![]() It’s one thing to giggle at the classic, “Do as I say, not as I do.” It’s another thing entirely to throw rocks at a glass house, especially when my glass house follows the architectural logic of the Winchester mystery mansion. My own writing style can be best described as Captain Beefheart’s signature backwards drums, as evidenced by John French, aka, Drumbo. An untrained Beefheart recorded improvised piano pieces that Drumbo was asked to turn into written music for two guitars, a bass, and drums. The style is simplistically impenetrable, and yet alluring and mystical. ![]() I write the way I write for reasons I can’t explain, and because I’m lucky that Grey, Rudy, Blair, Donkey, and others answered my email last year and asked for a writing sample. I conceived and wrote the first column in one go, as my wife lamented the title in the margins. As I’ve been trying to analyze both how to avoid being stomped by errant blurbs, or even how I have been stomped on in the past, I have remarked that blurbs are trying too hard they’re trying to become play-by-play announcers, full team box scores, and even wikipedia rap sheet pages.ĭid we learn nothing from Project Runway? Style? Style is nothing without substance. ![]() So it goes that today I clicked a blurb on Rotoworld (NBCsportsedge, ahem) and noticed an incomplete blurb. Would it take me to another page? Is this clickbait? Would it vault me over the paywall to join the fantasy baseball country club elite? Is there a dress code? Do I own any penny loafers? Did I even want to read more in the first place? Ninety words into this blurb, the final clause became obscured by bold letters that said: SEE MORE…. I clicked and it ended the sentence very plainly. Just an arbitrary UI word count threshold. We now know the limits of the modern blurbist: 90 words per section of analysis. Is it the cold robotic precision of a classic boxscore copywriter? The sarcastic, smug bile of the blurbist who thinks he should be the manager? The analytics-obsessed savant whose prose reveals the writer has never shaken his hips at an 80’s dance party? Next week we will dive deeper into style and what makes the perfect blurb.
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