Ad makes ass out of headline

This is what happens when ads take over the front page of a newspaper. Read more.

Using active verbs

I recently read an interesting column on verbs by Constance Hale. It's a good read for anyone interested in a career in writing.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that good journalists use active verbs. I tell students to avoid what I refer to as "weak" verbs like "was" and "are." For instance, instead of saying "There are about 13,000 students who attend UNC," I would say "About 13,000 students attend UNC." The verb "there are" is boring. The verb "attend" is active.

Active verbs bring stories to life. Boring verbs bog stories down.

Students getting down to business

Students in my Advanced News and Feature Writing class are once again blogging on their beats. I have assigned the blog for a few years now. Besides teaching students how to blog, it gets them working on two important tasks. First, it gets them writing about their beat on a regular basis. Second, it allows them to reflect on their reporting and writing. Check out what they have to say by clicking the links at right.

Worst error ever?

If this copy editor didn't lose his or her job, I'll eat a newspaper.

Students blogging again

My Reporting Contemporary Issues students are creating blogs. They will cover Greeley City Council twice a month and write about what happens on their blogs. Tonight we went over the agenda for the last meeting, and nothing stood out as especially interesting. I hope they don't all drop the class after that.

Pictures, words and women

I taught the Mass Communication and Gender class this spring. It went really well. Students did some interesting projects and seemed to learn a lot. But when it comes to comm and gender, some people still have a lot to learn.

My son got a neat game for his sixth birthday. It's called "Guess Who," and he really enjoys playing it. I am troubled by it, though. The point of the game is to use guesses as clues to find out who your opponent is. The board features 24 faces. Five are female. This just doesn't seem right to me. About half the population is female. Children learn a lot by playing games. What are they to learn when only five out of 24 faces are female?

If you care about issues of fairness in communication, you should check out the writings of Kate Swift. Swift, who died in early May, did a lot of work on sexism in language. As she and her co-author Casey Miller wrote in Words and Women,

everything we read, heard on the radio and television, or worked on professionally confirmed our new awareness that the way English is used to make the simplest points can either acknowledge women’s full humanity or relegate the female half of the species to secondary status.

Swift and Casey called attention to some of the blatantly sexist phrases in English and helped change the way words were used. For instance, they pointed out that when women were talked about, they were usually talked about in terms of their looks. The use of "firefighter" instead of "fireman" can be traced to their work. Read the New York Times obituary.

Did you really make the finals?

More on quotation marks. They should only be used when QUOTING something. This means they should be used when you're using someone else's exact words.

The quotation marks on this trophy are unnecessary because nothing is being quoted. The quote marks actually make the trophy look stupid because they imply that the winner was not really a finalist. I guess it could be a trophy presented to someone who played a tennis player in a show.