4 ms·

Harsh. I had a little back-and-forth with Violet Blue a few months ago. She accused some blogger of being egocentric in leading with personal pronouns. I defen

Harsh. I had a little back-and-forth with Violet Blue a few months ago. She accused some blogger of being egocentric in leading with personal pronouns. I defended said blogger, pointing out I do the same thing all the time, so as to give clues as to my thought process, the genesis of the post, and so on. She shot back a challenge that I should perhaps exhibit OTHER bloggers who do the same thing. I found it hard to meet that challenge.

SilasX 13y ago
I'm not sure I see the relevance.
- CurtMonash 13y ago
  The relevance is that there is a request for bloggers to reveal every little detail of the process of how they decided on what to write when, and I'm saying that's a very unusual practice.
  - SilasX 13y ago
    The similarity isn't applicable. While I see now that my original comment was unclear and overbroad, let me emphasize that I'm not suggesting bloggers do a full "coredump" of their thought processes. I'm just saying that if a PR agent (or other heavily incentivized group) is directing your attention to a topic (and [in]forming your analysis), while the typical reader would not assume that's how you do it, then you should say so. Same as you would disclose any other conflict of interest. "I typical form my speech with this pronoun pattern" is not affected by that practice. (edit: and those who criticized you were pretty loopy in doing so, fwiw)
    - CurtMonash 13y ago
      Your "if" is contrafactual -- more precisely the "while" clause is -- for the reasons I illustrated with the story of the pronoun pattern. At least it should be. Klein surely gets dozens of PR pitches per day, if not hundreds. Of course he's going to be influenced by a few of them. The people who assume otherwise ... well, they may well be too clueless to be his target audience. And, returning to my point, it's not common to outline the genesis of any particular opinion column or blog post. I don't really do it, yet I'm closer to doing it than most.
      - SilasX 13y ago
        Seriously? You're claiming that most people are aware that writers are choosing their topics (and ideas) because they were fed them that by PR agents?
        CurtMonash 13y ago
        I'm claiming that most people are aware that PR agents work hard to try to influence us, and that their failure rate isn't 100.00%

SilasX 13y ago

I'm not sure I see the relevance.

CurtMonash 13y ago
The relevance is that there is a request for bloggers to reveal every little detail of the process of how they decided on what to write when, and I'm saying that's a very unusual practice.
- SilasX 13y ago
  The similarity isn't applicable. While I see now that my original comment was unclear and overbroad, let me emphasize that I'm not suggesting bloggers do a full "coredump" of their thought processes. I'm just saying that if a PR agent (or other heavily incentivized group) is directing your attention to a topic (and [in]forming your analysis), while the typical reader would not assume that's how you do it, then you should say so. Same as you would disclose any other conflict of interest. "I typical form my speech with this pronoun pattern" is not affected by that practice. (edit: and those who criticized you were pretty loopy in doing so, fwiw)
  - CurtMonash 13y ago
    Your "if" is contrafactual -- more precisely the "while" clause is -- for the reasons I illustrated with the story of the pronoun pattern. At least it should be. Klein surely gets dozens of PR pitches per day, if not hundreds. Of course he's going to be influenced by a few of them. The people who assume otherwise ... well, they may well be too clueless to be his target audience. And, returning to my point, it's not common to outline the genesis of any particular opinion column or blog post. I don't really do it, yet I'm closer to doing it than most.
    - SilasX 13y ago
      Seriously? You're claiming that most people are aware that writers are choosing their topics (and ideas) because they were fed them that by PR agents?
      - CurtMonash 13y ago
        I'm claiming that most people are aware that PR agents work hard to try to influence us, and that their failure rate isn't 100.00%