Blog Assignment #1 The Good, the Bad, and then there's Me.

For me, this writing assignment was difficult on many levels.  One, I suck at writing let alone knowing what’s good and bad writing for online or otherwise, and I wouldn’t know the difference whether something is written by Hemingway or Snooki, online or on print.  Okay maybe I can tell the difference between Eminem and Jay-Z’s writing because Jay-Z’s “crap”, eh, I mean his lyrics. They are really overrated and his voice is really annoying.  I know that now because of my new job and the demographic I work with.  Two, I hated reading especially after spending more than two decades reading technical manuals the size of Yellow Pages.  And just when got the information down pack the technology is obsolete, and you’ll have to read another manual the size of the White Pages to learn its latest revision and update. And NO, the information is NOT on disks, CD, or any other storage devices on any servers.  Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at Los Alamo was a victim and a fall guy of COMSEC protocol, and “we” didn’t have WikiLeak back then, just something called the Pentagon Papers.  Three, almost all the websites I visit are mostly for hobbies and short videos on YouTube and from Khan Academy.  Last but not least, I was trained and conditioned through my military trainings to keep everything to myself and discuss “nothing with no one.”  NO ONE! Well, so much for that because I think I violated no less than a dozen of the Department of Defense (DoD) and Defense Communications Agency’s (DCA) Communications Security (COMSEC) protocols the first week after I created my facebook account.  That’s another topic for another time. 

Personally speaking, I believe there are good and bad writing within the same website, perspectively speaking, depending on the authors and their audiences they’re trying to reach out to.  My day time job requires me to interact with different groups of people from various social, cultural and academic levels, and like a good website, I have to make sure the messages or the information I transmit gets across to the receiving party.  This is a actually a lot easier when I use to speak with machines, all 1s and 0s. It is much more difficult with humans.  The message and or the information is not the only thing it to be transmitted, but the emotion of the transmitter also need to be delivered so that the human receive can receive the entire “packet.”

I’m not sure if I can use this link, http://www.deannazandt.com/presentations/claremont-mckenna-college-how-you-will-change-the-world-with-social-networking/ because it was the one from the reading assignment.  I find it to be a good example because the author and I have lots in common. We’re both techno-geeks hardwired and programmed with the same goodies from the same vocational mall.  Another thing is the way or the style in which her article was written.  I love her language and the tone of her voice.  She kept me reading, her article has “sticking power.”  I wish I can say the same about Clark’s writing http://scribeseo.com/downloads/How-to-Create-Compelling-Content.pdf , boring.  Had I stumbled upon the “scribeseo.com” website on my own, the “sticking power” would be less than 20second, a little less than the time of an HR person reading an online resume.  Zandt’s reading led to the first piece of bad writing, or at least in my personal opinion anyways.  I wanted to know what is “ambient awareness” so I did what all the kids do, I Googled it.  I can across this link http://www.endofcyberspace.com/2008/09/clive-thompson.html and started reading the article and before I even finish reading the second paragraph, I hit the back button and back to the Google search list. So I click on another link http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902818,00.html and when I saw the Twitter and saw the Clive Thompson’s name somewhere on the third paragraph, I again hit the back button.  I can’t even explain my actions I was visually turned off and left the link. Zandt’s explanation was okay for now. Then I got to the part about why empathy is important and the “neuroscience shows us that we’re actually hardwired to empathize with another.”  No shit? And we can find out more about it if we go to Ted.com and look for “mirror neurons.” I did. Wow! http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization.html I believe this is what I think is good writing. Even though PhD. “Rama” Ramachandran deliver it via video, he still has to first write it.  Unlike many boring sociology and psychology text books I had to read, Rama’s lecture is NOT boring.  He made neuroscience cool, who knows, had I had a teacher like him in high school, I would have study neuroscience. 

Through my new job, most of the work related websites I visit are not exactly what I call good writing because these websites are not my areas of interest making the content difficult to read, and something else, these organizations aren’t what they seems to be.  I’ll just put up their links and you can read their mission statements. They are ACS, Administration for Children Services and HRA, Human Resource Administration http://www.nyc.gov/html/acs/html/about/mission.shtml and

http://www.nyc.gov/html/hra/html/about/about_hra_dss.shtml .  Professionally speaking, after working with HRA and ACS the last nine years, their mission statements are any but that. But that’s another topic for another time.  Another site I signed up for is LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/  that I no longer use because it’s where all the over the hill unemployed gathers to toot their horns and all the employed with shitty jobs trying to get the hell out of Dodge. 

            I am not sure if I have actually described what truly is good or bad online writing but I can say that Zandt’s article is definitely better than Clark because I really got into Zandt’s content and I actually fell asleep on Clark’s material.  The internet is open to the likes of Jerry Springer and 60 Minutes, John Lennon and Jay-Z, Brian Williams and Glenn Beck, Iron Chef and Hell’s Kitchen.  Sometimes we can find good material in bad writing and bad material delivered eloquently, or not.  At times I wonder if majority of people who surf the internet really cares if the content is good or bad as long as they’re entertained. 

           

http://scribeseo.com/downloads/How-to-Create-Compelling-Content.pdf

http://www.deannazandt.com/presentations/claremont-mckenna-college-how-you-will-change-the-world-with-social-networking/

 http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization.html

http://www.endofcyberspace.com/2008/09/clive-thompson.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902818,00.html

http://www.linkedin.com/today/?trk=eml-tod2-today

This is an after thought burp, not blurb, burp. Just when I thought I couldn't find any online bad writing...BAM!
http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/Unlike-Denver-Broncos-quarterback-Tim-Tebow-New-York-Knicks-point-guard-Jeremy-Lin-is-real-deal-021412
...it's something written by Jason Whitlock about Jeremy Lin, the new Knicks sensation. Then I look at his home site. He works for Fox. That's explains it.