Writing for the Web

How the web is changing English

The other day I ran across a piece I'd written back in 2001. In some ways it seems dated, as in capitalizing "web" words.  But in others it's still pretty current. Here it is:

How the Web is Changing English

by Crawford Kilian (2001)

 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.

According to Global Reach, a Website that monitors Internet use around the world, some 391 million people are currently online. Almost 48 percent of them – 215 million -- are English speakers. Americans make up 167 million (actually down a bit from 2000). Britain has 22 million, Canada 11 million, Australia 9 million and New Zealand 1.5 million. Most of the rest are people for whom English is an additional language. English is the de facto language of the Internet, but just whose English? And for how long?

[Compare those usage figures with the ones most currently offered by Global Reach.] 

Watch an editors’ or content developers’ mail list light up about “ize” versus “ise,” “color” versus “colour,” and you see that people in different countries feel their identities are somehow at stake. And so they are, but not perhaps as we might fear. Our dialect is our cultural DNA. Whatever we may choose to say in it, we have a subtext: This is who I am. If your dialect is different, you are different and maybe we don’t even have anything to say to one another. As Professor Higgins observed long ago in My Fair Lady, “An Englishman has only to open his mouth to make some other Englishman despise him.”

Hatred or respect may spring from the dialect of the aristocratic or the plebeian, from the urbane or the rustic. Usually it is those on the economic or geographic margin whose language is most despised—not because it lacks eloquence, but because it does not speak in the accents of power.

Chaucer’s English, 600 years ago, became the ancestor of our English only because London was the political and economic hub of medieval England. Vigorous literatures in regional dialects are now lost to all but scholars, because they left no descendants. Those who might have become Northumbrian Shakespeares moved to London and adopted the dialect of the rich and powerful.

The British Diaspora sent Chaucer’s descendants all over the planet, in colonies that preserved or mutated the home dialects. The Appalachians are home to expressions long forgotten at home—and most Americans still use “gotten,”which Brits find as archaic as “God wot.” But London itself is marginal now, and power speaks English with an Appalachian-descended Texas twang.

Or so it seems. But the metaphor of the margin—the silence, the blankness that gives context to the central words—is fading. In a medium without a margin, the marginal are not only finding a voice, they are renewing the language itself.

The Diaspora is reconverging through the Web, like an enormous family reunion. Distant cousins are taking a fancy to one another and slipping outside together for a breath of air. Who cares who speaks “superior” or “standard” or “proper” English? One sexy idiom, and all our defenses (defences?) collapse in surrender.

Some of the relatives at this reunion are in-laws, people from Scandinavia or India or Spain who’ve married into the language. They’re pretty cute too. (Who cares if “cute” to Chaucer was short for “acute,” meaning “as pointed as a needle”?) Let’s have lunch after the reunion and really get to know one another. We seem to have a lot in common, and we can gossip about everyone else.

A whole new dialect—maybe a new language—is emerging from Web English. Its subtext is still “This is who I am,” but it’s an identity far less parochial than the language has ever expressed before. Several factors are at work in the creation of this new Global English.

One factor is what I call “crystallization.” Someone comes up with a standard operating system, and everyone else adopts and adapts to it. The same thing happened a century ago with the QWERTY keyboard. Good or bad, such crystallizations are unstoppable. Web jargon itself has crystallized not only English but numerous other languages. Visit a Website in Spain; even its Spanish-language pages use terms like “web,” “content benchmarking and audit,” “fulfillment,” and “site.” A Brazilian site offers “setup” and “hosting” for local “websites,” as well as “e-mail”—and you can put your purchases in a “shopping cart.”

Do Spaniards or Brazilians, confronting these exotic anglicisms, feel threatened? Or do they feel that these words make them members of an important new community?

Probably both, just as native English speakers may wince or grin at a new slang term that welcomes some while excluding others. If you’re a Brazilian who doesn’t understand “setup” and “shopping cart,” you feel excluded—and in your own country, on a site ostensibly in your own language. At best, you associate them with modernity and glamour, though they’re otherwise meaningless. But if you do know these terms, you feel like part of the in crowd. 

That feeling of exclusion, in turn, is thanks to another factor that's changing English: “exformation.” Coined by Tor Norretranders, a Danish writer, the term means the information that you drop from a message because you know your reader already knows it. The classic example is Victor Hugo’s concise dialogue with his publisher. Wanting to know how Les Miserables was selling, Hugo sent his publisher a one-symbol telegram: ? The publisher replied: !

If we don’t have the context, the exformation of a word or phrase, it’s meaningless and we feel excluded. For millions of Web users, “setup” and “shopping cart” are literally exclusive, pushing them back into a society on the defensive. With that exformation, however, millions more step into a new society.

What’s true of non-English speakers is still more true of those of us in the Diaspora. Canadian newspapers a few years ago reverted to “colour” and “labour” because their readers preferred the British usage to the American. American magazines and the New York Times are available almost anywhere. The sheer weight of the American presence forces many Canadians to resist; in a case like this, adopting the neighbo(u)r’s usage gains you nothing. The Americans don’t even notice. Sticking to your own usage lets you hang on to a scrap of your identity.

Global English therefore seems to be evolving in step with self-consciously regional dialects. Most of us, if we write and edit for the Web, will become polyglots in a single language: writing Global for formal occasions, writing local for friends and family, writing in others’ dialects when we want to get along with (or sell to) some of our cousins and in-laws.

Within each dialect, of course we have questions of register. I may impress my Latin American students with my 1950s-vintage Mexico City Spanish, but should I address a young female student intimately as “tu” or more distantly as “usted”? In the new dialects of Global English, is “ma’am” a courtesy or an insult? If I use American Plain Language, will an Australian lawyer find me pleasantly clear or babbling baby talk?

These are questions of exformation, of grasping background and context that our readers take for granted. We can learn that background only by trial and error, and even our readers might find it hard to explain it to us. Nor would they all agree on, for example, when to use “tu” with an unrelated young woman, or the value of Plain Language in Australian legal writing.

If Chaucer’s dialect became Standard English thanks to power, then standardization is also a way of preserving that power, keeping it in the family of those who master its rituals. Many English teachers still regard their job as preparing students for a rite of passage into the ranks of power. Like Professor Higgins, we want the power elite to take our mudlarks for princesses.

Yet the Web and the Net disperse power, enabling the once-silent to speak in any voice they choose, to scribble in the margins and between the lines of the central text. We may sneer at their spelling and punctuation, but what can we do about it? Send them grumpy e-mail, and hope we haven’t made any typos or accidental errors in grammar?

As writers and editors, we will have to accept that our dialect, for all its virtues, is just another dialect. Others’ dialects may be less eloquent or flexible, but they deserve just as much respect. And, as we are learning in the ongoing family reunion, exchanging cultural DNA will give both Global English and its dialects a welcome new strength and reach. Imperial English took words from every language it encountered; Global English should welcome words from its own dialects. If it’s going to be the world’s speech, it might as well be worthy of the hono(u)r.

 

Nielsen: iPad text resolution improves usability

I've been wondering what Jakob Nielsen would say about the new iPad, and now I know. Via Nielsen Norman Group: iPad 3 Changing Use Patterns. Click through for the complete post and links. Excerpt:

The new iPad 3's crisper screen will lead to increased tablet use, particularly when reading content. 

•iPad 3 is the first broad-market computer with a good display, meaning that it's currently the only computer that makes it reasonably pleasant to read text. In other words, people with both a desktop computer and an iPad 3 will tend to prefer reading from the tablet, even though the desktop is otherwise more powerful. (Users will stick with their desktop computer for tasks that involve more intense interaction.) 

•Also, as we know from all previous research, when the usability of something goes up, users do it more. More pleasant reading = more reading. I stand by the analysis in my previous newsletter that the user interface design guidelines remain the same as those discovered when testing the iPad 1 and 2. 

However, the expectation to see more use of tablets, now that they are more pleasant to use, does have implications for design strategy: a broader set of companies should now invest in designing tablet versions of their websites or mobile apps.

Webwriting with addictive technology

The Tyee has published my article Bad Apple. Excerpt:

Teaching in Capilano College's Mac-based Infotech program even before the web, I could see that we write and read differently on the computer screen. The medium really is the message online, and the message is jolts. 

Jolts are the little sensory rewards the computer gives us. They come when we turn on the machine and it bongs at us. Jolts come with every alert, every new window, every avian squawk and porcine grunt in Angry Birds. Jolts come with every email and text message. Isaacson [in his biography of Steve Jobs] doesn't use the word, but his description of Apple packaging shows that jolts of pleasure are designed right into the boxes that your Mac and iPhone come in. 

Jolts also come in the form of verbal abuse, which inspired the email and forum flame wars of the 1990s, the ongoing hysteria of today's political blogs, and the punchlines of Twitter. 

Like lab rats with electrodes wired into their brains' pleasure centers, we learn what gives us the strongest online jolts, and we keep doing it. We forget that the lab rats preferred to push their jolt button until they starved to death, but in our few lucid moments we realize that we're well and truly addicted to the jolts that Apple gives us. 

Hence our rapt anticipation of the next jolt machine: the iPhone 5, the iPad 3, or something completely novel that Steve knew we'd want before we ourselves did. (In one of my 1980s SF novels, I imagined something like the iPad, but assumed it wouldn't arrive until circa 2080.)

Obama: "My message is simple"—but is it simplistic?

Via Smart Politics: "My Message is Simple": Obama's SOTU Written at 8th Grade Level for Third Straight Year. Excerpt:

For the third consecutive State of the Union Address, Barack Obama spoke in clear, plain terms. 

And for the third straight Address, the President's speech was written at an eighth-grade level. 

In Obama's own words: "My message is simple." 

But was it too simplistic? 

A Smart Politics study of the 70 orally delivered State of the Union Addresses since 1934 finds the text of Obama's 2012 speech to have tallied the third lowest score on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, at an 8.4 grade level. 

Obama also delivered the second lowest scoring address in 2011 (at an 8.1 grade level) and the sixth lowest in 2010 (at an 8.8 grade level). 

The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. 

Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores. 

Smart Politics ran the Flesch-Kincaid test on each of the last 70 State of the Union Addresses that were delivered orally by presidents before a Joint Session of Congress since Franklin Roosevelt. 

Excluded from analysis were five written addresses (by Truman in 1946 and 1953, Eisenhower in 1961, Nixon in 1973, and Carter in 1981) and two addresses that were delivered orally, but not by the President himself (Roosevelt in 1945 and Eisenhower in 1956). 

The vast majority of State of the Union speeches were delivered in writing prior to FDR. 

Each of Obama's three addresses are among only seven of 70 in the modern era that were written shy of a 9th grade level, and among the six that have averaged less than 17 words per sentence. 

Obama's 2012 and 2010 addresses averaged 16.6 words per sentence with his 2011 address coming in at 16.8. 

Other low-scoring addresses on the Flesch-Kincaid scale over the decades are George H.W. Bush's 1992 address, Harry Truman's 1951 and 1952 addresses, and Lyndon Johnson's 1965 address. 

Obama's speeches are a continuation of a general pattern that finds as State of the Union Addresses have perhaps become more and more political, they have been written more and more simplistically.

This seems to me to be misplaced anxiety. As I've often commented, the King James version of the Book of Ecclesiastes is at the third-grade level of readability. But no one complains that it's "simplistic." 

Writing at a lower grade level is actually a major challenge for all writers, and especially for web writers. If your content is good and you're writing at a lower grade level, you can reach the poor readers and everyone with good reading skills as well. And if your content is bad or weak, writing at a "higher" grade level takes you only to a higher grade of bullshit.

Can you over-link a web news story?

According to Justin Martin at Poynter.org, the answer is yes. His argument: Why Christian Science Monitor stories have too many links, wrong ones. Excerpt:

I often don’t read my own articles in The Christian Science Monitor. The volume of hyperlinks the publication drops in their copy is just too distracting. Consider this Op-Ed on volunteerism among Millennials. 

Not only does it contain no fewer than 28 links, but among them are a number of highly disruptive, full-line links to Monitor content, screaming things like, “RELATED: Top 4 obstacles for young people – and how to cope.” The all-caps grabber and full-line disruption is more befitting an ad for a used-car dealer than the innards of a respected news provider. 

This one article contains five full line-break links to Monitor articles, and a sixth pasted after the writer’s bio. Every one of the 28 hyperlinks connects readers to Monitor content; readers aren’t afforded a single axon to outside information. The reason the article is littered with so many hyperlinks, a Monitor editor told me, is that the publication uses a computer program which scours copy and inserts links beneath words like “Tulsa,” “Harvard,” and “Twitter,” which direct readers to past Monitor stories. 

These links are not placed to provide readers with the richest evidence and information accrued during newsgathering for the story at hand. The Monitor tries hard to keep its readers contained in its site. On many occasions I’ve submitted Op-Eds to The Monitor containing links to information and evidence I think readers will find helpful; the links also support the integrity of my reporting. These links, though, don’t make it past the publication’s self-containing software, in part due to technical limitations. But that’s not all. 

“We also don’t have the manpower to vet and shepherd through links that our contributors might ask us to include,” Monitor editor John Yemma told me in an email. 

“We do favor links to our own journalism, since we invest heavily in it, are confident about its quality, and want to invite readers to engage more deeply with the Monitor,” he said. “We weigh all opinions — as we will yours — in our ongoing effort to improve our presentation of news.”

I can understand the Monitor's interest in drawing readers to related Monitor stories; it helps to boost on-site traffic. But it can be overdone. The function of links in a news story should be to document sources and strengthen arguments—not to lure readers in front of "related" stuff with new ads.

On some issues, however, you may have a real case for linking to related reports. On The Tyee, we regularly link to earlier articles because we keep exploring the same political issues, such as inequality, in the light of new events and evidence. But we usually limit such links to three or four, in a sidebar.

Ideally, links in a web article should enhance the value of the article without sending the reader off to get lost in a labyrinth of hypertext.

A Literary History of Word Processing

Via The New York Times, a reminder of how quickly we forget the machines and programs that changed our lives: A Literary History of Word Processing. Excerpt:

The literary history of the typewriter has its well-established milestones, from Mark Twain producing the first typewritten manuscript with “Life on the Mississippi” to Truman Capote famously dismissing Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” pounded out on a 120-foot scroll, with the quip “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” 

The literary history of word processing is far murkier, but that isn’t stopping Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, from trying to recover it, one casual deletion and trashed document at a time. 

Pay no attention to the neatly formatted and deceptively typo-free surfaces of the average Microsoft Word file, Mr. Kirschenbaum declared at a recent lunchtime lecture at the New York Public Library titled “Stephen King’s Wang,” a cheeky reference to that best-selling novelist’s first computer, bought in the early 1980s. 

“The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that would have littered Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said, before asking a question he hopes he can answer: “Who were the early adopters, the first mainstream authors to trade in their typewriters for WordStar and WordPerfect?”

It's an exquisite irony that documents created on such machines, with such programs, had lifetimes far shorter than that of, say, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A new direction in webwriting

Via The Blognostifier, a blog run by Weh-Ming Cho in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the ad that has transformed web writing overnight: Some long overdue Kijiji Action. Excerpt:

Do you like shoveling snow? Then stop reading this and go back to your pushups and granola because you are not someone that I want to talk to. 

Let’s face it, we live in a place that attracts snow like Magnetic Hill attracts cars, only that ain’t an illusion out there. That’s 12 inches of snow piling up and, oh, what’s that sound? Why it’s the snow plow and it’s here to let you know that it hates you and all the time you spent to shovel your driveway. Did you want to get out of your house today? Were you expecting to get to work on time? Or even this week? 

You gave it your best shot. You tried to shovel by yourself and I respect you for that. I did it, my parents did it, some of my best friends did it. But deep down inside, we all wanted to murder that neighbor with the snowblower who was finished and on his second beer while you were still trying to throw snow over a snowbank taller than you are.  

So, here we are. You could murder your neighbour, which could ensure that you won’t need to shovel a driveway for 25 to life, but there are downsides to that too. What to do?  

Here’s the deal. I have a snow blower and I want you to own it. I can tell you’re serious about this. It’s like I can almost see you: sitting there, your legs are probably crossed and your left hand is on your chin. Am I right? How’d I do that? The same way that I know that YOU ARE GOING TO BUY THIS SNOWBLOWER.

This ad breaks most of the rules of webwriting, especially concision. Never mind. The ad got over 500,000 hits, and his blog had over 100,000 hits by November 24. This evening he was interviewed by Carol Off of CBC Radio's As It Happens program, a tribute paid to a new medium by an old one.

Mr. Cho is onto something, and I plan to keep an eye on him.

Robert Fisk: The never-ending war against cliché and jargon

Via The Independent, Robert Fisk carries on The never-ending war against cliché and jargon. Excerpt:

Even the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury is now, according to its presumably literate publicists, "an attractive space" – when surely "is attractive" or merely "attractive place" would have made more sense. Last week, I even found a "workshop space" available at a conference, thus combining two of my most hated words in one phrase. 

The British Museum, I note, is advertising "interactive [sic] workshops" on 11 November. Stay away, O readers. Workshops are for carpentry. 

Even old clichés are constantly being revived. "Crackdown" died for a while, but is now in daily use for an "Israeli crackdown" or a "Syrian crackdown" or a Cameron "crackdown" on crime (presumably of a less lethal kind). 

A writer in The Lawyer said last week that lawyers were "up in arms" about a website. My God, I used to write in the Sunday Express about villagers who were "up in arms" about proposed motorways that would cut through their "greensward" – and that was more than 40 years ago! 

I fear we will always have to live with this trash. I am constantly advised of boring academic conferences whose participants will hold "plenary sessions" – as if they were at the Big Three talks at Yalta or Potsdam. 

The Irish Times (again) tells me of New York City Fire Department families who are only now "coming to terms with" their 9/11 tragedies. After which they will presumably be expected to "move on". 

Cameron added a new version of this when he last week spoke of "an international agenda that should be progressed" over Libya. Which PR idiot decided to use "progressed" in his speech? Or was it Cameron, the PR man himself? 

It goes on and on. Sewage turns into "raw sewage" when people decide to swim through it on the Thames – "treated sewage" being, I suppose, beneficial to health – while politicians continue to "fight for their political life" and Africans die from the "deadly Ebola virus" (the non-deadly version probably being as harmless as the common cold). 

Someone at the Belfast Buildings Preservation Trust announced last month that "my background is in lobbying and public affairs, about encouraging people to think outside the box". I really – truly – believed that "thinking outside the box" had had a stake run through into heart. 

I thought another ghastly cliché had expired until I read that the television presenter Tim Lovejoy had found that Ho Chi Minh City was "outside of my comfort zone".

The blog I've been waiting for: Unnecessary Journalism Phrases

Just ran across Unnecessary Journalism Phrases, which battles expressions like "For all intents and purposes" and "moving forward." Highly recommended.

Forbes's new experiment in social media

Via Forbes.com, a very interesting article: Forbes Update: Our New Article Page for the Era of Social Media Is Now Live. My chief criticism: They're writing overlong sentences and paragraphs. Re-paragraphed excerpt (but read the whole thing):

Today, FORBES launched Phase 1 of an exciting new article page for the era of social media, the next step in the iterative rebuild of Forbes.com. 

It’s a key component of our unfolding strategy to put our authoritative journalism at the center of a social experience by providing reporters and writers with the publishing tools and audience data they need to connect with consumers. If you total up our FORBES staffers and contributors, we have 850 topic-specific experts using our platform to do just that. 

This new page has a history that reflects the dramatic changes in news consumption. A digital media colleague of mine, Jim Brady, saw early-stage concepts before its initial launch a few years ago. His reaction was immediate: “What you’re doing is turning Facebook inside out.” 

Jim’s description has always worked for me. If the core of Facebook is self-published community content and the sharing of links the community finds valuable, the core of FORBES is that valuable information with the community gathering around the expert who published it. 

Today’s article page release tightens the author-audience relationship and furthers our effort to build a scalable content-creation engine of individually branded journalists, authors, academics and other qualified contributors.