Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger, lashed out at me today.
Ali Hale wrote a guest post called Are Vampire Words Sucking the Life Out of Your Writing? on the popular blog, where she says you should always use concrete terms like “always” and “never.” You should competely remove “vampire words” like “quite,” “fairly,” “sometimes,” and “often” from your writing.
Of course this is bogus in many situations, especially writing advertising and press releases which is Copyblogger’s bread and butter. I commented that this doesn’t apply on scholarly essays: anything to do with academia, school essays, formal stuff. Brian said Copyblogger doesn’t care about scholarly essays. I said it applies to advertising also. Brian completely ignored this, latching on to the scholarly essays seed. He told me I could take my “esteemed input” elsewhere, which is meant to be sarcastic and patronizing.
I replied. He toned down his comment and didn’t approve mine. I’m sure he feels he is the “winner” now. Copyblogger is a great blog which I read often. It’s in the top 100 on Technorati and it is 100 times more famous than mine. I never expected such cowardice from its founder.
Here are the ORIGINAL comments.
Thripp 2009-09-01T16:56Z:
This is fine for informal blogging but it won’t work for scholarly research. You can’t make unverified claims there without qualifying them. Unless you’re 100% sure you must use “may,” “almost,” “generally,” etc.
The same holds true for high school and college essays.
Most of us aren’t writing those, but you have to use a separate mode for blogging than you do for formal writing.
Clark 2009-09-01T17:15Z:
Richard, no such qualification for scholarly writing is necessary, because that’s not what this blog is about.
Thripp 2009-09-01T17:33Z:
@Brian Clark: No, it says “Writing” not “Blogging” in the title. Many of us have to write essays for college still, or
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