Commentary

Fake news or sloppy writing?

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged chemistry fake news stupidity USA Today on by

People get outraged when news media publish fake news. They seldom consider the possibility that the people writing these stories aren’t lying but just ignorant. An outrageous example popped up recently in a USA Today article on road salt. It contains this astonishing sentence:

There’s less mystery about the chemistry. Road salt typically consists of sodium and chloride. While sodium is less water soluble and lodges in soil, the vast majority of chloride washes away with the rain.

(more…)

New Jersey bill attacks freelancers

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing as business and tagged freelancing New Jersey regulation on by

A bill in the New Jersey legislature could mean trouble for freelance writers. It bans freelance contract work that doesn’t meet all of the following requirements:

a. The individual has been and will continue to be free from control or direction over the performance of the service, both under the individual’s contract of service and in fact; and

b. The individual’s service is either outside the usual course of the business for which that service is performed; and

c. The individual is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, profession or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.

(more…)

How writers should deal with Internet bullying

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged Internet writing on by

There’s an old Internet saying: “Don’t feed the trolls.” It’s still excellent advice. When people communicate with you only to get you upset, the best answer is usually no answer.

Some authors have been subjected to online harassment by cultural segregationists. Their crime is to write something which is not permitted to their race or ethnic group. A bunch of racists piled on Amélie Wen Zhao for the offense of depicting a fantasy world in which slavery isn’t limited to people with dark skins. (There’s a real-world counterpart: China, which is where Zhao comes from.) Some of these bigots said that people with yellow skins shouldn’t write about slavery at all. They temporarily intimidated her into withdrawing her book from publication.
(more…)

The researcher’s guide to beating the search engines 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged Internet research on by

If you’ve ever tried to research a difficult topic on Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, or any of the other major search engines, you know what a battle it is. You don’t just get irrelevant results, you get the feeling the search engine is working against you. Instead of matching your keywords, it returns matches for vaguely similar spellings. Instead of matching all your search terms, it gives you popular pages that match just one. You may start to think the search engines are conspiring against you, and in a sense you’re right.

Why the search engines fight you

Here’s the secret: Search engines think you’re stupid. They think you can’t construct a proper search and they have to “help” you by guessing your real intent. Statistically, this isn’t so unreasonable. Most people have no idea how to construct a search string. They can’t spell. Search engines have dumbed themselves down to the level of these people. This is great if you can’t remember the spelling of a name and you’re looking for popular articles, but it’s murder when you’re trying to get an answer to a difficult query.
(more…)

California bill threatens freelance writers 2

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged business California law writing on by

California map from EPA.gov Politicians hate the “gig economy.” The simple reason is that it’s harder to collect taxes from freelancers than from employees. The California Assembly has passed a bill that would put many freelancers out of work, including writers. It would force clients to take them on as employees. That’s very unlikely to happen for the typical writer, who would simply lose the work.

As of this writing, the bill still has to be passed by the Senate. The text of California AB-5 is on the state website.

I’m not a lawyer and (fortunately) don’t live in California, but this kind of legislation could spread to other states. If it does, it will force a lot of writing work overseas, hurting people in every state.
(more…)

Linux for writers

This entry was posted in Commentary Tools and tagged computers Linux software on by

Users are discovering that Windows 10, among its many annoyances, doesn’t work well if you can’t get reliable Internet download speeds of 10 megabits a second or better without a data cap. Macs are better in some ways (I’m using one right now), but they’re expensive. A lot of writers would just like a reasonably priced laptop that doesn’t make unreasonable demands on their connection.

Some writers consider a Chromebook a reasonable solution. It’s cheap and it doesn’t have ridiculous bandwidth requirements. You can use it in a library or a coffee shop. All your documents are online, so if you have a desktop machine at home, you can easily move documents between it and the Chromebook. But it means handing all your documents over to Google. I like having my files on my own computer, thank you. If Google locks you out of your account (I’ve had that happen temporarily) or terminates it for any reason, everything is gone. If you don’t like other people reading what you write before you submit it, how confident are you that Google doesn’t?
(more…)

A banned book you may never see 3

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged censorship law on by

“Banned Books Week” has become a joke. I call it “bland books week.” Its definition of “banned” includes being deemed inappropriate for elementary school libraries. This is at best deceptive, and it’s an excuse for not talking about books that face actual efforts to ban them. The list also includes “challenged” books; that means simply that somebody asked a library not to carry a book. Talking about real banned books would require entering real controversies.

Unless you think school libraries should carry everything down to and including hard porn, “banning” in that sense is justified in some cases. “Challenging” hardly deserves notice at all, unless it results in serious consideration of excluding a book. Whether a school library carries Captain Underpants or not isn’t an issue of freedom of the press. Whether a book can be published at all is. There are books which have actually been banned in recent US history.
(more…)

Writers: Are you an employee or a contractor?

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged business clients writing on by

Occasionally I hear from freelance writers who mistakenly think they’re employees. Some even list clients as employers on LinkedIn. I don’t think I’ve ever run into the reverse. In the United States, there’s a clear distinction between the two, and it’s important to know which you are.

If you’re an employee, you filled out a W-2 form for the IRS, and your employer deducts taxes from your paycheck. If you’re a contractor, you’re self-employed. You get a 1099 reporting your income, and normally the IRS collects the tax through estimated tax payments or with the 1040 in April. You get the privilege of paying double Social Security tax. On the positive side, you can deduct business expenses, perhaps even a home office.
(more…)