The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Bloggers: What Not to Do

Posted on | October 4, 2010 | 8 Comments

There’s some stuff you shouldn’t do if you want to be a blogger, like make an ass out of yourself the way Tommy Christopher did in writing a “column” about the One Nation Rally.

The scare-quotes around “column” are required because Tommy Christopher is such a lousy writer. Once upon a time, when columnists required the investment of ink and paper to get published, you had to be a good writer to become a columnist.

What William F. Buckley did three times a week for all those years involved a high level of literary skill and rhetorical method. And I will be the first to admit that David Brooks is an excellent prose stylist, even if he is politically useless.

Pixels being dirt cheap, any blowhard nowadays can call himself a columnist on the Internet, and it has spoiled the meaning of the term. Look at how Tommy Christopher begins his paragraphs:

The main point of contention . . .
For the purpose of this discussion . . .
Given that disparity . . .
On that score . . .

White noise, you see? Nothing artful or engaging. Tommy Christopher is boring.

Whatever you say about my contributions to The American Spectator, I hope they’re never dull. Here’s the lede of one piece from a couple months ago:

Howard Zinn was teaching a class, but he wasn’t yet a professor and his classroom wasn’t at a university. It was late 1951, and the students who gathered for Zinn’s lessons in Brooklyn were his fellow members of the Communist Party USA. . . .

Never assume that whatever it is you’re writing about is so damned important that people have no choice but to read it. Construct your prose so as to grab the reader by the throat in the first sentence and compel them to read all the way through to the very end. Draw them in, tell them a story, and tell it well.

Let me brag some more. Those who were with me on the evening of January 19 will recall under what chaotic conditions this lede was composed:

BOSTON, Mass. — If every Republican in Massachusetts wasn’t inside the ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel on Tuesday night, it was only because the city’s fire marshal is a Democrat.
Ayla Brown, the “American Idol” daughter of Sen.-elect Scott Brown, was rocking the capacity crowd to the tune of “Some Kind of Wonderful” when it was announced that Democrat Martha Coakley had conceded. The crowd began to chant: “John Kerry’s next! John Kerry’s next!”
Like the 2004 Boston Red Sox who broke an eight-decade curse by winning the World Series, Brown’s victorious surge has inspired Republicans in Massachusetts and nationwide to believe that anything is possible. . . .

C’mon, admit it: That was good. That story moves. And the fact that it was written while I was bone-tired, half-drunk and racing to meet a midnight deadline is a testament to the decades of discipline necessary to get that good.

Writing is a skill, not a talent, and developing that skill requires thoughtful practice, a continual striving for improvement. Work at it hard enough and you can make it seem effortless, but it takes a lot of effort to get there, and Tommy Christopher hasn’t made that effort.

His sentences lack rhythm. They don’t dance or sing. They clunk.

So Tommy Christopher is a bad writer, and that’s two strikes against him even before we consider the fact that he’s also wrong. He compares the One Nation rally to Glenn Beck’s 8-28 rally and says that a solid estimate of crowd size is “more elusive than Sasquatch.”

Perhaps in terms of absolute numbers, yes. But if you’re comparing two events, it’s not really elusive at all.

A bad writer who’s also wrong might want to heed the First Law of Holes, but Tommy kept right on digging: He got into a Twitter pissing match with Ace of Spades.

Bloggers: Do not do this. Ace gets 100,000-plus visits a day, and if he decides to make you the punchline of one of his running jokes, it won’t end good for you.

Don’t do it.

Bookmark and Share
Category: Blogging, R.S. McCain School of Journalism

Comments

  • http://twitter.com/lonelycon lonely conservative

    Great advice. Now I just want to see how your new comments work.

  • http://theothermccain.com smitty

    Are they not the niftiest thing since chocolate?
    Come back tomorrow morning for our first ever poll, on this very topic.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

    Man, I do respect your reporting – and the cited story was indeed well written, especially on the fly – but comparing yourself to Tommy Christopher is like bragging you are a better fielder than Marv Throneberry.

    (It was while watching Throneberry take infield practice during spring training for the Mets’ inaugural season that Casey Stengel famously quipped, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”).

  • http://twitter.com/lonelycon lonely conservative

    Oh, chocolate. Nothin’s niftier than that. But this comes close.

  • nice venn

    Well if they come in Chocolate, I’m getting out my credit card and ordering at least one of them today.

    In the meantime, I’ve got some semi-sweet answers in my freezer, just in case I get one of those late night hankerings.

    They’re called Nestle’ Toll House Real Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chunks, and unlike other “chunks” in life, they never disappoint.

    In fact, I’m popping the last few of one bag in my mouth right now, but no worries, I’ve got a back up bag all nice and frozen and ready to go, should that irrepressible urge come upon me later tonight, when the lights go down, and the stars come out and Silence of the spheres resound.

    Just knowing they’re there gives me a warm inner glow of love, joy, hope, and best of all, Freedom.

    As they say, it doesn’t get any better than semi-sweet chocolate chunks, and frankly, I believe them.

  • http://twitter.com/CathPrdDaughter Mary Rose

    Well, getting used to the new comments.. Mary Rose, here. :-)

    RSM, I remembered writing for my high school newspaper and also for my college newspaper and magazine. You are so right regarding writing skills. Many times it’s almost painful to read blog content. The amount of wasted words is enough to send me to an instruction manual just to clear my head. I’m a pretty impatient reader. Although I appreciate a clever sentence, most of the time I’m pushing through my daily ‘net tour and I want brevity and relevance. I like short sentences. (But then I also love poetry. Go figure.)

    Meanwhile, I’m always looking for virtual mentors, those from whom I can learn, and I place you in that category. During my college years, Mike Royko was one of my heroes. Now I’m finding them online although I have to pick through a larger lot to find the diamonds. But I actually love it. I love the equalizer of the Internet and if someone bores me, I’ll soon find someone who thrills me. Everyone gets a chance to capture the eyeballs.

    Oh, and your words dance as well as Fred — which is why your site is “pinned” to my “Top Sites” page. ;-)

  • Pingback: I don’t claim to be as good a writer as Stacy McCain… « Da Techguy's Blog

  • Pingback: dustbury.com » And the doctor said “Don’t do that”

Performance Optimization WordPress Plugins by W3 EDGE