It’s a tough life, being a professional writer on the Internet. Everything you post reflects, well or badly, on your professional qualifications. You might just be chatting with your friends, but if it’s under your name, potential clients could judge your skills by it. If you regularly make a lot of mistakes, you could lose work as a result.
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I’ve gotten it down to a pattern, and I’m seeing fewer rejections. It’s always hard to tell just what affects acceptance rates, but submitting articles with fewer typos and clumsy formulations certainly has to help. It’s a simple three-step process after I’ve finished the article and think it may be OK.
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This is a blog about writing, and books are writing, so book reviews are on topic here, right? The book in question here is The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. It’s an important book and one that may shock you. If I had more vivid powers of visualization, I might not have been able to get through it.
Before reading this book, I had plenty of reasons to believe the American criminal justice system is broken. Now I have more. The book focuses on Mississippi, which has a long record of being one of the worst states in that respect, especially if the accused is black. It focuses on two individuals, Doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West. Both helped to convict many people with what was believed to be their forensic expertise. Both have been pushed out of that role by the light shed on their work. Radley Balko has played a big role in accomplishing that. But the bigger issue is a legal system that allowed junk science to be used as evidence.
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If you write for websites, you need to know the basics of HTML. Even if you do your writing in Microsoft Word, Open Office, or a Web editor, it will get turned into HTML (or, less often, PDF). You need to understand how it will work in its final form.
HTML is a markup language. It’s text which contains plain human language plus tags that tell the browser how to render it. The tags are more guidelines than rules. They indicate an intent rather than dictating an exact appearance. In different browsers, or even different settings in the same browser, you might see differences in fonts, spacing, colors, and so on.
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It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.
(Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5)
When you aren’t writing under your own name, the boundaries of honesty aren’t quite the same. You aren’t being hired to say what you believe, but to put someone else’s ideas into words. It isn’t dishonest as such to say things which you don’t personally believe are true, but you don’t have a license to lie. Where’s the boundary you can’t cross without becoming dishonest?
The slope is slippery, so I stay well back from the brink. I’m willing to present a case for a conclusion which isn’t clearly false, even if I have doubts about it. For instance, I see no ethical problem with writing an article that says cloud-based VoIP is best on one day, then an article the next day saying an on-premises IP PBX is better. Both are true under some circumstances. However, I won’t write an article claiming an IP PBX is illegal — at least, not until I learn that some government has actually outlawed it.
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