{"id":974,"date":"2011-07-29T07:53:51","date_gmt":"2011-07-29T11:53:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antipaucity.com\/?p=974"},"modified":"2011-07-29T07:53:51","modified_gmt":"2011-07-29T11:53:51","slug":"personal-vs-professional-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/?p=974","title":{"rendered":"personal vs professional blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend<\/a> of mine recently pointed me at the newspaper-associated<\/a> blog<\/a> of a “recent Appalachian State University graduate and now a freelance reporter for The Charlotte Observer”.<\/p>\n

Ms Penland seems like a nice person – but her writing is not at all what I would expect for a blog associated with a newspaper – it is far more like a personal journal of a teenager than a professional blog of a reporter.<\/p>\n

I’m all for personal voice showing-up in folks’ writing (it certainly does on all of the blogs I follow – and on the ones I write ;)) – but when you’re writing reviews for a newspaper, it would seem like you’d try to be a bit more … professional in your writing.<\/p>\n

Besides the myriad grammar errors (I know – we all have them, but certainly some proofreading should be done to catch things like “was is<\/a>“), it seems she has a routine dislike for “chains” – and yet visits many. She also refers to her boyfriend in many of her reviews: a\u00a0perfectly\u00a0fine thing to do in passing, but she ends up\u00a0making\u00a0some of them more about him than about the place they went.<\/p>\n

As a “recent graduate”, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Brittany’s writing to be on par with, say, {{Malcolm Gladwell}}, but I would<\/em>\u00a0expect it to be at the level of, well, a college graduate. (I have seen some collegiate writing that appalled me when I was in school – writing submitted by 4th year English Majors that looked like it was pulled from a 6th grade student’s portfolio: but those folks don’t [typically] get hired by newspapers… do they?)<\/p>\n

I hope Ms Penland’s writing improves dramatically through her “freelance” association with the Observer, but I also hope that the Observer doesn’t have too many folks like her writing in association with them: it reflects poorly on their editorial staff and hiring practices if they do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend of mine recently pointed me at the newspaper-associated blog of a “recent Appalachian State University graduate and now a freelance reporter for The Charlotte Observer”. Ms Penland seems like a nice person – but her writing is not at all what I would expect for a blog associated with a newspaper – it …
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