links for 2009-03-20

"I’m something of an expert on the demographic implications of the baby boom. I’ve developed this expertise from copy editing hundreds, probably thousands, of articles* on the effect of the baby boomers’ impending retirement on Social Security. Based on what I’ve learned from those articles, and from closely watching the ongoing political debate over the Future of Social Security, I can say a few things, with confidence, about what this new generation will be like."

"Please, please do not have a 20 item list of supplies that you used on your board including things like thumb tacks, tape, paper and poster board. And then please do not read this list aloud during your presentation. I know you are nervous, I feel for you. Maybe you are trying to fill up time – maybe you think a long presentation is a good one. However, don’t do it. Stick to the important stuff. If you need to fill up space on your board, I would much rather see a picture of your experiment."

"Post takes his title from an extremely quirky Jeffersonian story. In 1787, when Jefferson was serving as American ambassador to France, he had the carcass, bones and antlers of a male moose, seven feet tall at the shoulders, shipped to him and reassembled in the entry hall of his residence. Jefferson’s letters and notes suggest that the moose was extremely precious to him.

There was a point to the moose. Jefferson was engaged in a debate with European scientists about the size of animals in the “new world”. European scientists advanced a theory that new world animals were smaller, “degenerate” versions of their European cousins, a view that Jefferson strongly disputed. “The moose was the coup de grace,” Post tells us. “He wanted a bison as well, but couldn’t get one.”"

"The actual reason why newspaper articles are written in “inverted pyramid” style is related to the technical process of submitting copy via a telegraph and the expense of communicating back-and-forth between editors and reporters. It means, among other things, that you can always submit “too much” copy and then the editor knows he should just cut however many grafs from the end in order to make the story fit. But this actually turns out to be a way of presenting information that has appeal to some people. And now we have some web outlets basically aping the inverted pyramid style, even though the space constraints that made it necessary in the first place don’t apply. Similarly, once headline-writing became a semi-specialized function, it turned out that specialists could do a better job of headline-writing than could general writers. "