "critical literacy."

The pamphlet begins, "If American citizens are to have clear understanding of present-day conditions and what to do about them, they must be able to recognize propaganda, to analyze it, and to appraise it."

Seventy-one years later, the lessons are as relevant as ever. I was pleased to see the IPA's propaganda devices mentioned in Poynter, because I tried for decades to teach them to my students. With political websites like memeorandrum working as propaganda geysers, we all need to be aware of what they're spouting.

On the same topic, I recently published an article on Blogs for Election Junkies in The Tyee.

A new edition of Writing for the Web

I dropped in to see my publisher yesterday, and he blindsided me by reporting that Writing for the Web 3.0 has practically sold out. But he doesn't want to reprint it—he wants a fourth edition.

Well, that was welcome news, and I can think at once of several areas that deserve fuller treatment. Writing for blogs is an obvious one. Maybe some concrete advice on search-engine optimization. And certainly some more exercise material, both in the book and here on its blog, would be useful.

But this is an interactive medium, so I'd be grateful for your suggestions on what you'd like to see in a new edition of the book. Even if you haven't read it, tell me about what your concerns and interests are. If the present edition already deals with them, great. If not, even better—I'll be sure to address your issues in the new edition.