Bad Writing
Read Dave Roberts and Ezra Klein and Brad Johnson on the latest “journalistic” atrocities being perpetrated by Politico’s Erika Lovely, who seems to have decided to cover the climate/energy beat with no intelligence and no integrity. But, of course, Politico is run by glib, greedy, sociopaths who are very good at attracting buzz and eyeballs and such and operate without a conscience about the impact of their work. If revenues increase by $1.02, readers are mislead, and thousands die as a result of Politico’s coverage, they’d consider that a job well done.
But Lovely is, among other things, a writer. So if she wants to operate as a hack propagandist and write about the “Gore effect” where after Al Gore gives a speech it gets colder (allegedly), fine. But how does one come up with this sentence:
While there’s no scientific proof that The Gore Effect is anything more than a humorous coincidence, some climate skeptics say it may offer a snapshot of proof that the planet isn’t warming as quickly as some climate change advocates say.
A snapshot of proof? Two vague “somes” and a “may.” Whatever a snapshot of proof may be, surely the Gore Effect either does or does not offer it.
33 Responses to “Bad Writing”
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November 25th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
The pieces by Lovely were bad, of course.
But I have a question – why does Ezra and Steve Benen refers to Politico as The Politico?
Sorry, it’s been bugging me. I thought it was a different publication at first.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Oh wait, my bad, sorry, Benen didn’t italicize the word “The”. Makes sense now.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
LOL at Matt tryting to criticize bad writing. Wither good writing?
November 25th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Lovley, not Lovely. I know that a misspelling by Matt is hardly to be avoided, but everybody’s been misspelling it, which is irritating.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
“Wither good writing?”
There’s a fundamental problem with science writing that prevents it from being good. Scientists are bad writers, and writers are bad scientists. In theory, a good writer could work with a good scientist and produce good writing. There used to be a word for that. Oh yeah, ‘journalism.’ Is it too late to bring that back?
November 25th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Personally, I’ve taken to referring to Politico as Republican-O. But perhaps that’s just me.
As for Lovely, it’s pretty hilarious to see supposed proof of planetary scientific truths coming from what “some climate skeptics say”. I think that has about the same level of credibility as remarks from anonymous UFO observers.
Her use of the phrase “climate change advocates” is amusing in the same way; nobody is advocating climate change. It’s more that some people give proper credit to scientific evidence and consensus.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
lovely
November 25th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
One of the few success stories on the right is the marriage of skepticism and belief. Pointy-headed scientists want us to believe we came from apes? Ha! And now they’re saying there’s such a thing as global warming? Have they been outside lately?
You patiently try to explain to these people that scientific propositions are probably a better guide to reality than top-of-the-head opinions. But then you realize you’re being an elitist. And in this mavericky nation of ours, that’s as bad as being liberal.
November 25th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
LOL at Matt tryting to criticize bad writing. Wither good writing?
We’re all tryting our best.
November 25th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
@blah: The word you were looking for was whither. I guess it’s pretty pointless, though, to correct the poorly-written comments on a post by a notoriously error-prone blogger about a poorly-written set of articles by a hack who writes for a notoriously error-prone news outlet, particularly when my own comment contains a run-on sentence.
November 25th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
@Midwest Product:
See
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/11/wither_the_subcabinet.php
and
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/11/important_questions.php
November 25th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
It’s like she came to the conclusion before doing the research. I’m sure she set out to write about how there are growing number of global warming doubters, and evidence to support them, but couldn’t find a shred of evidence to support her assumption. A rational person would conclude that their hypothesis is invalid. Instead, the article is laden with painful weasel phrases like “growing accumulation of global cooling science” and “small, growing number of scientists.”
November 25th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
I think I could put together a better sentence on climate change than that. In fact, I think I just did.
November 25th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
now we’re getting somewhere: calling the ownership of the politico “glib, greedy sociopaths” is excellent! keep it up matthew.
November 25th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Congratulations to blah for owning this thread.
November 25th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
She’s the symptom, not the disease. She went to a mass-production university and wrote for the school newspaper; she’s around 25 years old. (Google her and see for yourself.) She’s completely unschooled in the substantive issues she writes about. I don’t blame her–I blame Politico for hiring her.
November 25th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Here’s her Facebook page:
http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/s.php?init=q&q=%20Erika%20Lovley%20&ref=ts&sid=1c61c520eacbd63e07fc933a794356fc
Add her and let her know how good a writer she is!
November 26th, 2008 at 1:40 am
The basic scam here is “attitude is everything.”
Meaning is established through rhetoric which admits no alternatives. You dismiss opposing opinions and cut of debate.
The thing to notice is that the “attitude is everything” crowd always tries to refute years and decades of science with a pointless statement which sounds bold but is devoid of content.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:26 am
Excuse me, people? This is actually going to get important very soon, politically (it’s obviously already important from a policy perspective). There are different ways of measuring mean global temperature. The one environmentalists use (GISS) is being criticised for both measurement and methodology errors, big time (with considerable justification). The one skeptics are using is satellite measurement, which shows no warming over the past decade, but obviously doesn’t give the right length of timeline to be useful.
The skeptics have a very good chance of making a switch in measurement tools. It will dramatically change the terms of discussion.
Y’all best be thinking about this.
November 26th, 2008 at 7:35 am
fostert:
“There’s a fundamental problem with science writing that prevents it from being good. Scientists are bad writers, and writers are bad scientists. In theory, a good writer could work with a good scientist and produce good writing. There used to be a word for that. Oh yeah, ‘journalism.’ Is it too late to bring that back?”
I take issue with your statement that scientists are bad writers. It simply isn’t true–as in other parts of society, there are good and bad writing scientists. I would even say that scientists are much better writers than most cross-sections of society. They spend quite a lot of time writing and much of the writing is not just for their own narrow field of research. The problem is that scientists are seldom asked to write for journalistic publications–if asked, one could find a good writing climate scientist to write an excellent article on the subject that (with some editing) would be understandable to the general public.
I’ll also add that I’ve known several PhD scientists that have gone on to careers in science writing. They typically end up writing for broad-topic scientific journals (e.g. Science and Nature), but it wouldn’t be hard for other periodicals to find people like this to do their science writing.
November 26th, 2008 at 9:02 am
The one skeptics are using is satellite measurement, which shows no warming over the past decade
No, the main people doing satellite measurement now show a warming trend that’s very close to the surface temperature numbers. Apparently global warming denialists haven’t updated their beliefs to reflect the new analysis.
November 26th, 2008 at 10:09 am
“For the past decade” is a popular trope among denialists right now, because 1998 was a freakishly hot year.
In 2010, we’ll hearing about “the past dozen years.”
Etc.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Scientists also become very used to writing to their specific audience– other scientists. It’s hard for professionals to remember to strip professional language, acronyms, etc. from their work. You can find the same problem in academia and the non-profit sector– though you admittedly can find poor writing there, too.
November 26th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
In your very next post above:
Anyone who would open a sentence with those first fifteen words has no business calling anyone else out over hedge words and throat-clearing.
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