writing

On writing for freedom   Recently updated !

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

As the election approaches, I’d like to offer an unpopular idea: There’s too much focus on the candidates. If you care about human freedom, it should be obvious that Trump and Harris are both inimical to it (thought Trump is far worse). However, they’re just symptoms. Whether we’re looking at sending the military into every neighborhood to expel people from the country or instituting price controls and handouts to create winners and losers, the underlying premise is the premise that a central authority should decide how things should be. This idea has gained in popularity in spite of all the evidence that it’s harmful. The Republicans have almost completely abandoned the free-market principles that once formed an inconsistent part of their platform. The Democrats have believed in a managed economy and growth in federal power and spending ever since Franklin Roosevelt, and they haven’t changed on fundamentals.

As the election approaches, writers spend many words on the candidates as people. News sites, no longer pretending to give news, jump on any little thing that makes their preferred candidates look good or their opponents look bad. Their goal is proxy power. People on social media do the same, often with even less regard for the facts and less of a reason. Their main line of argument is “I’m smart, anyone who disagrees with me is dumb, and if you’re smart like me you see that, right?”

If you write on current controversies and value human freedom, you can do something different. You can set a better standard. If enough authors and journalists do it, it can make a difference, pushing the national discourse in a better direction. It wouldn’t take much to make it less awful.
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The death of objectivity

This entry was posted in Commentary Writer ethics Writing and tagged ethics journalism news writing on by

Try to find a news source that just gives you the facts, instead of trying to sway your opinion in every story. You can find some on the local level, but national news sources that care about objective reporting are rare. You only have a choice between sites with “left-wing” and “right-wing” agendas. The result is that people don’t trust the news they get. They especially notice when people they like are hit with distortion and selective criticism. They’re likely to turn to sources whose biases match theirs, even if they’re less trustworthy than the mainstream ones.

This is a big factor behind Trumpism. A site which bashes him day in and out, pulling quotes out of context and picking on minor things, is less convincing than one which presents the facts and lets people draw their conclusions. When they repeatedly note that Trump has failed to back up a claim with evidence, yet never do the same with Democrats who do the same, people dismiss the stories as hit pieces. I just came across a CNN top headline: “Trump’s wild and lewd rhetoric reaches a new extreme.” I try to keep myself informed, I know Trump is horrible, and I don’t want to read that article. Do they really think anyone inclined even a little favorably to Trump is going to think, “This article may contain important facts. I should read it.”?
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Yahoo News calls its readers “absolute morons”

This entry was posted in Writer ethics Writing and tagged fake news news writing on by

I don’t know whether headline writing is a low-paying job that attracts incompetent people or they’re under time pressure and can’t do a decent job. Or perhaps their bosses tell them, “Never mind respect for the reader, write clickbait!” A headline that I just saw on Yahoo News tops them all: “No, Donald Trump Isn’t Wading Through Hurricane Floodwaters, You Absolute Morons.” I don’t know why Yahoo decided it was a good idea to grossly insult all its readers, but I won’t reward them with a link. You know the search-engine routine. Here’s a screenshot, in case the people responsible have been sacked by the time you read this.
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Has the meaning of “refute” changed?

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged language usage vocabulary writing on by

This week I came upon a bizarre claim in an Associated Press article: “The federal law that President Joe Biden signed at the end of 2021 followed allegations of human rights abuses by Beijing against members of the ethnic Uyghur group and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. The Chinese government has refuted the claims as lies and defended its practice and policy in Xinjiang as fighting terror and ensuring stability.” If AP was using the established meaning of “refute,” it was claiming that these allegations were lies and China had proven they were. The article didn’t say what this proof was.

However, it was called to my attention that some dictionaries give a new, second meaning for “refute.” Merriam-Webster gives two definitions: (1) to prove wrong by argument or evidence : show to be false or erroneous. (2) to deny the truth or accuracy of. Dictionary.com, on the other hand, gives two definitions that both entail proof: (1) to prove to be false or erroneous, as an opinion or charge. (2) to prove (a person) to be in error.
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AI Panic and NaNoWriMo

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged AI computers nanowrimo software writing on by

This has been the year of panic over artificial intelligence. It will take over our jobs! It will replace journalism, fiction writing, and maybe even songwriting! This panic has shown up in reactions to a measured statement by the board of National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. Three members of the board have resigned over the statement.

It begins: “NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI.” That’s not a very tactful way to start, I’ll grant; it could easily be read as endorsing the use of a computer to write your work for you. A clarification was added after the first paragraph, saying, “We also want to make clear that AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse.”
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There’s nothing wrong with these expressions

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

I’ve written a lot of posts on the misuse of words and expressions. For balance, I should mention some that pedants object to, but I don’t. (“Pedant” is defined as someone who objects to usages I don’t object to.)

“I could care less.” The pedant says this should be “I couldn’t care less.” Don’t you understand irony? This is always uttered in a sarcastic tone, and it means something like “I could care less — if I really tried hard.” Do you also object to saying “Big deal!” to dismiss something unimportant?
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Britannica blunders 1

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged language Shakespeare usage vocabulary writing on by

The once-respected name of Britannica has really sunk. In an article on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, they misquote and misinterpret the most famous line of the play, while thinking they’re correcting a misconception.

The most famous line of the play, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”, is often misinterpreted. The archaic word wherefore does not mean “where”, but “why”, rendering the modern English translation as “Why are you, Romeo?”

That’s not what the line is! It’s “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” with no comma. Juliet isn’t asking why Romeo exists. She’s asking why he’s Romeo — meaning why he is Romeo Montague, a member of an enemy family. The next lines make this clearer: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name, Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.”
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“Writer Beware” blog

This entry was posted in Writing Writing as business and tagged business scams writing on by

This is still, at least officially, a blog by a writer for writers. This week I came across a blog that will interest anyone who writes for money: Writer Beware. It presents worthwhile information on scams that writers may encounter, as well as advice on dealing with publishers, agents, and so on.

I encourage people to use RSS feeds rather than social media sites when possible to follow blogs and news sites, so here’s the RSS link, which should work with any RSS reader (I’ve subscribed to it with Leaf).

The attack of the singularized plurals 2

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

English includes many nouns that end in “-um” or “-on” and are pluralized by changing the ending to “-a.” They come from Latin and Greek respectively. Examples include “medium,” “datum,” “ovum,” “criterion,” and “phenomenon.” As with everything else, the language isn’t consistent; we have museums, not musea; morons, not mora; polygons, not polyga. I wouldn’t complain if the language regularized the endings of all these words. “Bacteriums” and “phenomenons” would sound weird at first, but we could get used to it.

What’s happening instead is that people turn the plurals into singulars. With some words, like “data” and “media,” the change has been firmly established. Others are substandard but turn up often, like “a bacteria” or “a phenomena.” Recently I saw a writer friend who should know better talking about “a criteria.” This doesn’t make the words any more regular, since double-pluralizing “medias” or “datas” is still frowned upon. It leaves us with words that are the same in the singular and the plural.
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Villains

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged fiction writing on by

Villains make stories exciting. They add an element of danger, giving the hero an adversary to overcome and the reader someone to hate. But who exactly counts as a villain? Is it any character who does bad things? This question came up in my mind when discussing the question of whether the opera Carmen has a villain. Is it Don Jose? He murders the protagonist. Is it Carmen? She leaves a trail of ruin, but that’s not her intention. Here I’ll put a few thoughts together.

First try: A proper villain does bad things with bad intentions. But do the intentions have to be bad? The classic example of the righteous villain is Javert in Les Miserables. Throughout the novel, he pursues Jean Valjean in the belief that he’s hunting down a dangerous criminal. He can’t grasp that Valjean has greatly changed, and when the truth hits him … well, that’s a spoiler. Is he a villain? Gottesmann in my The Magic Battery is similar, and I had Javert in mind when I created him. He thinks that letting just anybody use magic is too dangerous to allow, and he won’t allow the conviction of an innocent person, but his campaign kills a lot of people.
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