Tag Archive: writing
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 …

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In kindergarten, children are given writing assignments that are ten words minimum. Your high school final essay probably had a length requirement of 3000 words. A doctoral thesis is often required to be 30,000 words plus a bibliography.
Just like age for rights such as driving, smoking, and drinking alcohol, the word count has become the de facto standard for measuring content. Similarly, both age and word count are largely irrelevant. We use the most useless measurement of content not because it has merit, but because it is easy to use.
Novels are supposed to be 80,000 words. If you write a …

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A comedy skit I wrote:
Did I tell you that I’m going to be staying in North Virginia this summer? Every time I go there, my mother KILLS me! She says I don’t visit enough.
Oh, you mean North Virginia as in *North* Virginia?
SOUTHERN North Virginia.
Do you really mean to tell me, that, that you’ll be staying in SOUTHERN North Virginia?
Well yeah, of course. Why is that such a surprise to you?
And, and your mother will be staying there too?
I hope so.
Why would you wish such a thing on her?
It’s where she lives! What are you stupid? All the great Smiths retire …

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When I think of a wiki, I think of a collection of articles that can be edited by anyone. But wikis have another core trait. If you’ve ever looked up an article on Wikipedia, you’ve noticed that practically every other word is a link to related articles in the wiki.
There are no direct links to external sites. All those are footnotes or references, appearing at the bottom of the page. But within the text, there are internal links all over the place. It’s a self-contained Internet.
I think your blog should be the same way. This isn’t reasonable …

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