Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘writing’ Category

Tours through my life

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Free Software, journalism, open source, Personal, writing, tagged , , , , , , on June 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »

The other evening, we received a call from someone we knew fifteen years ago. We hadn’t heard from him for several years, and, while we had nothing particular against him, we were content to drift out of touch. But there he was, a disembodied voice bringing up names that these days we hardly thought of from one year to the next, and urging that we should get back in touch with people with whom we no longer had anything in common. The experience was sad and guilt-provoking in equal measure. At the same time, I resented it, because our caller believed he still had the right to make demands on us.

All in all, it was a perfect example of what American fantasist Harlan Ellison once called taking a tour through his life. He meant, as you can probably figure out, somebody leaping to conclusions about how he thought or felt, then acting upon them rather than responding to what he actually said or did.

I don’t have one-fortieth of the name recognition that Ellison had in his heyday, but as a writer who publishes mostly online, I have people taking tours through my life all the time. They miss the sarcasm, take a phrase out of context, or misread, and then they take me to task for what they imagine I said or believe.

For example, once when I did a brief commentary in which I suggested that a woman-only distribution of GNU/Linux might be worth trying. Among other things, I wrote, “I’m not a great believer in the idea that women are less aggressive than or interact differently from men. Yet even I have to admit that most of the regulars on free software mailing lists for women are politer and more supportive than the average poster on general lists.” Then one of the commenters inferred that I must be single and a loner who knew nothing about women, because they obviously were different from men. He apparently stopped reading with the first sentence of the passage, and was willing to blast me on the basis of his incomplete understanding. Never mind that another five seconds’ reading might have prevented his mistake and public embarrassment.

As an ex-university teacher who tried to encourage careful and sympathetic reading among students, my first impulse is to correct such statements as politely as I can. However, experience has taught me that the effort is usually a waste of time. Nobody likes being proved wrong at the best of times, but, when they are also proved incompetent, most people become defensive and angry. I save everybody’s time and keep my blood pressure lower if I don’t respond, or, at the very most, stop the email exchange after my second message.

That probably leaves the commenter thinking that they’ve won, but I can live with that. I don’t know them, after all.

But some tourists through my life are not simply on a self-conducted tour, but trying to sell other people tickets as well. There’s only two or three of them, but they spend a surprising amount of time on their blogs and web sites attacking me for what I did or didn’t do, or for what they imagine I said.

Why they attack me in particular, I have no idea. Maybe it’s because I write online and seem accessible.

What disturbs me about these tour guides is not that they disagree with me. They have every right to do so. Occasionally, they even point out actual mistakes (although they frequently confuse the concepts of “mistake” and “different opinion”). It is not even their relentless anger (explicable to me only as too much caffeine and too little sleep), their refusal to follow even the basics of civilized discussion, or the question of why they don’t write about someone important.

Rather, what disturbs me is the cognitive dissonance that sets in when I read their comments about me or my articles. Possibly, they get carried away by their own rhetoric, but the image they present of me or my articles is so far from any possible perspective that I can’t even call it a distortion. I suspect they are projecting an image drawn from their own imagination or systematic misreadings and over-simplifications. A Microsoft shill or dupe? A writer who is one with Dan Lyons and Laura Didio? Considering that an even larger group of readers identify me as completely biased to the free software school of thought, these accusations would be laughable if only they were not so humorless and ill-natured.

Emotionally, what they say about me has no resonance whatsoever. It simply strikes me as bizaare.

When I first started receiving these attacks, I used to respond to them, thinking that I couldn’t let such outrageous comments stand unchallenged. But doing so, I quickly found, is an even bigger waste of time than responding to those on the self-guided tours. The tour-guides never give in.

For these reasons, I rarely read the tour-guides. The occasional pingback to my blog or a note from a friend tells me that they are still out there, but I mostly catch only snippets of their latest rants. I tell myself that to be known as someone attacked by such people is a mark of honor, and, considering their other targets in the free software community (many of whom I’ve met and liked, although not always agreed with), I should consider their attacks a sign of distinction, no matter how undeserved.

But increasingly, just as with the former friend who called, when I happen across the tour-guides, what echoes inside my head is Ellison’s reply to the similar people in his own life:

“I don’t know you, and you don’t know me.”

And I, for one, am very content to keep things that way.

Read Full Post »

Nine Myths Would-Be Writers Need to Unlearn

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, writer's block, writing, tagged , , , , on May 4, 2009| 1 Comment »

Writing requires fewer expenses than any art except singing, and everyone who finishes grade school learns a few rudiments. For these reasons, it has never lacked wannabes. I’ve heard the claim that if you ask random strangers in Los Angeles how their screenplays are going, you have just bought yourself ten minutes of boredom – and, considering my experiences at science fiction conventions, I can believe it (except that, there, what you shouldn’t ask about are stories). But most of the wannabes never get where they would like to be, usually because they run afoul of one of the following myths:

  • You need to be inspired to write: You can have many Eureka! moments as you write, and a new love or a lost one may urge you to new heights. But if you wait for inspiration before you start to write, then you will never write six days out of seven. Like most forms of mental and physical exercise, writing is something that gets easier if you practice and keep in practice. As Peter S. Beagle said, “If the Muse shows up late to work, you start without her.”
  • Writing done when you are inspired is better than writing you do at any other time: Although you may feel better about your work when inspired, what you produce is usually no better or worse than what you write when every word comes out like a kidney stone you are passing. If you don’t believe me, save one piece you write when inspired and one written when the words come hard, and compare them a week later. Neither is likely to be much better than the other. And, if one is better, it may be the hard-won words, not the inspired ones.
  • Writing block can keep you from writing: In my experience, writer’s block is generally a luxury enjoyed by amateurs. Professionals have no time to have one. The best cure for writers’ block is a deadline. When you have to write, you have no time to play games with yourself. Real writers often have problems that they need to work out, but they view the problems as part of the process, not as an opportunity for self-dramatizing. In the few cases where writer’s block is more than that, a sleep, violent exercise, working on something else, or any other change of pace usually cures it.
  • Talking about your writing is a good idea: Not for anyone I’ve ever met. You will only bore others, and waste energy that you could use for writing in talking. If you prefer talking about your work rather than doing it, then chances are you are more in love with the idea of being a writer than with actually writing. At least, that’s how most practicing writers will view you – and most of the time they will be right.
  • Developing style is the most important thing you can do: An awareness of style is essential as you learn to write. But your own style? Don’t waste time worrying about it. It will come along without any special effort as you focus on clarity, conciseness, accuracy, and otherwise learning how to get down something like what you mean.
  • Style is hard: Even relatively inexperienced writers can learn to polish a phrase or two. By contrast, how to structure and pace your work takes much longer to learn. That’s one reason why, although many poets have done brilliant work before they were twenty-five, very few novelists produce anything memorable before they’re thirty.
  • If you’re talented, you’ll be discovered sooner or later: Possibly. But getting to know publishers, editors, and other writers works even better. Knowing you probably won’t mean that they’ll take an unpublishable work from you, but it does mean that they are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt in borderline cases – and let you in on the industry news.
  • A work that’s rejected is no good: Often, yes. Most times, even. But works are often accepted and rejected for reasons that have nothing to with their quality. Maybe the editor is overstocked with submissions. Maybe the publisher just did a novel featuring a family much like the one in yours. The rumor is that Stephen King got his start because his publisher was looking for more works that would interest women, and Carrie opens in a high school girls’ locker room. Your rejection might be random as King’s acceptance, so try again. But collect four or five rejections on the same work and maybe you need to start thinking about revisions.
  • There’s nothing wrong with being self-published: Many good and even great books have been rejected before being published, and we’ll never know how many others disappeared before their writers got discouraged. However, the odds are that the number is far fewer than the number of self-published books that succeeded. An editor’s job is to detect salable writing, and, while one or two can make a mistake, five or six are less likely to. The prejudice against self-publishing is not irrational; it’s based on experience. If you really can’t sell your work and want to publish it, you can get free blogs on line at any number of places far more cheaply than you can publish a book or win a contest promising publication. Oh, and calling your vanity publishing an Indie Book won’t make anything said here less true, either.

Harsh words? Maybe. But who said that writing was about your ego? It’s about working to do the best job you can in the time that you have. Anything beyond that is playacting about being a writer – and if you have time to pretend to be one, you won’t have time to actually become one.

Read Full Post »

Looking back at Linux.com

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Free Software, journalism, Linux.com, open source, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , on March 4, 2009| 3 Comments »

I wrote for Linux.com for five years, so anything I say about the transfer of the site from SourceForge to the Linux Foundation is hopelessly biased. Still, while I wish the Linux Foundation every success with its new community-oriented version of the site and hope to do some writing for it, I am sorry to hear that the new site will not be focusing on journalism. The free and open source software (FOSS) community had something special in Linux.com, and many people don’t seem to recognize what’s been lost.

Quite simply, the old Linux.com site and its sister-site NewsForge were the largest source of original news in the FOSS community. That is not just bias, but objective fact. The FOSS community has other sources of original material (and I’m pleased to write for them), incuding Datamation, Linux Journal, and Linux Planet, but only LWN is in the same league as the old Linux.com’s average of four stories per day, plus one one two on weekends.

And these weren’t just links to other stories, or quick rewrites of news releases, the sort of content that you find on many technology sites. These were independently researched stories, ranging from breaking news and opinion pieces to how-tos and reviews, each averaging 800 to 1200 words.

Even more importantly, the quality of Linux.com stories was consistently high, thanks to the general policies of editor-in-chief Robin “roblimo” Miller and the copy editing skills of executive editor Lee Schlesinger and his various assistants over the years. Sometimes, a regular contributor slipped up, or a new one published a shoddy piece, or the submissions didn’t include enough pieces to maintain both the highest standards and the busy publishing schedule, but the overall quality surprisingly high (I’m talking about other people’s work here, you understand, and saying nothing one way or the other about my own).

Again, this statement is not just bias. If you don’t have time to re-read the archive (which I’m grateful to hear that the Linux Foundation will preserve), consider some of the people who wrote for Linux.com: Chris Preimesberger, who moved to eWeek; Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, now community manager for openSUSE; Lisa Hoover, now a successful freelancer, or award-winning writer Joe Barr, who died at his workstation last summer.

And that list is just the start of a list of regulars that includes such writers as Nathan Willis, Dimitri Popov, Susan Linton, Ben Martin, Federico Kereki, and Marco Fioretti. Not every successful writer covering FOSS and technology had a stint at Linux.com – not by any means – but a surprising number did, and I think they were better for the experience and the consistent market for their work.

Both Robin and Lee might be embarrassed if I called Linux.com a center of excellence, but that’s what it was, and my own experience shows that. Virtually everything I know about journalism, I know from selling stories to Linux.com. I learned journalistic ethics from Robin and impartiality, pitching a story, and structure from interacting with Lee. I learned editorial writing from the example of Joe Barr, and how to cover breaking news by being given a chance to try it.

Five years ago, if anyone had told me that I would be writing and selling some twenty thousand words per month and surviving as a freelance writer, I wouldn’t have believed them. But, thanks largely to my experience at Linux.com, I do. Linux.com taught me so well that I have even managed to survive its end as a news site – sometimes less comfortably than I did when it was a going concern, and scrambling more as I write for half a dozen editors, but surviving all the same.

Some readers criticized Linux.com for not being blindly supportive of everything and everyone claiming the FOSS label, or for not sharing their opinions. Others mistook covering a topic for support of it. But what such readers failed to understand, and what made Linux.com important for the FOSS community was its honesty. You might disagree with what writers said on the site (I frequently did), but you could trust that they were giving an honest opinion, uninfluenced by advertisers, counter-opinions from editors, or even their general sympathies for FOSS. You could trust, too, that, except in obvious commentary, they were making a good faith effort at fairness (whether or not they achieved it), and not engaging in the demagoguery that passes for journalism on some other kinds of sites. This truth-oriented journalism is more important to a community than blind reinforcement of basic tenets, because it genuinely and reliably informs in the short run, and, in the long run, becomes a first draft of history.

I knew three months ago that Linux.com was being transferred to the Linux Foundation, but I have been under non-disclosure until now. In the mean time, I’ve moved on, writing for other sites and expanding my existing association with other sites. But, the news of the transfer brings the regret back to me, and I wonder if SourceForge ever knew the value of what it had.

Still, looking back, I’m proud to have been accepted as part of Linux.com, and to have learned the writing trade there. I couldn’t have asked for a better school in which to learn.

Read Full Post »

Manufacturing news

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, manufactured news, Personal, Susan Faludi, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on January 29, 2009| 1 Comment »

One of the most disturbing trends in modern journalism is the manufacturing of news. Of course, journalists – or, at least, editors – have always had the power to decide what is or isn’t news, which is why Rolling Stones’ conversion of the New York Times’ motto “All the news that’s fit to print” to “All the news that fits” is so cynically funny. But what I’m talking about goes even deeper: I mean cases where reporters from reporting the news and starts to making it – often out of very little substance.

For example, Susan Faludi, who is best-known for Backlash, her book on the reactions to feminism, but is also one of the keenest observers in general of the media in North America, notes that, after the September 11th attacks, reporters claimed that women in the United States were suddenly lusting after firefighters. As Faludi observes, this trend was based on no statistical evidence, and often nothing more than a few off-hand comments. Yet it soon became a truism that the media took for granted, its members forgetting that they had created the story themselves.

Some manufactured news is relatively benign. Stories to mark the anniversary of an event are usually fairly lame, but perhaps in an era where the cultural memory is so short, they serve more point than simply providing journalists with an easy story based on old material. And at least anniversary stories are based on real events, although the danger exists that new interpretations will be slipped in, as happened with the twentieth anniversary of Expo 86 in Vancouver, when journalists managed to pretend that the considerable political dissent that the event generated never happened.

Similarly, while journalists reporting on other journalists means that, rather disturbingly, they move from behind behind the scenes to being part of the news, that does happen naturally from time to time. About the worst thing you can say about this type of manufactured news is that journalists do not make nearly as fascinating copy as they seem to believe, and, while they are indulging their own interests, they are usually boring the general public. Still, reporting on journalists can cause an imbalance in the news, as happened when Conrad Black went on trial and dozens of eastern Canadian journalists, many of whom had either worked for Black or with him, gave him coverage that was not only wildly excessive, but so willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that the quality of reporting slipped badly.

However, other types of manufactured news undermine the supposed traditions of journalism more consistently. The manufacturing of a trend based upon a few anecdotes or wishful thinking, the sort of occurrence that Faludi is making a career out of documenting, exists on all levels of journalism, but makes a mockery of the idea of investigation and the effort to uncover truth. Instead, it is the passing off of fiction as reality through repetition – and all the deadlines in the world cannot excuse the fact that it is simply shoddy reporting.

Similarly, when a journalist interviews a celebrity, they frequently fall into the associational fallacy – the idea that, because someone famous endorses something, it must be good, or at least news-worthy enough to be on the front page rather than in the sports or entertainment sections where it belongs. Given the power of the media (and, since the Internet, that power has become greater than ever, even if those who hold that power have shifted), any promotion of sloppy thinking is an event to regret. And when that promotion becomes a regular event, it becomes even more alarming. I also have to wonder why editors are giving away free advertising.

At times, manufactured news turns even nastier, being based on outright distortions and over-simplifications. For instance, recently in the free software media, a great deal of attention was paid to the fact that Linus Torvalds, the benevolent dictator of the Linux kernel, was no longer using one piece of software (the KDE desktop), but had switched to a rival (the GNOME desktop). This switch was only a small part of an interview that covered far broader-ranging and interesting topics, and the comments were casual. Not only that, but the switch was provisional, with Torvalds saying that he would reconsider his choice the next time he set up a computer. But, by giving these comments an exaggerated importance, free software journalists ended up systematically misrepresenting the affair to the public.

What makes this manufacturing of the news particularly troublesome is that, being overworked and under deadline, journalists often borrow from one another. This habit breaks the implied contract that journalists have with readers – especially if the journalist is a columnist – since one of the claims that journalists have to their audiences’ attention is that they are supposed to offer expert information or informed opinion.

But, when manufactured news enters the picture, the habit becomes a means for distortion and poor research to become more accepted.

I can’t say that I have always resisted the temptation to manufacture news myself. I’ve done my share of anniversary reporting, just as most journalists have done. But that is minor peccadillo at best, and sometimes useful. Nor, I’m sure, can I claim that bias creeps into work despite my best efforts – real bias, I means, not the sort that people mean when my efforts to marshal facts leads to a conclusion different from theirs.

But, for me, journalism is supposed to be an effort to express the truth as I see it. Deliberately, consciously manufacturing news is an abandonment of that effort for convenience, and produces only distortion. As I struggle with mixed success to keep my own hands clean, I can only become angry at other people in my profession who no longer even try to do so.

And so, too, should their readers.

Read Full Post »

12 Tips for Writing Free Software Documentation

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, Business, documentation, Free Software, freesoftware, journalism, open source, Personal, software development, technical writing, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , on December 15, 2008| 1 Comment »

For eight years, I made most of my income from technical writing. Not the relatively glamorous technical writing involved with writing articles about free and open source software (FOSS) – glamorous, that is, to those who haven’t done it (those of us who have done it are usually considerably less starry-eyed) — but basic how-tos and detailed instructions to accompany hardware and software. Looking back, I must have been reasonably good at the job, since I went from a beginner to a consultant with a sub-contractor in eight months, and kept myself steadily employed most of the time and well-employed much of the time.

Based on that experience, I would like to offer some advice for those who are trying to fill the gaps in FOSS documentation. It’s a thankless job, under-appreciated and laborious, but, if you’re going to attempt it despite all the disincentives, you might as well do it properly. After all, your satisfaction in doing the job properly might easily be your only reward:

  • You must become an expert in what you are writing about: Some professional technical writers pride themselves on being specialists in communication, and feel they don’t need to know the details of what they are writing about. You can always tell manuals done by them, because they are shallow and have large gaps in them. Likewise, you can always tell this type of technical writer, because they’re despised by any developer with whom they work. The truth is that, while you don’t need to be an expert when you start documenting, if you aren’t expert by the time you’re finished, you aren’t doing the job properly.
  • It all comes down to structure: Anybody with average intelligence or better can learn to write a coherent sentence or paragraph. However, structuring several hundred pages is hard work – much harder work than the actual writing. The need to structure is also why you need to become an expert in your subject; if you’re not, how can you know what information to put first, or what’s missing? Don’t be surprised if you spend 50-75% of your time in planning the structure, or if your first outline changes drastically as you work. Both are indications that your work is developing the way that it should.
  • In the majority of cases, the best structure will be a list of tasks, arranged from the most basic or earliest to the most complex or latest: It will almost never be a list of menu items and taskbar icons, except in brief introductions to the interface. This task-orientation is a major reason why you need to be an expert in what you are writing – if you’re not, you won’t have any idea of what users might want to accomplish.
  • Think of your audience as being attention-deficit: Knowing your material is necessary, but it can also make you forget what new users need to hear. The best way to write to the level you need is to project yourself imaginatively into the position of a new user, but, if you can’t manage that, imagine that you are writing for people with low attention spans who are easily bored. The result may spell out the obvious for some readers, but other readers will be glad that you are thorough. Always remember: What is obvious to you isn’t obvious to your readers.
  • Don’t worry about style: In fiction, writers often call attention to their style. By contrast, non-fiction like technical writing is not about you. Your job is to provide simple, clear prose in which you are invisible. And if that sounds boring or unchallenging, you might consider Isaac Asimov’s observation that stain glass windows have been made for over a millennium, while clear glass was a much later development. In many ways, writing simply and clearly is much harder than writing with flourishes and personality. Focus on clarity and content, and let other style considerations take care of themselves. You’ll be surprised how well they work out without you thinking consciously about them.
  • Use structured prose whenever possible:Bullet lists, numbered lists, tables, and callouts on diagrams – all these techniques are conciser and easier to understand than straight prose
  • Your first draft is probably going to be terrible: But that doesn’t matter, so long as it improves by the end. What matters in the first draft is getting something that you or others can analyze for gaps and make estimates about the finished documentation from. Probably, the physical act of writing will be no more than 25% of your time. Often, it will be much less. If you’re planned properly, and begin writing with a thorough understanding, it should almost feel like an afterthought.
  • Don’t mix writing and editing: Writing is a creative process, editing a critical one. If you try to mix the two, you will probably do both poorly. You may also find yourself freezing up and being unable to write because your self-criticism is interfering with your ability to write.
  • Make sure editing is part of your schedule: Editing should not be a last-minuted effort. Instead, accept it as an important part of your schedule. Expect it to fill 10-20% of your time.
  • Editing is about structure as well as words: Editing is not just about spelling or correcting grammar. It’s just as much about the structure of the work.
  • Get second and third opinions: When you have just finished writing, you are probably unable to judge your work effectively. Get other people to review your work in as much detail as possible. If you can’t get other people to review, put the manuscript aside for several days. If you can’t put it aside, print it out, or take a break before returning to it.
  • Expect revisions: Based on my experience teaching first year composition at university, I can say that the average person takes 3 to 4 drafts to produce their best work. You may be naturally talented or reduce that number with practice, but don’t count on either until you have some experience.Make sure you budget the time. You’ll know if your efforts are succeeding if the general trend is that each draft becomes quicker and quicker to write. If that doesn’t happen – especially if you have to keep reinventing the structure or making major additions – then something is probably seriously wrong.

With any given piece of writing, you may not be able to follow each of these pieces of advice. Deadlines in particular may keep you from giving each of these points the attention it needs. But keep all these points in mind, and you will be more likely to write documentation that people actually use, instead of an after-thought to the software that is never used.

Read Full Post »

Down with the grammar police

Posted in Bruce Byfield, grammar, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , on November 29, 2008| 2 Comments »

For as long as I can remember, I have always disliked those who correct other people’s grammar unasked. My dislike has little to do with being corrected myself, although I can be careless with proofreading my own work because I am in a hurry or simply because I dislike the task. However, having taught composition at university and sold hundreds of articles, I have reasonable confidence in my own literacy, and the most I can muster when my mistakes are pointed out is generally a mild embarrassment. Nor am I upset when people correct grammar when asked – that’s called editing. But those who decide that their mission is to correct other people’s writing or speech are rude, misguided, wrong (as often as not), and less interested in clear communication than in establishing their own superiority over someone else.

Working on the Internet as I do, I am used to all levels of literacy. Text messaging, lack of education, and efforts to write in a second language all mean that the English I read is often less than fluent. But unless someone asks my help, I refrain from pointing out errors and simply do the best I can to decipher. Under modern circumstances, zeroing in on someone’s errors is simply rude. It’s like telling someone with a large birthmark on their cheek that they have a blemish. If you have any claim to manners, you don’t mention the fact, and do your best not to stare or make the other person uncomfortable with your awareness.

At any rate, many of the grammar police seem to have little understanding about what language is about. Yes, consistency in language helps communication. But English can support a high number of transmission errors without being unintelligible. So why linger over the errors when you should be focusing on understanding?

More importantly, grammar-correcters seem under the impression that only one standard for communication exists. Perhaps this impression is the result of how reading and writing is taught in schools, but nothing could be more misguided. Any language has variations based on region, ethnicity, class, gender, politics, and just about every other factor that you can name. It changes over time and even over circumstance – for instance, my own sentence structure and vocabulary changes drastically depending on whether I am writing an academic paper or a blog entry, or talking to octogenarians or young adults. And when I follow the lead of Shakespeare and I use “they” as the impersonal pronoun (as in “Everybody is entitled to think what they want”), I am not committing an error but refusing to use “he” because of support for feminist language critiques I absorbed in university.

The grammar police, however, like to pretend that language has a single standard and never changes. A particularly popular ploy of their is lament the perfectly normal change in meaning of words; often, they can go on for thousands of words on the subject. But their diatribes are pointless – I have never heard of a single case in which a word reverted to a former meaning because the grammar police complained. In fact, I suspect that on some level they would be disappointed if their complaints had results, because then they would have less point to nag everyone with.

At other times, they show a singular lack of understanding of context. The much-dreaded double negative (“There ain’t no way”) is a common method of emphasis in Germanic languages for over a thousand years. So is repetition, although I recently saw “I personally” on the grammar police’s hit list.

The truth is, the grammar police often show a limited understanding of the language they claim to be defending. For example, you often hear them denouncing starting a sentence with “and” or “because,” although the practice is widespread among writers of all levels of expertise. Their argument is that “and” and “because” are conjunctions that join two clauses. And so they do – but the idea that the clauses can be in separate sentences never seems to occur to the grammar police.

But few of the grammar police are interested in accepting, much less appreciating the endless variations of English. What they are really interested in doing is establishing themselves as experts and their victims as less than themselves. Since this effort is often irrelevant to whatever is being discussed – that is, to the content – it amounts to what Roman orators described as an ad hominem attack – an effort to discredit an argument by attacking the person making it rather than disproving the argument itself. In other words, by making a writer or speaker appear illiterate, they hope to sway listeners against what is being said. Or, possibly, their goal is simply to demonstrate their superiority over the person they are attacking.

You can see these goals very clearly in the attacks on the syntax of George W. Bush – as though it were his syntax rather than his ideas that made him so alarming. Of course, you might argue that an incoherent politician is likely to have muddy thoughts, but the usual impression is that those who dwell on Bush’s syntax are more interested in establishing themselves as smarter than he is than on any more valid critique. They may very well be, but crowing about the fact is ugly and ignores the substance of what he is saying, which needs to be addressed far more than his illiteracy.

Being rude, ignorant, and elitist, the grammar police do little worth doing. They show only their own massive insecurities, and do nothing to advance communication or discussion. In the end, it is not just their lack of social graces or understanding that makes them irritating, but the way that they insist on thrusting their own need to prove themselves superior into every conversation. They are like a man who insists on adding irrelevant jokes into every conversation, only worse.

Read Full Post »

On company time

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, careers, corporatelife, ethics, hypocrisy, leadership, management, management theory, officework, Personal, work, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 9, 2008| Leave a Comment »

One of my pet peeves about business is the constant consternation among executives about employees doing personal business on company time. Even if the transgression is just a few minutes browsing on the Internet, it’s viewed with the greatest concern. Business experts talk earnestly about what such loss of productivity might mean to the nation, and devise ways to spy on employees, or to block web sites that employees might like to view. Doing business on company time, they gravely explain, is the worst sin of our secular age – stealing from your employer. What annoys me is that such concerns are a grotesque hypocrisy.

I’m not talking, you understand, about the extreme cases, where a middle manager spends five or six hours a day on a gambling site, or a system administrator watches porn all day. Such behavior is obviously unacceptable to anyone. I’m talking instead of people who take five or ten minutes a couple of times a day to read a news or hobby site, or to dash out on a family errand.

Of course, even this behavior was unacceptable thirty years ago, when people worked regular hours and rarely deviated from them. After all, the lost time quickly adds up.

But the workplace is different today. Instead of receiving an hourly wage, the average office worker is on salary – a ploy that forces them to work hours of unpaid overtime. Especially in high-tech, the norm is to take advantage of this situation, putting heavy pressure on those who leave after eight hours and implying that anyone who doesn’t devote evenings and weekends to the company are not being good team players and letting everyone down. More than once, I’ve encountered supervisors who had a habit of starting meetings ten minutes before the end of the day and forcing people to work overtime, knowing very well that the social pressure would keep most people from objecting.

And only rarely does anyone get a day off to compensate for their extra hours. Rather, unpaid work has become the norm.

Under these circumstances, how dare employers complain about the loss of half an hour or an hour a day when they are averaging twice that in unpaid overtime from their employees? If anything, they ought to be glad that employees are taking short breaks. Otherwise, productivity would decline steadily after about nine hours. By taking those breaks, employees are actually making better use of the time actually spent working, because they are more refreshed than they would otherwise be.

An employer with any knowledge of human nature should be glad that employees know how to pace themselves. Otherwise, employees risk falling into the unproductive habit of a resident doctor I once knew. When I asked how she handled the thirty-six hour shifts that are part of the hazing ritual for new doctors, she explained, “I try to make all my decisions in the first twelve hours. After that, I just try not to make any mistakes.”

Anyway, what choice do employees have except to conduct personal business on company time? When employees are working long days, often the middle of the day is the only time they have for errands or personal business. Very few stores are open at 10PM – assuming that someone staggering home after a fourteen hour day even has the energy to stop to shop.

At any rate, employees are doing nothing that many executives haven’t done for years. Despite all the pep talks about the importance of leadership, the average manager works far less strenuously that the average employee. The exceptions are those who have a hands-on approach, and lend a hand in anything that needs doing, and they are usually in a startup. The average manager thinks nothing of doing exactly the sort of thing that annoys them when employees do them.

And perhaps that’s the problem, Maybe the executives who worry about productivity are simply irked that average employees are claiming perqs that used to be reserved for them alone.

When companies pay overtime or don’t cajole and threaten free work out of their employees, and managers set an example of dedication, then they will have a right to complain about what is done on company time. Until then, so long as employees put in the number of productive hours listed in their contract, they have every right to reclaim some of their free time.

So far as I’m concerned, the employees aren’t the ones who are stealing.

Read Full Post »

Being listed in the top 200 technology blogs

Posted in Blogging, Bruce Byfield, Free Software, freesoftware, journalism, open source, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 10, 2008| 1 Comment »

Much to my bemusement, I see that James Maguire has listed this blog as one of the top 200 technology blogs, in the GNU/Linux/ Free and Open Source category.

James is my editor at Datamation, who shows amazing toleration for my inability to edit my own work, so I already know him for a decent sort. So, I figure he just needed to round out the spaces he had allotted for the category. Not that I don’t appreciate the honor, but I can see myself clearly enough to know that I don’t deserve it.

For one thing, look at the company I’m keeping. My entries here certainly aren’t a match for the varied articles at Linux.com, which is also on the list. Nor do they come close to the combination of astute legal analysis and wonky opinion on Groklaw. As for equating my efforts here with the industry analysis in the blogs of Mark Shuttleworth, Jim Zemlin, or Matt Assay – no way, man, as we used to say in my increasingly distant youth. I mean, I didn’t call this blog “Off the Wall” at random, you know what I mean?

What is really ironic is that, when I started this blog, I intended it as a place where I could write about things other than free and open source software. At the very most, it would be a sandbox for ideas that weren’t ready to be articles, or ones that I didn’t think I could sell. Nor do I often write on such topics, although I have plenty to say about my life as a journalist who covers such topics.

Yet, if I’m being honest, I have to admit that, when I do cover free and open source topics directly, the posts attract an entire order of magnitude more readers than my other topics. And I mean that literally, without any exaggeration whatsoever. So, maybe James is right, and this is a technology blog after all.

Anyway, I was taught that, if someone pays you a compliment, you say thanks and smile warmly – especially if the compliment isn’t true. So, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, figuratively speaking.

Read Full Post »

Mainstream journalists and the fear of blogging

Posted in Blogging, Bruce Byfield, Christie Blatchford, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , on September 6, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Why are mainstream journalists so threatened by blogging? The question is starting to nag me, because the response is so widespread – and based, I believe, on some key misunderstandings.

The strongest recent expression of mainstream journalists’ discomfort is from Christie Blatchford of The Globe and Mail. A few weeks ago, she used her report from the Olympic Games as an attack on blogging. Blogging, she says, is “the unofficial end to journalism as I know it.” Claiming that she is not complaining just because she is a Luddite, she says that she objects to blogging because she only has so many stories in her, and she doesn’t want to fritter them away. More importantly, she feels that blogging will diminish the craft of journalism, because blog entries and reader comments open up an unfiltered conversation.

I have a certain amount of sympathy for Blatchford’s view. Frankly, I find many people who are famous for blogging a pretentious waste of time. However, the term “blogging” covers so many different types of writing – everything from a teenager’s angst-ridden diary of her love life to columns by both semi-professional and professional journalists – that I can’t accept her catch-all condemnation. So far as I can see, when Blatchford talks about blogging, she is referring to any sort of writing published online.

In other words, when she says it’s not just because she’s a Luddite, I have the feeling that, yes, it is because she is a Luddite. She sounds worried that the ability to write something publishable is debased by the Internet, but, mostly, what I hear in her complaints is the cry of the middle-aged, bemoaning the fact that the world has changed.

Mostly, I find her fears groundless. Yes, online-publication – whether you call the result a blog, a column, or an article – is now open to everyone. However, the ability to write a piece that someone will pay to publish remains the dividing line between the professional and the amateur. Expertise – to say nothing of the ability to make deadlines — still matters, and, so far as I can see, always will.

The fact is, writing remains writing, regardless of the medium. The ability to choose worthwhile topics, to research and express them, are not diminished by the Internet. They are still rare skills that people respect and will pay for accordingly. If anything, suck skills stand out all the more in the new tidal waves of illiterate and self-indulgent prose.

As the old signature tag used to say, it was once thought that an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know that isn’t true.

Admittedly, the ease with which readers respond online does create a new relationship with writers. And this relation is scary, and takes some getting used to, because readers assume an absolute egalitariansm with the writer, and do not automatically respect the writer. A professional online writer has to learn the give and take of such a relationship, and learn when – and when not to – take its demands seriously.

Much more so that the traditional print journalist, the online writer has to develop careful filters for reader commentary, knowing that much of it is worthless and that conflicting opinions often cancel each other out, yet remaining open to the small percentage of valid criticism. They have to learn not to take abuse seriously, nor praise either. Online writers also need to budget their time, to ensure that they do not lose too much time in endless debates with readers (my personal rule is to respond no more than twice to any except in exceptional circumstances).

But, if all the increased commentary gets irksome at times, online writers can at least take comfort in the fact that people are reading. They may be misunderstanding, taking thoughts out of context, and using your ideas as a starting point for their own rants, but they are reading. And, in the case of online publications, the audience can consist of millions rather than the tens of thousands for traditional journalists – figures that any writer is sure to appreciate.

I am equally dubious about Blatchford’s concern about running out of stories. Journalists don’t concoct stories out of pure imagination; they respond to the events on their beat. In my experience, the problem is not finding a topic, but deciding which one most deserves coverage or is most interesting to you or your readers. And deadlines, I find, are a marvelous antidote for writer’s block. Would Blatchford, I wonder, have the same concern about the number of columns she has left in her?

However, Blatchford has been a professional journalist much longer than I have, so I can’t completely discount the possibility that I won’t have the same concern when I have her experience.

Apparently, I am on the other side of the digital divided from Blatchford, even though I am probably not that far from her age. My own journalistic career is almost entirely online, except for a handful of print articles each year, and the conditions that Blatchford seems to fear are simply normal working conditions to me. But it seems to me that the worries of Blatchford and other traditional journalists are nothing more than a fear of change, and mostly groundless. Change happens, but most of it is far less revolutionary than the claims of its supporters.

Read Full Post »

Living with journalistic enemies

Posted in Bruce Byfield, enemies, Free Software, freesoftware, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2008| Leave a Comment »

When I was a boy, I imagined that one day I might become so skilled as a writer that I would silence all the critics. I was very young, and, of course naive. But I can’t help remembering that dream now that I am a writer and have made some permanent enemies as a result of my modest success.

Even now, I’m close enough to the dreaming boy whom I once was that the word “enemy” sounds melodramatic, even paranoid. Yet what other word can I apply to people who imagine that I am always writing about them, and who spend an inordinate amount of time not only bad-mouthing me, but writing abusive posts and emails to repudiate my opinions? “Critic” or “detractor” might do, but neither word suggests the fury or the personal rancor of these people. So I suppose “enemy” will have to do.

Still, no matter what word I use, the idea of having enemies bemuses me. I seem to be such a poor hater that I have trouble imagining dislike in others. And, to be honest, when I first became aware of the fact, I was taken by surprise. Until about a year ago, I had had a gentle reception as a journalist. Very little of the attacks that other free software journalists have endured had come my way, and never from steady, identifiable sources. So I hardly knew how to react to the situation.

However, over the last six months, I’ve developed a habit of ignoring them. I won’t mention them by name in public, nor respond to their comments. In fact, I very rarely read anything they write, regardless of whether it’s about me or not; with all the intelligent and informative material about free software on the web, why should I waste my time? Most of what I hear about them comes in passing second hand references, or from reading a link on a portal site.

Yet, almost despite myself, I can’t help learning a little about my enemies. For example, I can’t help noticing that none of them seem to be contributors to any free software projects. Moreover, the other people whom they attack (my enemies being very far from discriminating) are among the leaders of the community, and hard workers as well, even if I often don’t share their opinions or think their energies misplaced. So, while I would rather not be among those my enemies focus upon, I suppose their attention is a wry compliment to my articles. After all, if I was completely unsuccessful in expressing myself or providing unusual or thoughtful arguments, then they probably wouldn’t bother with me.

But, even more importantly, when I do come across the writing of my enemies – regardless of whether it’s about me or some other straw man of the day – I’m starting to find that they help define me in a negative way. Just as, in the 1970s being on Richard Nixon’s enemy list was a sign that you were an effective social activist, so being a target of these kinds of people helps me to define the sort of person and writer that I want to be – in essence, everything that is the opposite of them.

For starters, I have no wish for prolonged flame wars. I might toss off an angry reply, or even a second one, but, after that, I can’t sustain the emotion. There are so many more interesting ways to spend my time that I quickly lose interest.

For another, while most of my writing about free software is advocacy journalism in the sense that, by choosing my specialty, I am implying that the subject is worthy of attention, I have no interest in attack journalism (I suppose that comes from getting enough sleep and not being wired on coffee all the time). I can disagree with a person or a corporate policy very well without any need to denounce explicitly. In the end, I would much rather stand for something than against something.

Anyway, if I present the facts accurately enough, I don’t need to condemn – if someone or something is unpleasant, the fact will come through without me belaboring the point.

Even more importantly, while I wince at typos and factual errors, taking them as proof of my own carelessness, I am far more concerned about logical errors. I don’t believe that, just because you find a tenuous connection to Microsoft that you have proved a conspiracy, or that simply because one event follows another that the first caused the second. I try very hard to keep an open mind as I research a story, which is why I usually can’t say the perspective I am taking until shortly before I start to write. I believe that quotes and other evidence needs to be taken in context, not jammed anywhichway into my existing beliefs as if I were some remote descendant of Procrustes. You don’t arrive at the truth by over-simplification or jumping to conclusions; you get there by acknowledging as much of the complexity as you possibly can.

But perhaps the biggest difference between my enemies and me is that I don’t think that my writing is all about me. When I sit down to write, my goal is cover the topic thoroughly, and support any opinions I state so that they are plausible to a fair-minded person. However, I rarely write to justify myself when I’m reporting on free software, nor do I expect everyone to agree with me. In fact, those who disagree with me often force me into a more nuanced and therefore more accurate view of the subject. In the end, my goal is to send off a finished article with what Balzac called “clean hands and composure” — by which I mean the knowledge that, given my material and time restraints, I have done the best job of expressing my point that I could.

Sometimes, I wish my enemies would find another target and leave me alone. Increasingly, though, I find myself accepting the fact that they are not going away in a hurry, even thinking that they are useful to me. For all the annoyance they provoke, they are examples of the sort of person and writer that I do not wish to be. So long as I act in the exact opposite way that they do, I can continue to be a person with whom I can live.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »