OK, so here’s the deal. I’m a fairly regular contributor to an e-magazine site and I’m trying to work my way up to “staff.” No, I don’t need anyone to lobby for me. What I do need is some honest and constructive critique on my writing. I checked with CKDexterHaven about this and got his OK.
http://www.intrepidmedia.com/column.asp?id=2003 <–this is my most recent, and clicking on my byline will lead you to my previous attempts as well. I’m working on improvement and ANY legit criticism will be taken seriously.
The Izzard review seems emotionally flat. Too much description of what he does, not enough of your own reaction to what he does. You distance yourself (and therefore your reader) by talking of the response of “the audience” rather than your own response.
“radio ga-ga”: Avoid cliches like “I smiled indulgently”, “you can imagine my surprise”, “left me cold”, etc. Overall, I liked this piece a lot. I laughed out loud at this paragraph:
I wouldn’t really argue with any of the above. You definitely know how to write. Maybe this is just my personal writing aesthetic, but I think sometimes you can lose the flavor of a subject by over-explaining it, and the Izzard piece does that sometimes. You definitely know what he’s doing and what he’s about, so if you explain it a little more directly and in a livelier way, I think that will be really good. There’s a little of that in Radio Ga-Ga too, but I liked it more. The piece has more personality and it moves around a bit instead of just analyzing.
Keep it up, and since you’re practically living next to me, can I either write for you or clean your gutters? I need some work.
Thanks! Now, can you maybe clarify something for me? The Izzard review was supposed to be straight journalism, and I was trying to be very objective. Based on your comment, it seems I succeeded a bit too well. So in the future, would it be better for me to be LESS objective, and what should I have left out in terms of straight information?
The radio bit - I have to agree with you about the cliches, and I’ll admit the column was written fairly quickly and off-the-cuff. There are some phrases that pop into my head when I’m writing, and they probably do that because they ARE cliches. I’ll watch for it in the future and try to stifle it some.
Ha! You snuck in there while I was posting. I don’t need the gutters cleaned, but if you wanted to climb on my roof and hang the Christmas lights, I’d let you.
So no one thinks journalistic objectivity should come before personality? This kind of counters what I learned back in school…
It sounds like the Izzard piece was something that’s tough to do- just writing about the guy without actually getting to do a profile. That makes it almost impossible to add anything new. So you didn’t really have a choice about being objective there. Maybe the difficulty with that story is the focus. Is it a review of the DVDs or a profile? It’s a good objective profile, so if it’s that, cool. If not, it seems like you take a while to get to the reviews, although they’re also good.
I’d just advise being a little more direct in your writing. Try to say what you’re saying with a little less explanation, if that helps.
I agree with the above, but would add that I think it’s too long. Too much detail - tighten it up. I’m not familiar with Izzard, and your critique got me interested, but I zoned out somewhere in the 4th paragraph.
Geeze. This writing thing is harder than I thought. Making something concise, clear, informative and entertaining at the same time is tricky!
But you’ve all got very valid points, and this is the kind of thing I need. In general, I suspect I’m wordy where I don’t need to be - do you guys see that tendency? With this column in particular, I made the assumption that the reader wouldn’t have a whole lot of info on the artist to start with, and tried to give some insight into the artist as well as the work. Would I have been better focusing on just the work?
Yeah, it can be pretty darn tough sometimes. I’d love to set up an SD Writers’ Exchange- I’ve written some things that I really like but that not too many people see, and I’d love to know what others think about them.
Those kinds of things really depend so much on the magazine and the intended audience… but if it was supposed to be a DVD review, yeah, a shorter explanation of what he does would’ve been fine.
