writing

Lying for money

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

A piece called “Confessions of a Fake News Writer,” by someone using the name Winston Wordsworth, recently came to my attention. You can look it up if you want; I’m not giving this scumbag any “link juice.” He says in the article that he currently accepts money to write lies, so there’s no strong reason to accept anything he says as true. But by Russell’s Paradox, if he’s lying, he’s telling us the truth when he says he lies. And there must be people like this. They deserve to be spat upon.

Winston says he’s “prostituting myself out.” That’s an insult to prostitutes, who mostly deliver honest value for money.
(more…)

“Link juice” and other content marketing superstitions 1

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

Small minds are attracted to zero-sum thinking. They believe that anything that benefits someone else must hurt them. That’s where the myth that sites should never expend “link juice” comes from. The idea is that if you have any links in your articles, the site you link to will gain in search rank and you’ll lose correspondingly.

How much influence do these people think they have over search ranks? Unless they’re operating a leading site in the field, their effect is negligible. Besides, presumably they aren’t linking to their competitors, so giving another site a slight boost doesn’t do them any injury.
(more…)

Dealing with FDA censorship

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged censorship writing on by

Writers in every country can run into governmental censorship. The USA is among the freest, but there are some areas where businesses can get into legal trouble for publishing truthful statements that aren’t state secrets. The FDA is one of the biggest censors of truthful speech. With certain products, it isn’t enough for the manufacturer’s statements about them to be true. They have to be approved. More precisely, making certain truthful statements about smokeless cigarettes, which contain no tobacco, miraculously turns them into “modified risk tobacco products” which are subject to tobacco regulations.

'No' symbol over word 'censorship' I can say what I want about e-cigarettes on this blog, since I don’t produce or sell them and I’m not getting paid by anyone who does. But if a business that sold them asked me to write something for them, I’d have to be careful. I might not be able to say that they don’t contain tobacco, even though they don’t. I couldn’t point out that they’re far less dangerous than real cigarettes.

Legal writer Jonathan Adler, in the Washington Post, writes about the prohibition: “FDA regulation of e-cigarettes is not only bad for public health but also is likely unconstitutional. Insofar as the federal Tobacco Act, and the FDA’s implementing regulation, prohibit product makers and sellers from making factually true statements about their products, they likely violate the First Amendment.”

Nonetheless, A lawsuit against the FDA lost and, as far as I can tell, ran out of appeals. The ruling is long, and I can’t figure out from it how it justifies the speech prohibition. It seems to just take it for granted. The part of the ruling which claims to show that products with no tobacco are “tobacco products” is preposterous hand-waving, so I shouldn’t expect much sense from anything in the ruling.

Concerns for writers

It’s very unlikely the FDA would go after me personally for anything I wrote for a customer. (But don’t take anything here as legal advice.) The issue is that to write something which the customer could safely publish, I’d have to be careful to state only government-approved facts. Companies sometimes run articles past their legal departments to minimize the chance of regulatory trouble. This could result in nitpicking rewrites or even rejection of a perfectly good article. If you get into this situation, understand that the customers are just protecting themselves.

The tobacco industry loves it when e-cigarette makers can’t tell people all about their products. So do the nannies who think people should be prohibited from taking any risk, even if it’s a smaller risk than they’re currently taking. Tacit alliances like this happen more often in the crony system than you might think.

You have to be aware of the potential for trouble when you write on those topics. You can’t be a legal expert on what statements are allowed or not, but you can be aware that your work could face delays and rewrites.

Thanks to Tom Schwing for the forum post which called my attention to this issue.

What makes a professional writer? 1

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

Is a professional writer just someone who makes money writing? Then we might as well call anyone who gets paid for doing anything a pro. The word implies more than that. It means a commitment to producing the best results possible. It means not just being paid for work, but being paid for good work.

Professionals know that a career is an ongoing effort, not a leap to stardom. It’s a matter of constantly developing better skills, both at doing the work and at marketing it. Jeff Goins’ “7 Things Professional Writers Know That Amateurs Don’t” makes some excellent points on this topic. He explains that “success in any field is more about commitment to a process than it is about finding one magic trick that will make it all come together.”
(more…)

Excuses for dishonest writing

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

Some people see nothing wrong with writing dishonest articles. A discussion in an online forum recently reminded me of this.

Let me start by clarifying what I mean by dishonest writing. If you’re writing on someone else’s behalf, you can argue for a position which you don’t personally agree with. It’s legitimate if there’s some case for the position and you use accurate facts and valid arguments. You’re helping the customer to present a position in a reasoned way, and there’s nothing wrong with that even if it’s not your position.

It becomes dishonest when your argumentation is dishonest. If you cite sources which you know are unreliable, use arguments which don’t hold up, and present “facts” with no source, you’re serving up counterfeit goods. If the customer is unaware you’re spewing nonsense, you’re cheating the customer. If they do know they’re asking you to deceive, you’re collaborating in cheating the reader. In some cases, it could count as fraud under the law.
(more…)

Yesterday’s Songs Transformed: Update 1

This entry was posted in My writing and tagged music writing Yesterday's Songs Transformed on by

Yesterday’s Songs Transformed is getting close to completion. I’m working on the introduction, which traditionally is one of the last things you write. It deals with the relationship of the book to Tomorrow’s Songs Today. TST is about filk music. YST grows out of my interest in filk. It puts the rewriting of song lyrics into a bigger context. I expect a large part of my audience to be people interested in filk, people who love the idea of replacing old lyrics with new ones. I also hope that other music lovers will get enjoyment out of it.
(more…)

Maximizing the value of each word

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

When I’m polishing text that I’ve written, I find myself thinking about the value each word contributes. Can I replace a long phrase with a short one with equal value? Can I use a high-value word in place of one that has relatively little?

By “value” I mean the precision and impact which each word contributes to the statement. A precise word has more value than one with a broad meaning. A straightforward word or phrase has more value than a cliché. A sentence with a high value per word has more impact than one that’s full of low-value words.
(more…)

HTML for blog writers

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

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.
(more…)