gcottay

Inexorably eschew obfuscation.

rando

Content was OK, but your style was almost unreadable. In your post-writing here, you come off as a pretty normal guy. in your "Writing for the paper-persona" you seem to have a rather large piece of wood inserted in your rectum, talking down to the unwashed masses. try to lighten it up, simplify it, focus, and don't use the $5 words when a 2$ one would do just fine. I notice you are a Mass Communications Major. If you go into any kind of writing in the field of media you will find out that this style will not cut it. at all.

Zaneluke

I have ridden in Texas. Yes the driver population there kind of mimics the population as a whole, very uneducated and angry. I rode to and from work while I lived in San Antonio. Some of the worst drivers in the states IMHO.

Then I moved to the Washington DC metro area and encountered a whole new level of driver aggression. :shrug:

Not meant as an insult. Your writing reminds me of my sons. He is in 11th grade. Lots of "fluff" but very little context. More of a rant than anything else.
I know you did not post this looking for advice on your writing style. Lighten up a bit. You are projecting a harsh vibe with your writing.

Homebrew01

Your other posts says the roads are for cars and bikes are bad. ..... hmmmm
I dub thee:

CB HI

College kid finally gets out of school, gets a job so he can buy the pickup truck that gets him off his hated bicycle.

Says his major was mass communications. What is that, spamming people with commercials?

Maybe he should have kept riding his bicycle, only took him two years to end up with type II diabetes.

Chris516

Yes, We are in the minority.

manapua_man

You're writing for a publication- your writing style should be changed to something appropriate for that format. If this is going to be printed, ink and paper costs money. You should know this if you're a "Mass Communications" major. Beyond that, if it's too verbose, people will just skim over it and there's a good chance that whatever point you were trying to make is going to be missed entirely (it's a newspaper article after all, not a paper for a creative writing class.)

Bekologist

a university newspaper actually published that?

"grave danger, feeble thoughts".... inflammatory and polarizing from the onset.


Unfortunately, that article doesn't effectively build coalition for bicyclists, not even among bicyclists at a bicycling forum.

that is absolute rubbish. the rule of the road is cyclists mustn't impede, get out of the motorists way?

Quite the endorsement of anti-cyclist attitude. Way to go.

KonAaron Snake 

+1...I got four lines in and had to stop. I was an editor of my college paper and was, at one point, fairly serious about journalism. That is a blog post - the kind your parents might read. Keep it simple, stick to basic language and make your points succinctly. The writers who used the most big words are usually the ones trying to pad poor writing or topics that don't matter; it's why the sports section always has more flowery language than hard news - insecurity over their lesser importance. You aren't trying to prove that you have a high SAT score to your reader, you're trying to get them to read your article and think about it.

The general structure is that each paragraph should make its point in the first sentence and have one or two sentences of support. Don't talk down to your readers...assume they don't care and try to give them something to make them interested. What you wrote is pompous and condescending. I know this is harsh, but that really misses the mark. Give your reader a hook - something that makes him interested because you connected to an interest of theirs. Don't just describe your interest...no one cares if you like your bicycle, except maybe fellow addicts like us.

Pick a narrow, focused, topic - maybe something like "Campus Cyclists live longer and have more money for beer". You can describe the benefits and get your advocacy across in a more subtle manner. Also - lose the car bashing. Make your argument on the strength of your topic, not the evil of another...it's extremely preachy and the VAST majority are just going to think "pretentious hippy".

Don in Austin

Difficult to read. Uses 100 words per each 10 word concept. You are unlikely to impress anybody with a sheer volume of words. Reads like it was written by a junior high school student who was given an assignment with a 1000 word minimum but could only come up with content worth 100 words. A good high school English teacher would give this a "D," or would have back when I was in high school. Today, sad to say, literacy standards seem to be much lower.

Don in Austin

linus

LOL.

https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...child-s-safety

This is even better.

Phil_gretz

DP1112,
You'd do well to take an effective writing course. You will improve by learning to simplify and clarify your message. This discipline will challenge you by exposing muddled thinking that had been covered up by overly complicated and flowery writing. Good luck and remember this counsel when you're successful in twenty years.
Phil G.

rydabent

At least this writer is trying to do something!! Most do nothing or at the most just complain!!!!

rydabent

To those that complain it was too long and too flowery, remember where it was published, a college newspaper. If it was not written the way is was, he would be put down by the people it was aimed at.

KonAaron Snake 

Uhhhh...no. I edited a college newspaper...we'd never print that. College newspapers are training for the bigs (or what used to be the bigs) and the rules don't change. It's where you learn the rules.

A good way of explaining this is to keep it like a Ramones song - terse, no wasted effort and with a great hook. A great guitarist can ruin a song with an overly long guitar solo...writing is the same. Keep it short and simple.

Pick a punchy, focused headline and the rest will follow. Don't diverge from your headline. I like "Campus Cyclists have more money for beer." Opinion pieces that aren't about massacres should aim for some humor to keep interest.

K'Tesh

To the OP,

Thanks for getting something into the paper.



To the critics,

Let's see you do better.

I-Like-To-Bike

The critics are more than likely correct that the OP's diatribe will only elicit negative impressions about bicyclists from the majority of readers who are not card carrying "cycling enthusiasts." Writing nothing at all on media read by the general public is "better" for bicycling advocacy than the flowery gibberish from the OP.

delcrossv

Persiflage? Umm... No.

Pedantry? Yeah, that's it!

manapua_man

Quite a few of us *have* done better. We've already seen someone who was an editor for a college newspaper, and I've written papers that have been published in academic journals. I'm sure there's more than a few competent writers here. What the OP wrote would get shot down in an instant, and if I had seen any of my students write that kind of garbage I'd have failed them after reading the first few lines and asked them to see me after class.

Honestly, he really would have been better off writing nothing, instead of putting out something that'll just irritate people who hate cyclists even more.

RaleighSport

I agree with this, I found it very hard to drudge through it and I knew it was about something I care about... imagine the average non cyclist?

wphamilton

Sorry but you lost me on the second sentence and I quit reading after his last one.

It's not particularly gentle the way I ride, the dangers are not "grave", the decision is neither "dire" nor "simply choosing a certain means", and what you've written is not a manifesto for me.

Nor would I take someone seriously who stereotypes motorists in this fashion.

Sorry to be so blunt, but by posting here you did invite opinions ...

ps, I thought the first sentence was ok, except for the distracting error.

caloso

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

—George Orwell: ‘Politics and the English Language’
First published: Horizon. — GB, London. — April 1946.



I don't mean to pile on, kid. But if your intent is to advocate, you have first got to communicate.

RaleighSport

I dub thee witch doctor zombie thread raiser!

KonAaron Snake 

I'm not trying to attack the guy or hurt his feelings, but it really needs work and he solicited criticism. I probably wrote a lot like that when I first hit college and you learn, quickly, that tossing the word paradigm around only goes so far. The point of writing is to communicate effectively in the appropriate area, and this does not communicate his idea effectively; it's going to irritate the reader. I actually didn't really see a central idea communicated in the first four lines.

Pick one, simple idea to communicate...the rest of the article is support for that one, simple idea. I always began an article by picking a headline...and when I edited other people's work, I always approached it with the idea of "what is the headline, does this paragraph fit that idea?" Paragraphs should be simple. The way columns work makes longer paragraphs look like unbroken clumps, so you need to keep paragraphs short...typically no more than three sentences.

AP style is no longer the universally accepted standard that it was, but I recommend reading a book on AP style or, better yet, taking a course.

lostarchitect 

College.