According to a little test I took based on something I saw David Gelles play on Facebook, I went overt to I Write Like and took a bunch of my copy from my silly little blog-based spy novel, Hill Mole, and it turns out that I writer like David Foster Wallace — amongst my favorite writers. I am pleased with myself. Have you read Infinite Jest? W00t!

From “English Grammar for Students of German” by Zorach, Melin, Kautz

Posted via web from Chris Abraham

“English Grammar for Students of German”

Posted via web from Chris Abraham

I think community and conversation is the future of journalism.  I am platform agnostic.

What journalism did wrong is this:  journalists, reporters, and papers have started to let their contempt for their readers show.

They — print media and serious news papers — fancy us a bunch of dumbasses who don’t care, any more, about civics and duty and politics and so they have therefore holed themselves up, right next to the Academy, and have tried to write for and teach the readers they wished they had — or used to have — rather than the readers they are losing every day.

Here’s an analogy. After inviting your parish priest and your childrens’ Sunday school teacher over to your backyard BBQ a couple-few times, you may get tired of them judging you — telling you how you shouldn’t be drinking beer or eating pork — so you stop inviting them to the party after a spell.

Journalism and print media don’t give people the gifts they want, they try to force-feed us the gift they think we should have — and with social media the company store is no longer the monopoly that it once was and we don’t need to spend every morning poring over the paper — unless we’re boning up for the Foreign Service exam or are on assignment from our school marm for a civics class.

That’s the very basic tenet of market capitalism: give them what they want,  not what you think they need. Right?  (Actually, that’s generally good advice: give people the gift they want and not the gift you want, yourself.)

Well, the “stewards” of “our culture” are realizing that they cannot “maintain the culture” for us and also make a profit from advertising and subscriptions.

Brian asked this question on the BBC World Have Your Say and I wanted to address it,

“There is a feeling that the conference is possibly widening the gap between mainstream media and bloggers/citizen journalists”

Others will follow.

The perceived “widening of the gap” has to do with the defensiveness — the fear — that is obvious to me from comments like, “I am a reporter, journalist, broadcaster, and I resent your saying that I don’t have passion for what I do.” That is a comment made out of fear: aggressive and defensive.

Yes, that man might be passionate about his job and the “noble” profession of being a pedigreed journalist-of-stature (and should be above these comments), and he might be passionate about his beat, but he is also able to get axed, made redundant, and is beholden (more than he may realize) to his six-figure lifestyle and sensibilities.

Profit motive versus passion motive. Bloggers (or citizen journalists) who are not paid completely through passion and have other masters (or a passing interest) never last very long. Of the 50 million bloggers world-wide, fewer than 100 are “essential reading” and fewer than 500 “influence the influencers.” in a real way every day. Many more — but only thousands — bubble up through those influential 100/500 blogs.

RSS syndicated feeds and the decontextualization of these “news stories” further blurs the line.

Back in 1997 and 1998 I was a creative writing instructor for a seminal on-line creative writing program. This program was a highschool magnet program for the Kalamazoo, MI, public schools.

A grammatical, usage or pronunciation mistake made by `correcting’ something that’s right to begin with. For example, use of the word whom in “Whom shall I say is calling?”

[From Greek hyper- (over) + correction.]

“One explanation is that some people may have been corrected for saying `bad’ in another construction such as `I need money bad’ and so in hypercorrection use `badly’ in all constructions. Other use it trying to be elegant, thinking `feeling bad’ is somehow less educated.”
Roz Young, The Good Word is Don’t Feel Bad About ‘Feeling Badly’, The Dayton Daily News, Sep 4, 1993.

“The truth is that hypercorrection isn’t grammar’s coup de grace. We all do it occasionally; here’s how: Fear of the objective case. This comes as a shock to we (should be `us’) people who care about grammar, but between you and I (should be `me’), hypercorrection is quite common.”

Rob Kyff, The Error of Fixing What Ain’t Broke, The Hartford Courant, Apr 20, 1994.

Hey, I remember from your CV that you taught Creative Writing… was it fiction, poetry, drama or what? Well, it was all of that.

It was based on “Whole Language” and so it was partly about getting the kids to write and then it was about finding the form that best fit their voice. So some of the kids got off on D&D-type fiction fantasy, others went with Haiku.

So when each kids found his or her voice, we would find a work that “felt” like their stuff — to show them that they were most of the way there, by writing.

When my CW professor told me I sounded like Galway Kinnell, I got a rush and sped out to find him, to listen to him, and to explore what it was that my professor, Maxine Claire, saw in my work that reminded her of Mr. Kinnell. It was the alliteration and the assonance.