[nnythm]

I was skimming this article and thought that the premise was that first person shooters were switching to using the up, left, right, and down arrows instead of wasd. I felt the lede + nut graf (was there even a nut graf here?) was misleading--it was completely about the buttons, not about the identity of the gamer, the game industry, nor society in general.

I am interested in articles about female gamers and how they deal with the unpleasantness surrounding the gaming industry, but I wish that blog posts were held to a slightly higher standard--I am a fairly fast reader, and had to double back to reread large parts of the article to recalibrate as the article started talking about being directed to games with fuzzy animals and facebook games instead of shooters, when I expected the author to be complaining about the wasd keys opening different menus rather than moving around the character.

This seems to be a pretty good argument for paying for better quality journalism. I bought a copy of GQ, not exactly the highest brow magazine in the business, admittedly, and the articles weren't riveting, but it was efficient to read them, because they were written carefully and in the traditional journalistic style, with a lede, nut graf, and transitions. Furthermore, it's a magazine FOR MEN so most of the words were Anglo-Saxon and avoid the errors that Orwell rails against in "Politics and the English Language." I never felt like I was being jerked from one idea to another, and I understood the point of the article if not from the titled or the images associated with it, then at least from the first few paragraphs.

TL;DR: May there be truth in advertising, if bloggers can't write a proper lede, we will have to pay for news.

[andrewdupont]

You do realize that opinion pieces don't necessarily follow the traditional lede-plus-nut-graf formula, right? And that some pieces aren't meant to be skimmed?

> Furthermore, it's a magazine FOR MEN so most of the words were Anglo-Saxon and avoid the errors that Orwell rails against in "Politics and the English Language."

I don't even know what you're trying to say here. I mean, I can guess, but it makes me queasy.

[nnythm]

Yes, for example Foucault or Derrida is not meant to be skimmed, and part of the point of reading Hegel is to struggle with it. It doesn't make sense to make the reader struggle with an opinion piece, since you are generally trying to persuade someone of your opinion. Although opinion pieces don't necessarily follow the traditional lede + nut graf format, this one appeared to do so, until the actual content was different from the first few paragraphs.

GQ prefers short Anglo-Saxon words because they think it's a style that men prefer to read, and what I am trying to say is that using too many words that were imported from French is generally used to make people sound smart because it was once the language of bureaucracy, but generally makes things harder to read.

Consider, "I don't even know what you're trying to say here. I mean, I can guess, but it makes me queasy." This is an extremely clear sentence, and would be pretty similar if translated into Middle English. This is generally the argument that Orwell makes in Politics and the English Language.

http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html