A beautiful hunk of writing about meaningless copy from A List Apart.
Wise words to live by, even though it takes aim at business sites instead of library sites. We all fallinto zombie-traps now and then. It's the nature of the enabled, leveraged beast.
I should print this sucker and reread it anytime I start to open my mouth onto a blank page.
And interestingly, this gem comes on a day when I was forced down into the syntax rule books for citations...would you believe that a lot of bibliographic manuals still espouse underlining for book titles? I had dismissed it years ago, with the advent of hyperlinks!
So. Good lessons for me on this day.
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4 comments:
Ok, now c'mon... how often do we see this gobbledygook on library blogs? I see other problems (Ms. Apostrophe and Mr. Comma are given short shrift far too often), but most librarian bloggers don't write this way. They may not always write well, but it's rarely this empty corporate flackish jargon. Quite often librarians are amusing, interesting writers who share things rather inventively.
kgs
I don't disagree for library bloggers. Library Annual Report writers? Print columnists? I am so busted with the modifiers, it's not even funny.
Maybe this was a post more for my own writing than anyone else's...sent to me by one of the best writers I know.
And I just had a colleague send me the link to Fight the Bull, and I have to say, I love the idea of it-- and I have not even downloaded it yet!
There is even a Mystery Matador tab where you can load your hunk of prose in and the system will score it for useless jargon that may be lurking in your copy. Very cool.
Bring on the Bull(fighter).
Ok, well... library grants. I even posted one of my own horrors on FRL: "An outcome-oriented approach to evaluating this objective is an outcome-oriented qualitative approach to determine if awareness of..." Scary!
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