Still slogging through the THESIS like tap-dancing through molasses, but I just had to post about this one. I fired up my browser this morning to read the news and my eyeballs tripped over this headline in the New York Times: “Female Briton Feared the Worst in Iran.”
Friends, this is horrible English. When I was a kid and my Mom proofread the stuff that I wrote, one lesson she drilled into my head repeatedly was that ambiguity is bad. Unclear sentences are the writer’s archenemy, because any time a sentence makes a reader pause and say, “Wait – What?”, the reader stumbles out of the writer’s carefully-constructed world. Suspension of disbelief is shot. True, this ambiguous headline actually got me to click on the story, but only because I wanted to know what the worst-feared Briton in Iran looked like. Thirty feet tall! Eyes that shot fire! Razor-sharp claws and teeth like flaying knives! RUN! IT’S THE WORST-FEARED BRITON IN IRAN!
Ahem. Yeah. The headline writer for the Times needs to have a little sit-down with his editor.
Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.
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