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This Week’s Grab Bag

Here’s another roundup of items that have caught my attention lately:

TOP OF THIS WEEK’S LIST: Work Talk Writing Tips, by Elizabeth Brenner Danziger, author of one of my favorite books of practical writing advice, Get to the Point!. I always recommend her work to my coaching clients. Also read her other collection of tips, Writeamins. And subscribe to her monthly e-mail newsletter (she doesn’t offer a webfeed yet). Danziger offers some of the best, most concise writing advice available.

Here’s the rest of the list…

  1. Blogging corrections. In his july 26 blog entry, Wordpress comment spam, Neil Turner made some comments about comment-spam protection in WordPress. Soon afterward, he discovered that his original comments were mistaken, and he corrected the information visibly in the original posting. I like how he handled that – I wish more bloggers would be so forthright about corrections.

  2. Working with Wikis: Part 2: June 14, by Bill Ives. Here, Bill recounts a discussion he had with Paul Trevithick of Gennova Group, Paul’s had a lot of experience with various types of collaborative tools. The article explains several ways that wikis can be put to use in practical ways within an organization. (For collective capability mapping, document development, etc.)

  3. AcronymFinder: This is a fun tool. Here’s how I discovered its true usefulness. I was explaining to someone why I think the term “webfeed” is more intuitive and less confusing to the general public than the more common technical acronym “RSS.” This person countered, “Well, everyone knows what RSS means! That’s perfectly clear!” I replied, “Oh really?” and proceeded to demonstrate that there are at least 65 different meanings for RSS in current usage – including “Root Sum Square” and “Rescue Swimmer School.”

  4. How blogs and wikis can help knowledge management, posted June 18 by Wayne Robinson to the e-consultancy forum. He offers an intriguing analogy for the shared-experience part of knowledge management: “From my window, I can see the great cathedral of York Minster, which was built over 700 years ago by generations of skilled craftsmen. They would have learnt their trade through serving seven-year apprenticeships, where they picked up the skills of their craft by observing the more experienced craftsmen. This is a classic example of socialisation - the tacit knowledge belonging to the craft masters is passed on through shared experiences to the apprentices.” (Thanks to Bill Ives for this link.)

  5. Davenport on Personal KM: July 30 by Martin Röll, Das E-Business Weblog. I enjoyed Röll’s insightful comments on a presentation by KM expert Tom Davenport. Röll notes: “I think “reliability” has been too much overlooked in PIM/PKM-Tools. If people are confiding their personal information to a software system then they want to be sure that they can access it all the time and get it “back” from the system if they want. How many crashes of your email system have you had? How did it feel when your weblog last broke down? Ever had some data in some proprietary format in some PIM-Software (like TheBrain, MindManager,…) that you couldn’t get out?”

  6. Social Issues Surround Social Software: June 25, eWeek, by Matt Hicks. This article recaps a session at the Supernova 2004 conference where panelists explored the social dynamics of social software. Esther Dyson said there, “Social networking sites and software in the past year have gained much media attention and increasing amounts of venture funding, but Dyson said she expects the functionality of such software to increasingly become features in other tools, such as in Windows, e-mail services or Web portal sites.” (Thanks to Yvonne DiVita for this link.)

  7. The Death Of Meta Tags?: DevAddict, July 25. Meta tags are keywords encoded into the header section of an HTML file (web page) which tell search engines and other automated tools how to classify the content of that page. I’ve long advocated that content professionals take an active role in specifying meta tags, rather than leaving that all up to designers and programmers. This article contends that since spammer have been drastically abusing meta tags to boost search engine rankings, meta tags are becoming increasingly irrelevant – the big search engines are clued in to this ruse and have adapted their ranking systems to ignore obviously rigged meta tags. This trend emphasizes the increasing importance of relevant, high-quality content on your pages, rather than flimsy search engine optimization tricks.

  8. Guidelines for Authors of Learning Objects (monograph by Rachel Smith) and its Companion web site: This 32-page document, published by the New Media Consortium, finally clarified for me the critical but often-fuzzy concept of learning objects. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the e-learning field. (Thanks to Travis Christopher for this link.)

  9. Understanding Metadata: Although this 20-page publication from the National Information Standards Organization is pretty geeky, it’s absolutely essential reading if you’re expanding your career to include working with content management, e-learning, or knowledge management.(Thanks to EdTechUK for this link.)

  10. Feedster Preps Paid RSS Links as Ads Expand: eWeek, Aug. 16, by Matt Hicks. Here’s yet another reason to justify offering a webfeed – it can carry paid advertising (which means you can make money from it). Webfeed ads is a controversial topic, of course – opening any new medium to advertising always ruffles feathers. It needs to be handled carefully.

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on August 20, 2004 at 1:17 pm and filed under Amy's Grab Bag (quick notes). Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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One Comment

  1. I was interested in your recommendation of Danziger’s writing tips as a possible resource for my students (I teach journalism online). However, two items I checked out on her site made me hesitate. For one, she describes a tip for knowing where to place a comma: “If you develop the habit of reading your work aloud, your comma problems will be solved. Read your first draft out loud, and insert a comma where your voice pauses. You may wish to practice this skill by reading a variety of documents aloud, and noting where the commas are placed.”

    As someone who has taught college level writing for more than 20 years, I can tell you that too many people learned this tip way back when, and the result is commas every which place with no rhyme or reason to them.

    People need to learn the particular sentence structures that require commas — such as restrictive (or bound) and non-restrictive (free) modifiers. It’s harder than following some “easy” tip like Danziger’s, but much more accurate.

    What I do now is have students copy all the sentences with comma errors I mark in their work and paste them into a file, then I tell them to look for patterns (and any repeated pattern in their next writing will be marked down significantly). More often than not, their errors fall into a particular pattern (such as failing to put in the second comma after a non-restrictive modifier), or separating their subjects from their verbs with commas, or failing to put a necessary comma after however, or putting an unnecessary comma after but. The problem is that people don’t always inflect various sentence structures the same way as they read. While they don’t necessarily need to know the names of the structures, they do need to be able to recognize the patterns.

    Danziger’s big tip for using the semicolon can also lead people astray. Danziger says: “When you use the semi-colon within a sentence, you should be able to replace the semi-colon with a period. The words on the left and the right sides of the semi-colon must be able to meaningfully stand alone without any further revision.” While that is true for semicolons used to separate independent clauses (absent a conjunction), it is definitely NOT true for semicolons that she notes on the same page:

    “2) It separates items on a list, especially when the items on the list contain commas.

    We visited the following cities: Paris, France; London, England; Rome, Italy; and Geneva, Switzerland.”

    Following Danziger’s tip, you should be able to insert periods above between France and London, England and Rome, Italy and and. Obviously you can’t or you end up with sentence fragments. So if the only thing people remember from Danziger’s discussion of semicolons is her tip, they are bound to make mistakes on the occasions where semicolons are needed with items in a series. And there’s another problem: many people cannot recognize sentence fragments.

    Sometimes I think it would be easier to teach writing to college students if I could erase everything their elementary and high school teachers taught them!

    [Reply]

    1. Georgia NeSmith on September 5th, 2004 at 4:36 pm