Do You Have Info?

The Team & The Drink:  A one act play of posting request
By Adam Holisky
October 2010

ADAM

Hey team!

THE TEAM looks up to ADAM, disinterested.

TEAM

What…

ADAM

Wanna relax and drink this weekend?

ADAM takes a sip of a gin and tonic.  He motions forward with his glass, nodding towards THE TEAM.
THE TEAM perks up at the mentioning and display of alcohol.

TEAM

Yeah!

ADAM

Cool!  A couple of you want to write a post this weekend?  We’re on an every-other hour schedule through Monday, so we need all the regular columns plus a couple more posts.

THE TEAM is now excited to write posts for this weekend.

TEAM

Sure!

ALEX can be seen nervously holding his bottle of Tanqueray, not sure he wants THE TEAM to drink it all in one shot.

ADAM

Thanks! I love you all.

Adam makes the <3 sign with his right hand pointer finger.

Oh, so who wants to write a post this weekend?

_______________ (your name here?)

I do!

~fin~

I think part of being a good writer is understanding your faults.  And what better way to correct my faults than to yell them to the world?  So without further ado, my top five writing mistakes.

1.  It’s vs. Its

While I know the difference between the two, however when writing I’ll often times mess it up somehow.  When I go back and proof my work, it doesn’t always get caught either.  I also find that this is one of the most common mistakes missed by editors.

2.  One comma too many

I have a tendency to write long and drawn out sentences, often times I’m not content to write in the short bursts that have become common place in modern writing.  That’s just part of my writing style, and while I oftentimes find myself trying to change my style in this regards, when I do write the longer sentences, I tend to use too, many, commas.

3.  Forgetting to edit

I’ll write a sentence like “The Vikings are one of the best teams in the league.”  Then I’ll edit it to say “The Vikings are the best team in the league.”  But, I’ll forget to take off the “s” at the end of “teams,” so my sentence ends up saying “The Vikings are the best teams in the league.”  More fail.

4.  Not connecting disjointed topics

Say I’m talking about how great the Twins are for couple sentences, and then in my mind I’ll start thinking about other great baseball teams of the past twenty years.  I’ll then just launch right into other great teams of the past, not writing a connecting statement to join up my two thoughts.  This has a tendency to make my writing a little more spotty than I want it to be.  This problem becomes particularly obvious when I’m writing a more conversational piece where I need to be entertaining and present unique and insightful thoughts.

5.  Weather/Whether, Affect/Effect, Week/Weak

Those are the top three groups of words that I always have to stop and ask myself “I’m using the correct version, right?”  I’ve gotten better at these mistakes, but I still make them often enough.  When I have weeks like this last one where I write over 10,000 words, I’ll inevitably screw up and let these mistakes negatively affect one of my articles or writings, whether I pay close attention or not.

So what can we all learn from this?  Having another set of eyes on your writing, hopefully by a professional editor, is an awesome thing.

There have been two stories that WoW.com has broke under my name in the past week:

• Patch 3.2 Going Live
• Cataclysm races leaked

Each story relied on anonymous sources (well, anonymous to you) that had information pertaining to the facts which were being reported on.  Each story was cited as such, with the words crafted in a way to express the source’s validity.

But yet here we are, the evening of the big Cataclysm leak, and the crying over WoW.com not revealing its sources has reached the worst levels I’ve ever seen.  People seem to think they’re entitled to the same trust that individuals place in myself and fellow editors at our site, and feel that without their personal seal of approval we have nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors.

Well, okay then.  I’m fine with people questioning or holding up a skeptical eye to our news, especially with something like this.  But when people shut their brains off and just start yelling, it tends to get to me. (Same with the “town halls” going on right now).  And while most of those people who are yelling are getting banned from our site over the next few hours (there’s so many of them), there are some facts I think are appropriate to put out there:

First, we would never stake our reputation on posting news like this if we were not supremely confident in our sources.

Second, the sources are not just one person saying something.  There’s a lot of stuff we’ve got with only one person saying it.  We have no idea if it’s true. It could be false.  But like a good journalist, when more than one person says the exact same thing, and are in a position where they’d know the facts at hand, it becomes valid enough to write about and bring to the public.

Third, no one will reveal their sources.  This is a founding principal of modern journalism.  Anonymous sources stay anonymous.

If I were to reveal the sources, I would likely be fired from my job at WoW.com.  I would be untrustworthy and show a clear lack of decision making capability.  I would be a person who cannot handle confidential information, and thus would be someone who could jeopardizes the welfare of the site on a daily basis.

If I were to reveal the sources I would likely not be able to get another job with responsibilities and tasks which I enjoy spending my life doing, and would be forced to be a burger expert at McDonalds.  And I’d be lucky to even be able to land that job in this economy.

I’m not going to reveal the sources under any circumstance.  If I did, I would be ruining the lives of people who put their trust in me.  That is something I will not, cannot do.  It goes against every ethical fiber of my being.

I know I have a flare for the literary.  I was a big reader as a kid, my nose always buried in some book.  As an adult I’ve carried this tradition on, spending too much money at Barnes & Nobel every month.  I figured that someday I’d write an article for a magazine or SciFi novel, but it was never at the top of my list.  I thought that I’d end up working in computers somehow, probably with stuff on the internet.

I never thought I’d be editing other peoples work.

You see I have two faults as a writer.  The first my grammar – it isn’t really up to my standards.  I have a good persuasive and conversational tone, and can meld the two together with ease.  But my skills in technical and “100% proper” grammar have never been my strong point.  Not the basic stuff like you’re and your, or their, there, and they’re.  More “advanced” stuff like use of – or; or my, penchant, for, comma, usage.

If the above paragraph doesn’t get me fired I don’t know what will.

The second fault I have is my spelling.

I had a teacher in the fourth and fifth grade named Mrs. Davidson, at Otter Lake Elementary School in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.  I stayed in touch with her throughout the rest of my public education, and did some work with her classes for a college course later on.  She was a great teacher to both my brothers and me, and she always gave me shit about one thing: I couldn’t spell to save my life.

I was in an English class of hers in 2003 helping out and observing for a large college honors report I was doing on power structures in the classroom.  She chuckled and motioned for me to come over to her desk, giving me the dreaded two fingered summons.

You know.  The kind every teacher can do.  Raise their hand above their head, look right at you over their bifocals, put their pointer and middle fingers together and give you the “Come over and receive punishment” motion.

I pop up from my seat at the back of the classroom and walk over between the rows of students, reminiscing that I once led such a simple life of worksheets and crossword puzzles.  I take a seat on the chair next to her, smiling.  She hands me a spelling test and says softly, “Make sure you know how to spell the words before you tell the class.”

A grin and a chuckle later, she reminded me after first teaching me over 10 years ago that I still didn’t know how to spell worth a damn.

And she was right.  One of the words was italicize.  Z and not S?  News to me.

So this brings me to today, a full 16 years after I first had spelling lessons given to me by Mrs. Davidson.  I’m now working as a full time editor for WoW.com (formerly WoW Insider) and amongst other things, every day I correct people on spelling, grammar, and other subtle nuisances of the English language.

It’s absolutely the last job I ever thought I’d have.

If you’re reading this site then you know what I do for a living; I write and edit posts at WoW.com. Some of these are true blog posts, others are news articles, and still others are encyclopedic features that take months of work. I want to ramble for a minute about diversification in blog posts.

Here’s a bold statement for you all: talking just about World of Warcraft is very boring. One of the great things about the game is that it lets you combine many other aspects of your life into it. Have a bunch of friends that play it? You’re probably going to spend the majority of your time talking about non-Wow related stuff while you’re in game. This isn’t a bad thing, indeed it’s a great thing. The inclusion and ability for non-game related material in game will, and might have already, extended the lifetime of the game many times over.

That same diversification should be taken into account in blog posts about WoW. Note that I’ve made a distinction above of the different types of posts WoW.com has. Blog posts are very different from encyclopedic reference posts. You shouldn’t include a Monty Python joke in a 50 page knowledge dump about in-game mounts. But you should include a Monty Python joke (or two) in a blog post where you answer random questions.

An example of this was The Queue that I wrote today.

I’ve reached this conclusion about diversification and inclusion of external non-game content based on the feedback we’ve had to The Queue. When something like Hawaiian Pizza is mentioned, we’ll get 75 to 100 comments talking about Hawaiian Pizza. Post some music or comic reference, guaranteed to get lots of comments on those references too.

Last week my fellow editor Alex Ziebart included some music to listen to while reading The Queue. People loved it, and we’ve continued to include optional reading music. The music doesn’t have a damn thing to do about WoW, but it’s still a piece which people seem interested in and want to comment on. That helps build a community, which means the site gets more traffic and will be around much longer.

Now on a scale of WoW.com, where the site is already well established, has been around a long time, and will be around for a long time to come, it doesn’t have an immediate impact on community building and traffic numbers (however we do see popular and well written articles have increased traffic, of course, just like anything else). But when everyone at WoW.com suddenly starts building communities of readership around their posts and columns, the site’s heath sky rockets. This is true for any long established blog. Just because you’re big, bad, and are pulling in billions and billions of visitors a day doesn’t mean you can’t improve. And that improvement, is, well, awesome.

This might seem like a justification for including off-topic content, and in some ways it is. But it’s also a recent epiphany of sorts on pulling in readers and keeping them here.

Anyone can have a blog, but only the special blogs will make a reader raise an eyebrow at their content.

I really don’t get it.  Blizzard is sitting on the patch notes, etc… if they’re getting the PTRs up ASAP as Zarhym has been saying tonight, then why not just release the patch notes in a blue post and be done with all the idle speculation as to when the PTRs will be up, what will be in the patch, etc…

And to be honest, it’d make my job 100% easier.  At this point it’s Friday night around 9:45 p.m. and I’m sitting infront of my computer waiting for some updated information – all because it needs to go up on WoW Insider fast, as soon as it’s released.  Now I’m not saying that my fellow writers and I shouldn’t get this up right away – we should.  What I’m saying is that Blizzard should give us the notes early, place them under an embargo until a specific time, and let that be the way they communicate with the largest WoW sites out there (WoW Insider, MMO-Champion, World of Raids).  This constant “oh lets play the waiting game” thing is kind of getting old.

And to further illustrate how out of touch Blizzard is with their communication, which I’ve written a lot about at WoW Insider, is the fact that they don’t usually post the patch notes on the forums until a few days later.  It’s obvious that they, to some extent, rely on the official fansites (like WoR) and other news and info sites (like WI and MMO-C) to disseminate information.  When we get a few million people visiting WI in a single day because we’ve got patch notes up and stuff, well, it just goes to show where we exist on the information chain – and that chain really needs to be fixed.

It’s a little rusty.

I hate writer’s block.  I’m currently suffering from a mild case of it myself.  Since I cover mainly day to day news, the block isn’t as much as what to report on but ways to report on it creatively and in a manner that most people will find enjoyable.

And it has to be most people, and not just my nitch of SciFi/Fantasy/KevinSmith fanboys.

According to the source of all things in the universe, Wikipedia, writer’s block is defined as: “Writer’s block is a phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity.  Writer’s block can be closely related to depression and anxiety, two mood disorders that reflect environmentally caused or spontaneous changes in the brain’s frontal lobe. This is in contrast to hypergraphia, more closely linked to mania, in which the changes occur primarily in the temporal lobe.”

I find that quite interesting, especially since right now I’m deep into my psychology studies (and god only knows if I’m actually going to go into that field after I graduate, it sounds more and more like I’ll be writing or producing entertainment for a career).  But I digress.  The fact that my writers block could be attributed to depression or anxiety gives me pause.  I’m not really depressed about anything (quite the opposite actually, yay promotion).  And I don’t have any higher-than-normal level of anxiety, at least I think.

So putting that aside the psychological issues for a moment, there’s a few tips I found at 43founderes.com.  Google is win after all.   Some of the best:

• Listen to new music
• Write the middle
• Take a walk
• Take a shower; change clothes
• Talk to a monkey

Instead of talking to a monkey – which is just a funny way to saying talk about what you’re writing to an inanimate object, I think I’ll talk to my cat Max.  Yes, that’ll work.  NOTHING is wrong me.  Nope, no need for psychological evaluations here.

“So Max… what do you think about gamer addiction and the economy?”