Make any sense to you? As a headline in my morning newspaper, it didn’t to me, either, until I scanned the subhead, photo and article below for context.
The article tells the story of an entrepreneur getting out of the plastic packaging business and into the biodegradable packaging business, and goes on to describe a new generation of packaging materials made from agricultural byproducts.
So the headline writer really meant to write, Businesses investing in products that rot. I imagine the copy editor or whoever did the final page layout just ran the whole piece through a computer spell-check. A set of human eyes or two would have caught the error immediately.
As I’ve written often in this space, newspapers and other print documents typically contain plenty of visual context that quickly clears up readers’ initial confusion over errors like this one and renders them merely comical.
But when headlines and other brief materials migrate onto the Internet or other interactive media, they become “microcontent,” which often gets displayed out of its original rich visual context.Those of us who learned to type on typewriters rather than computer keyboards learned the convention of putting two spaces after each period. Typewriters gave all letters the same space on the line (monospacing). Adding two spaces after a period helped readability by indicating clearly the end of each sentence and the beginning of another.
Most fonts developed for modern computer typography use “proportional spacing,” which compensates for the varying widths of individual letters by giving some letters more space than others. Notice:
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i
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The ease of reading proportionally spaced computer-generated text has changed the standard from two spaces to a single space after a period. If you still use two, look closely at your text. You may notice wavy white lines meandering vertically through your pages, which may distract and annoy your readers.
If you can’t break the habit, simply do a “find” and “replace” as one of your final proofreading tasks. “Find” two spaces and “replace with” only one. Then hit “replace all.”Those of us who learned to type on typewriters rather than computer keyboards learned the convention of putting two spaces after each period. Typewriters gave all letters the same space on the line (monospacing). Adding two spaces after a period helped readability by indicating clearly the end of each sentence and the beginning of another.
Most fonts developed for modern computer typography use “proportional spacing,” which compensates for the varying widths of individual letters by giving some letters more space than others. Notice:
e
i
l
q
s
m
w
The ease of reading proportionally spaced computer-generated text has changed the standard from two spaces to a single space after a period. If you still use two, look closely at your text. You may notice wavy white lines meandering vertically through your pages, which may distract and annoy your readers.
If you can’t break the habit, simply do a “find” and “replace” as one of your final proofreading tasks. “Find” two spaces and “replace with” only one. Then hit “replace all.”In an article about a cat show in Concord over the weekend, I read, “While some cat owners were there to win, largely to boost their breeding potential, others were there just for fun.”
Oops! This reads as if the owners had ambitions for their own “breeding potential.”
The reporter could have avoided the humorous ambiguity if she’d written, “While some cat owners were there just for fun, others competed to win, since champion cats command higher breeding fees.”
Some excellent thoughts for the day, from the University of Delaware’s writing program.
Critical reading is an active process of discovery. You discover where an author stands on an issue; you discover the strengths and weaknesses of the author’s argument; and you decide which side outweighs the other. The end result is that you have a better understanding of the issue.
Ultimately, this will lead to being a better writer, because critical reading is the first step to critical writing. Good writers look at the written word the way a carpenter looks at a house—they study the fine details and the way details connect and create the whole. The better you become at analyzing and reacting to another’s written work, the better you become at analyzing and reacting to your own: Is it logical? Do my points come across clearly? Are my examples solid enough? Is this the best wording? Is my conclusion persuasive?
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When you read critically you might ask the following questions of the author as you read:
- What did you mean by that?
- Can you back up that statement
- How do you define that term?
- So what?
- How did you draw that conclusion?
- Do all experts agree?
- Isn't this evidence dated?
Or, you might think the following:
I recommend reading the whole piece and taking it to heart.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.—Herbert Alexander Simon, economist, Nobel laureate (1916-2001)
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. What an interesting concept: attention consumption. I wonder if part of the energy drainage we feel from the assault of information comes from the quality of attention we “pay.” Buddhists have a concept often called “bare attention.”
It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories. It just looks. [Bare attention] registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it were occurring for the first time. It is not analysis, which is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process…
Mindfulness creates its own distinct feeling in consciousness. It has a flavor—a light, clear, energetic flavor. By comparison, conscious thought is heavy, ponderous, and picky.—Bhante Gunaratana
Bare attention, rather than draining energy, may increase it, or at least increase the “flavor” of energy in one's mind.
Also, I’ve observed in myself that energy drainage comes not so much from an overabundance of information as from its fragmentation. I call this a poverty of integration, not attention.
The Professional Writing & Rhetoric Concentration in the Department of English is pleased to offer this online course, this summer:Whoa!
Mediastorm: Rhetoric in Information Age
Prof. [name deleted]
This is a course on media literacy and information age survival skills. Beginning with the advent of cable TV in the 1970s, to satellite TV in the 1980s, and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, we are living in what media critic Todd Gitlin calls a “torrent of images and sounds” which overwhelms our lives. From the “Sopranos” and “Sex in the City” to “Survivor” and C-SPAN and ESPN, we are awash in media 24/7. There can be little denial that even now, arguably still in the dawning period of the information age, in order to prevent citizens from being blown away by the data storm of information technologies (and the Internet is only the most recent and explosive of these), that education must provide not only exposure to new media tools but also some principles of critical analysis about information technology and the rapidly changing paradigms of literacy in an information society.
Beginning with the advent...?
[Take a deep breath.] There can be little denial that even now, arguably still in the dawning period of the information age, in order to prevent citizens from being blown away by the data storm of information technologies (and the Internet is only the most recent and explosive of these), that education must provide not only exposure to new media tools but also some principles of critical analysis about information technology and the rapidly changing paradigms of literacy in an information society.
Huh? The guy offering this advanced undergraduate English course may have a load of excellent information to pass along, but he needs an editor. Badly.
Over the many years I supported myself as a freelance writer, I gradually came to understand the value of a good copy editor, those critical readers laboring in the background who never took credit for the shine and sparkle they added to my writing, the folks who saved me from a thousand terrible embarrassments.
Every writer deserves a first-rate copy editor.
I’ve just discovered John McIntyre’s blog you don't say: language and usage, in the Baltimore Sun’s online version. A past president of the American Copy Editors Society, McIntyre works as assistant managing editor for the copy desk and teaches journalism at Loyola College in Maryland.
One recent McIntyre post introduces another important role of a copy editor: fact-checking. This demanding practice involves close, critical reading: checking each fact for accuracy (technical and linguistic); making sure that dates, percentages and other numerical data make sense; checking the entire document for internal consistency, etc. Diligent fact-checking saves a lot of face and protects a lot of professional reputations.
“So when we deal with sentences like the examples below—all the work of professional journalists — we see what we are up against in the combat with error,” McIntyre writes. (A commenter to the blog suggests calling it “the war on error.”
(1) And 42 percent of the students with low grades are boys, compared with 28 percent who are girls.
(2) He brought a luna moth to school, and recently, when she saw a 14-foot woodpecker, it was he who told her it was a pileated woodpecker, a scarce bird in Maryland.
(3) In the opening scenes, he’s literally bending sideways as he walks, ducking in and out of doors like Groucho Marks.
(4) Silent auction in West County: Among the wonderful items up for sale is a live thoroughbred horse.
(5) Divers Clinton Suggs (left) and Victor McCaugherty pause during their dive to replace a hole underneath Dam No. 5 near Williamsport.
(6) And the magazine was almost always right — until 1936, when the editors confidently predicted that Pennsylvania Gov. Alf Landon would soundly defeat Franklin Roosevelt.
(7) The seven-member group, the Pasadena Citizens Task Force on Radium in Well Water, was split down the middle.
(8) The train tracks are believed to be part of the Underground Railroad by which slaves found their way to freedom.
Follow the link to read the whole piece, which contains McIntyre’s comments on each of the examples. Imagine how grateful you’d have felt if you’d written one of these doozies and an editor had suggested changing it.