The Wednesday Word Wise Roundup

So many blogs, so little time. What's a girl to do? Save time, follow my advice, check out the following:

• Though American English and British English (English English?) are the same but different, I’ve lately been reading The Engine Room, a writing blog written by two copy editors on an unnamed weekly UK magazine. A recent Engine Room post was about the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), a ‘60s teaching fad that relied on phonetics. Coincidentally, it's the method under which I learned (or as the Engine Room bloggers might say, “learnt”) to read. ITA relied on the alphabet but also had other letter-like characters representing specific sounds. So though my name (then) was Danny, it was spelled "dancc," with those last two letters having a "strikethrough" through their centers connecting them for a hard "e" sound. Consequently, within a day of starting ITA I was, in the abstract, at least, able to read anything written in ITA, whether it was Anna Karenina or Mastering the Art of French Cooking. That said, I've grown up to be a very fast reader with excellent comprehension but a really bad speller. 


• Another well-worth-reading blog is the aptly titled You Don’t Say, written by John McIntyre, the assistant managing editor for the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun. Though he writes from the point of view of a journalist for other journalists, much of what he has to say applies to those of us in public relations and marketing, too. Like him, I decry long leads that go off in a million directions before telling me anything important. His advice? “Get to the point,” he wrote in his Aug. 6 post. “Take this sentence: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ The creation of the universe has a 10-word lead. Why does this story need more?” He might have asked, why does your press release need more?