Slashdot Mirror
On the Subject of Slashdot Article Formatting
I'm not talking here about "Should a story be posted" or "I have 9 submissions about the same thing, which is best." Today I'm talking entirely about what I try to do when I decide that some story is good for Slashdot. What changes I think matter before posting it. Picking which stories to post is a big part of our job, matters of style and formatting matter too. Today I try to address what things I think are important before I click 'Save'.
The most important thing is what I'll call my most-important-link rule. Often submitters submit stories with like 8 links. I try to remove any link that doesn't substantially add to the article. For example linking ZDNet.com directly, and then a second URL to an article on ZDNet is redundant. Or if your link is to Joe's Blog, where he essentially says nothing except "I found this article". I'm not opposed to having several URLs in a story, but I want to make sure that they each serve a real purpose.
Next is proper anchor texting. I fix the hyper text on the vast majority of submissions. People link the word 'Here' or 'Article' or 'CNN' and I find that very frustrating. I want the hypertext to be the most appropriate 2-3 words that tell you exactly what you're clicking on. I think that is absolutely essential. Every URL should matter, and every bit of hypertext should tell you exactly what it is you're going to get when you click that mouse button.
Another key component in Slashdot article formatting is to strip off the extra text in a submission. I have a mental image of how long a Slashdot story is. Many submissions are to long or to short. So I get out the scissors and start looking for sentences to cut.
Often a submission starts with a clause that says something to the effect of "Hey guys, I found this URL that says...". I'd much prefer to cut that out and get right to the meat. Likewise many submissions end with a call to action... "We should get those guys" or "Lets show them what Slashdot can do about it!". I yank those sorts of things. As a general rule, I want the story to be short, sweet, and direct. Anything that distracts from that, I want to chop out.
Likewise some submissions are simply a URL and a single sentence. Since I want my articles to be around the same size, this is my chance to put in my own words. I'll try to add a joke or opinion. Or just a fact that I thought was worth sharing from the article itself. It's often these phrases that comment posters get most up in arms about: irate readers commenting that I should not be allowed to post my views.
I consider this opinion to be simply ludicrous. Slashdot was spawned from what today would be called a blog. To be more precise, it came from MY blog. Where I posted almost nothing but my own opinions. But more blatantly, I could simply rewrite the entire thing, say exactly what I want to say, and post it as an anonymous reader. Or as a made up nickname. I don't do any of those things. I simply add my 2 bits at the end to the occasional story. Not only do I think this is desirable on Slashdot, I think it's essential.
Now let us talk about one of my secondary concerns: spelling and grammar. Let me be clear. As you are probably well aware, I don't think these are as important as the things I mentioned above. I want a Slashdot story to be focused, directing your attention to the URL in question. It needs to be not to long, not to short. Links should be clear. Spelling and Grammar are secondary issues.
Slashdot is not the Wall Street Journal. It is not The New York Times. Slashdot is an informal meeting ground. A town hall. A pub. A bulletin board in the quad on campus. Here people might not properly capitalize a proper noun. They might transpose letters in 'thier'. They might use jargon that isn't in oxford. And all of that is OK with me.
Now sometimes a sentence doesn't parse to me. I'm not opposed to correcting the grammar in a sentence if it just doesn't work. But I simply don't think that a typo or grammar error is a make or break problem for a Slashdot story.
Many users routinely email me to complain about such errors. I'm usually fairly flexible on these matters. If the error is blazingly bad, I will often correct it. Of course some users like to email me to tell me how much Slashdot sucks, how fat and lazy I am, and how the most terrible thing in the history of Slashdot is the fact that the 4th story down contains the word 'to' when it ought to contain the word 'too'. That missing 'o' is the greatest travesty on-line today! It's hard to take that seriously. Especially when people are rude.
As an aside, for awhile we actually had an editor reading Slashdot articles and correcting grammatical mistakes. Turns out it doesn't really matter much. People found other things to complain about. It's almost as if some percentage of the population wants to complain. And they will find something to complain about no matter what. Perhaps by leaving a few typos on the site, I am making their day a little easier! Leave them some low hanging fruit I guess.
A a further side note to anyone who ever wants me to look at anything on Slashdot. If you e-mail me, include the URL. A comment mismoderated? A user who is misbehaving? A story with a typo? Include the URL. Don't say "The article about Novell" because there might be 3 in the last 2 days. Don't say "The last comment I posted" because it might be 2 hours and you might have posted since then. It takes you 3 seconds to cut and paste a URL. It might take me 3 minutes to find the content in question if you don't. That doesn't sound like much, but if it happens a couple dozen times, it adds up really fast. Do you want to stay an hour late at work today?
But back to the topic at hand, You are welcome to disagree with me on matters of grammar and spelling. And many of you do, very vocally in the forums. I would hope moderators would see such commentary as offtopic. A story about a new motherboard chipset has nothing to do with the proper use of "Its" and "It's".
The moderation system serves many purposes, but perhaps the most important is to provide a user, 24 hours later viewing at Score 2 or 3 an accurate pulse on the topic at hand. If the comment is not about the new motherboard chipset, that comment at least should not be modded 'insightful', and in many cases, ought to be modded offtopic of flamebait.
As with last week, I'm going to try to participate as best I can in the discussion. If major points arise I will update here. I think the real topic of this article is the formatting of Slashdot Stories: not moderation, the story selection process, and or story selection criteria. Please help by staying on topic so I can try to address these matters efficiently. And please don't email me directly- lets keep the discussion here in front of everyone so i don't have to answer dozens of you individually. Moderators, feel free to moderate good questions up to help me find them, and likewise if my answers are good, give those the thumbs up too so that readers can find them and save me from having to re-read questions i've answered already. Once again, I plan to do this as regularly as I can. If you have ideas for future discussions here, e-mail me... but I beg of you, wait until tomorrow!
Update Here is a further clarificatio on typo and grammar errors on Slashdot. I believe that Slashdot is a somewhat schizo place. A dozen voices stand side by side on the main page. Some of them will have proper grammar. Others won't. Just like a mailing list. Just like crappily written comments in some ancient piece of source code. Just like that email jotted out in seconds. Just like some bit of IRC chat you just read a few minutes ago.
Simply hiring a copy editor to purge these changes fundamentally alters the personality of the site, and my opinion is that alteration is for the worse. It might improve clarity to some percentage of readers who truthfully can't parse bad grammar or spelling. Likewise it might cut down on some offtopic meta threads in the forums. But the I think that it changes the flavor. The feeling. The tone of Slashdot.
Some people disagree with me. You are welcome to do so.
Another note about URL formatting. An interesting thread spawned in there about what text makes a proper hyper link. Given the example string:
CNN has an article about a sticky widget
What text should be linked?
There are 2 potential URLs in here, a CNN article, and the text 'CNN'. Some users think the words CNN should link to an article. Other users might link CNN directly to CNN, and the word 'article' to the article in question.
My stylistic preference is to only link 'a sticky widget' to the article. Not to link CNN directly to CNN.com (that link is redundant- I want only the most important links. And not 'article' because that tells you nothing about what you are clicking on.
Meta discussion on Slashdot is a substantial issue we intend to address in the moderation system redesign. Things like typos and grammar have a place on Slashdot, but today that place can only be described as 'Offtopic'. (And I think all moderators and meta moderators should keep that in mind). Our plans for dealing with 'Meta' discussion are best left for another editorial. In fact, I have one half written. Maybe next week.
Taco's "review" on article formatting is one that many of us should use and learn from -- especially anyone with a blog or an opinion site themselves.
The most important thing is what I'll call my most-important-link rule
I've actually been watching how articles are "formatted" for the past 2 months and tried to mimic it on one of my blogs. The result? More people clicking within that blog, staying on for up to 1/2 hour per visit. This is a good thing, it means that people like the content for whatever reason. If you're linking to other sites, make sure you find the link that really has all the information in total. Do some google searches before settling on the link you think is good. Don't link to 10 different sites all offering the same general information.
Next is proper anchor texting. I fix the hyper text on the vast majority of submissions.
I find that another of my blogs has better content than the previous, but it isn't read very deeply (if even past 1 page). I seriously believe this is because I would link to "here" or "article" instead of linking to "the housing bubble is about to burst."
Another key component in Slashdot article formatting is to strip off the extra text in a submission.
Of the 12 articles I've submitted to slashdot, the 3 that were accepted were posted almost verbatim -- I actually think it was because I left the editor with a good direction and a good article at link's end. The ones they rejected often were short articles, or opinion pieces with links to other sites with deeper information. I'm actually glad the editor at the time went to the link and read it (or probably did). Looking back, those submissions should have been rejected. I'd love to see an option on slashdot -- a checkbox saying "If rejected, show complete submission on user page as journal entry" so others can moderate our submissions on our journals. They won't moderate if this article is worthy, just comment on the submission. I'd love to know what others think about some of my submissions.
Anything that distracts from that, I want to chop out.
If you're a blogger, definitely listen to the part of Taco's "review" that talks about making generic comments like "I found this" or "Let's get these guys!" I hate blogs that write these little side comments. If I go to a site because of an opinion, I like to stick with sites that offer non-fluff text written by the opinion writer. I've seen newspaper columns that are all fluff content like that, and it drives me crazy.
It's almost as if some percentage of the population wants to complain.
I believe that to be true. The more sites (/blogs) that I work on, mine or those of others, the more complaints I see from the same people, even between two totally different sites. I have one grammar nazi (I actually appreciate his e-mails even if I don't adapt) who has probably spent hours criticizing my grammar on different sites (and on slashdot). What is the old cliche about one's importance if others are criticizing you? By the way, Google Toolbar's spell checker is pretty amazing, I'm trying to make it a habit to use it on every textbox.
Side topic:
I tried Digg, but I didn't like the feel of it. Democracy, to me, is not a good solution for posting articles. I like having someone doing some work, and I completely understand the dupes we see (I've submitted a few in my life, thankfully none were accepted). Sometimes I'll post something insightful and end up with 100 e-mails in my Inbox from slashdot users, so I can completely understand how the average editor here is a bit overwhelmed.
My final remark is one question I haven't seen an answer to -- are slashdot editors paid, and is it reasonable compared to the amount of work they perform? If they're not paid (or if they're employees of the bigger picture), why do they put up with us?
Amusingly enough, a professional editor DID read my editorial and correct the typos before it was set to post. I chose to keep my typos to prove a point.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Let me start by saying I like the site, think you're doing a good job and don't care if you change it based on what I, or anybody, says. That said, I have been an editor of one sort or another for 25 years or so, and I must take exception to how you're defining your job if you're calling yourself an editor. You are, in fact, the first editor I've ever heard of who thinks spelling and grammar aren't of primary importance. I don't want to sound snippy, but if you're going to say spelling and grammar are of secondary or tertiary importance, you need to come up with a new title. It's as simple as that. Perhaps article aggregator.
In editing (and maybe in everything) you have functional obsessions and dysfunctional obsessions. Spelling and grammar are functional obsessions because they speak to clarity, which is central to good communication. They also help define how much credibility you have, which your readers use to decide everything about your site. As someone else already noted, if you can't catch to vs too, humans who know the difference will inevitably start to wonder what else you didn't understand or chose to overlook. There's no way around it. It's human nature. It's like asking someone to not question a meal served up by a short order cook with cigarette ashes on his shirt or snot dripping from his nose. You just have to wonder what else is going on.
Your obsession with link wording, on the other hand, sounds like a dysfunctional obsession to me. Unless you think your readers are reading the link text without reading any of the surrounding text, it doesn't matter much what the link text says (as long as it remains coherent and relevant, of course).
Think about how readers approach a story. They read the headline, which should tell them at least half of what they need to know. It certainly puts things in context. Then they read the lead sentence. I doubt anybody's clicking links before at least getting through those two things (OK, unless they're easily outraged and the headline is "MS disses Linux again!"). By the time they've read the headline and lead, they have enough context to know what to expect when they see the word "here," or "at CNN," or whatever as a link. It doesn't matter a whit nor a tittle if relevant words are used as link text or the phrase "the article" is. None. Not to the reader. It matters to you, so you spend time fixing that problem when you could be spending that time fixing the most egregious spelling and grammar mistakes. So it's dysfunctional. It robs you of time you could be using to do things that matter more to the quality and health of your publication.
Sure, it's a matter of opinion, and hey: it's your site. But if you want to be an editor and a professional, and you want your site to be as respected as possible, you'll value the fundamentals of communication over a pet peeve that most of your readers won't notice either way.
Now, all that said, I certainly agree there's almost always a better way to construct the sentence than to have it end "the article," or "here," or whatever, just so you can have something to link against. But to spend time rewording sentences because of the link text while ignoring glaring spelling and grammar mistakes is a poor use of your time.
Again, nice site. I'll be refreshing a dozen times a day either way.