The Fix
The Passage
Here is a passage from a blogpost on leadership:
The Internet is riddled with advice for people just like me, searching for queries like “what makes a good leader” (SV: 3600), “how to be a good leader” (SV: 9900), and “qualities of a good leader” (SV: 10500). [our bolding]
Feedback
Our writer is searching the Internet for advice on the nature of leadership.
Let’s first look at the bolded words in the passage. There is no need for the word “just” and it seems to us that it should be “people searching with queries” rather than “people searching for queries.” By way of explanation, we think that SV is the acronym for Search Volume defined to be “the number of search queries for a specific search term in a search engine such as Google within a given timeframe” (see https://www.searchmetrics.com). We note that our writer did not specify the time frame over which the SV was measured. But certainly, there are a significant number of searches with the search terms she mentions.
But isn’t the writer confused about what her data suggest? It seems to us they justify the conclusion that many others, like her, have searched for information on leadership. They do not justify the assertion that “the Internet is riddled with advice.” To be able to conclude this, we’d have to look at the websites these searches recommended.
So how should we rewrite? How about this:
Many people like me are searching the Internet for information on leadership with queries like “what makes a good leader” (SV: 3600), “how to be a good leader” (SV: 9900), and “qualities of a good leader” (SV: 10500).
Odds and Ends
A Paragraph from Verlyn Klinkenborg
Verlyn Klinkenborg, author and Yale professor of English Literature, writes well. We were struck by a recent paragraph he wrote in his review of the PBS American Masters documentary film Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road which appeared in the New York Review of Books (“Endless Summer” Oct 6, 2022). He begins his piece explaining how important the Beach Boys and Beatles were to him between the ages of 11 and 14 when he was growing up in California and elsewhere. He asks “But who would I have been without the Beach Boys and the Beatles from ages eleven to fourteen?” The paragraph we liked was the first in his answer:
This was all long ago, and it’s tempting to talk about what was missing then—the digital and informational ubiquity we take for granted now, everything everywhere, all at once. But none of that was actually missing because it hadn’t been thought of. When I walked down Main Street to the one store in Osage with a (tiny) record section and paid ninety-nine cents for a 45-rpm single (“Fun, Fun, Fun” or “Ticket to Ride,” for example) and brought it home and put it on the record player, I was the first person who’d ever heard that very disc. I wasn’t siphoning the song from a ceaseless, invisible digital flood. I experienced a discrete event contained in the moment of listening, a personally owned artifact of black vinyl spinning on a platter while a needle wobbled in its grooves. How the wobbling turned into sound, how the record was written and recorded and produced and mixed and pressed and distributed, how the physical disc in its paper sleeve made its way to our little Iowa town to be traded for my allowance, and who made money from my allowance and in what proportions, I had no idea. Only the music mattered—and what it made me feel.
If you’re learning to write, trying to find your voice, studying paragraphs like this is useful. We could go on for a while about this one but let’s focus on his characterization of the tumult of today’s internet: “the digital and informational ubiquity we take for granted”, “everything, everywhere, all at once”, “a ceaseless, invisible digital flood”. How would you characterize the nature of the internet? Are there aspects of Klinkenborg’s characterization you don’t like? Send us your comments.
Quote of the Week
Verlyn Klinkenborg on Clichés
A cliché is dead matter. It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.
That’s a fine metaphor.