Oh, I had to respond to this.  King Banaian – a college professor – wrote this:

Have you checked his Blog Readability? Go ahead, put the Berg blog in there and see what you get? Yes, Elementary School. Centrisity scores Junior High by comparison. All that pontification, all those twenty-years-ago-today piffle, and for what?

Yeah, what the hey, let’s go ahead and check that out:

Get a Cash Advance

  Hm.  OK.  And SCSU Scholars?

Cash Advance Loans

  Well, there’s a big jump!  Just for kicks, let’s try Powerline, Cap’n Ed and, say, Sheila O’Malley:

Powerline:

Ed:

 

Sheila:

Get a Cash Advance

So let’s get this straight:  Ed and I – the only two members of the NARN who’ve ever I written for non-academic, non-professional audiences (I as a reporter and writing instructor, both of us as technical writers) for a living, who are both trained in writing clearly and precisely (read: simply), along with Sheila, who’s a just-plain-great writer, scored “elementary school” level (i.e., simple and clear enough for pretty much any audience).  King – a capable writer, but mainly an academic – scored “junior high”, meaning more complex, ergo less clear.  In the meantime Powerline – who are lawyers, ergo trained in writing to obfuscate – scored “Post-Grad”. 

There are those who those – along with King – have tried to pass this off as a negative, or even an insult. 

Baloney.  Self-indulgent, gassy, bloated writing – the stuff my high school writing teacher used to call “EngFish”, because it stank like a rotting fish – is the easiest thing in the world (vide  a whole generation of business writers in this country).  Self-disciplined, simple, clear writing, on the other hand, is a goal to be sought out – among those who pay attention.

Which clearly leaves out economics professors and trial lawyers.

And how about Minnesota Monitor, City Pages and Norwegianity?

 The Mon

 

CP?

The Wege?

 

This is getting fun. How about the Mole?

 

Good lord, how impenetrable must that be? How about The Dump?

Huh. 

 Those of us who have the talent and self-discipline to write simply, clearly and directly should be are dang proud of it. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.