Monthly Archives: January 2018

Which English are you writing in?

This entry was posted in Techniques and tagged usage writing on by

My writing work goes to several countries. Just in the past couple of days I’ve written for American, English, and Australian customers. Keeping the customer happy requires writing in the kind of English they want. You can’t always assume it from the country they’re in; I have a regular customer in the UK that wants American English.

Spelling

Spelling is the easiest part to adjust. Britain tends to use “-ise” where Americans use “-ize,” “-our” where we use “-or,” and “-re” where we use “-er.” Australia and New Zealand generally follow Britain. Canada does sometimes, but not always.
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Using and abusing technical words

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged usage on by

Good writers use words precisely. We know that we may lose things if we loose them. We know it’s a sad and messy occasion when someone literally explodes. Technical terms can be trickier to get right. They have complex definitions which not everyone understands. But they’re precise definitions, and it’s a shame to throw that precision away. Sometimes, too, people use those words to appear precise when they aren’t. That’s just another kind of imprecision. Let’s look at a few ways writers fall short of the accuracy which tech talk ought to have.
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The tyranny of SEO

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing on by

A huge amount of the text on the Web is written more to satisfy Google than to please or persuade readers. The name of this game is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. Websites maintain blogs not to inform, but to get in keywords that will improve their search ranking. There are sites that have blogs for no reason except to improve their search ranking. Writers make money from this — or at least they will till AI does it better. (Having machines create text to please other machines seems entirely appropriate.)

There is software to enhance SEO, analyzing pages and suggesting keywords to add. At the same time, Google’s software includes tests to detect keyword stuffing, repeating phrases incessantly for their own sake. I’d give an example, but that would hurt my search engine rank. :) There are WordPress plugins dedicated entirely to SEO. It drives trends, sometimes in a good way; people who wouldn’t add HTTPS support for security reasons will add it to get a slight boost in search rank.
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