It occurs to me that I should post my final Project Report (sort of like a thesis) for my Master of Publishing degree, which I recently completed. For one thing, it would be nice for all that content to get indexed – especially given that it’s about SEO and publishing content on the Web. Plus, given how much time and effort went into producing it, and given the number of people who will read the soon-to-be-dusty library copies (i.e., zero), it would be a shame if I didn’t. And then there’s the fact that I purport to be a “Web Content Strategist” in my day job.

Alas, the cobbler’s son continues to go unshod. Since completing the report in December, and since starting work full-time, I have neglected to put my writing about Web content onto the Web. Eventually I will, and it will be properly linked and formatted. But until such time, a simple PDF download will have to suffice.

So, herewith, for those of you interested in reading 20,000 words about words, I present SEO for Magazines: Optimizing Content for Digital Publication.

For those of you interested in more fleeting pleasures such as hilarious videos of cats and other animals, please feel free to skip along.

*Note: this is my long-winded response to a question in the Globe and Mail’s recent “Collected Wisdom” column. Given that my answer is likely too long to get published, and given that it’s probably the only thing I’ll ever write about hockey on this blog, I thought I’d post it here just for fun.

The reason goalies wear jersey numbers 1, 30, and 31 is that those are the biggest jerseys – and the reason goalies wear the biggest jerseys should be obvious: their equipment is much bulkier.

The reason those numbers represent those sizes is perhaps less obvious in an era of high-paid pros and made-to-order equipment: in minor hockey, where cost is a consideration and post-pubescent teens come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, a team will buy an “off-the-rack” batch of jerseys ranging in relative size from large to small.

Typically, the largest “skater” jersey is #2 – usually worn by a hulking defensive player – followed by progressively smaller jerseys ending somewhere in the high-20s and usually worn by pint-sized forwards. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the two goalie jerseys – differently cut to allow for more heft – are then tacked on as numbers 30 and 31.

For some reason, jerseys, like channels, rarely feature a #1 (perhaps because of the implied superiority), but when they do, it is the largest skater jersey, and therefore suitable for slimmer goalies as well.

In today’s NHL, any player can wear any number under 100 – and most players are uniformly Herculean anyway, the sub-six-foot forward having largely been relegated to the parking-lot snow-pile of hockey history. But many NHL-ers who came up through the Canadian system (and I can’t speak for any other) still bear the symbol of their disparate-sized PeeWee past, from “Big” Chris Pronger (#2, 6’6″) to Mike Comrie (#89, 5’10″) and many others in between.

UPON COMPLETING the final project report for my M.Pub. degree, I decided to plug the text into Wordle, the amazing online word-art generator, to see in an elegant yet practical way which of the 22,000+ words in my report (not including “common” ones) cropped up most often. Not surprisingly (well, not to me anyway, since I wrote it), the word “content” took top honours. Of course, I was writing about publishing – specifically, about publishing magazine content online – but there are many people, I suspect, who would cringe at this association.

In the most uncharitable interpretation, “content” is mere stuff, indistinct, interchangeable – the unmentionable bastard child sired by advertising, and beneath other non-fiction forms, such as literature and journalism, of nobler birth.

Harper’s magazine, that aristocratic eastern arbiter of intellectual taste, has taken recently to pointing out this fact in its pages, proudly proclaiming that it is “100% content free!” The full-page ad continues:

Everybody gives you “content.”
But you’ll never find that in Harper’s Magazine.
Instead, you’ll get literature. Investigative reporting. Criticism. Photojournalism. Provocative adventures. Daring commentary. And truth-telling as only Harper’s Magazine can tell it.
Subscribe today and join thoughtful, skeptical, witty people just like you who pay for culture, not content. [...]
Harper’s: Proudly “content free” for more than 150 years!

(What they fail to mention is that what it is full of is an endless parade of dreary, doom-and-gloom stories and statistics that make you want to slit your wrists. Which is why I’m switching to the much more engaging New Yorker for my haute non-fiction fix. But I digress.)

As a student of publishing and a fan of writing, I tend to agree with Harper’s sentiment. But in my new-found professional role as Content Strategist working for commercial clients – as well as in my past roles in the publishing and journalism trades – I take slight offense. For one thing, there is a practical reason for calling even the most thoughtful and inspired cultural output “content”: it serves as a useful catch-all to include all written and audio-visual multimedia in print and on the Web in today’s vast, platform-agnostic publishing world. In other words, “copy” doesn’t quite cut it anymore.

But perhaps we resist the term content because, like copy, it’s been used by both the editorial church and the advertising state – it’s not ideologically pure. Readers and publishers have the same psychological need to believe that these two entities are distinct, even though, in reality, that line is continually getting blurred.

‘Everything else is advertising’

My beef isn’t with Harper’s, then. In their cynical way, they do have a point: content isn’t journalism, nor is it literature (these, I would suggest, being three distinct forms of non-fiction). The argument that I would like to make is that most of the non-fiction that we do consume is “content.”

Harold Evans, the so-called “high priest” of journalism, makes this same point in a recent interview with the Globe and Mail. There, he repeats the maxim that “news is whatever someone wants to suppress; everything else is advertising,” which to my mind is more of a blow to those who purport to produce journalism than to those who consume it.

The phrase may have been coined years ago, but it rings truer than ever today. Not everything that gets printed in a newspaper is news, after all. There are the subsidized travel stories, of course, and the “reviews” of cars and clothes and homes and everything else, but most readers today are media-savvy enough to give these bought-and-paid-for supplementary sections a pass.

However, if we’re trying to re-evaluate newsworthiness during this mid-life crisis that the media is currently experiencing, then even sacred cows such as sports and entertainment need to be looked at with increased scrutiny. Simply put, asking a band how hard they rock or a player what it will take to win may elicit a response that is of interest to many, but it’s hardly what you’d call hard-nosed, muckraking journalism, and it’s hardly something you need a printing press to disseminate. That’s not to say that sports writers, to unfairly single out one group, aren’t good at what they do, or that they would never touch a controversial story, or that there isn’t an audience for their reportage. It’s simply to say that their output is more along the lines of content than journalism, if we’re to abide by Evans’s distinction between suppression vs publicity – and that should these paid professionals be so unfortunate as to lose their jobs in today’s wretched media environment, there is still a long lineup of people who would gladly take the gig for less money.

Granted, some sports writers are talented, experienced, and insightful enough to be considered irreplaceable. Some of them even know how to spell. But journalism isn’t about the writing, or the design, or the presentation, or the delivery. Those things might matter to publishing, but they don’t matter to democracy. Journalism is about what happens behind the scenes, before the story is filed, before the paper goes to press. It’s about the reporting, the digging, the fact-checking, the phone-calling, the relationships. Without access to important, influential, and hard-to-reach people, a journalist, no matter how talented a storyteller, is nothing.

Often, this access is automatically gained with a press pass or a phone number. But as once-dominant media companies shrink and fold, it remains to be seen how much of today’s journalistic access and influence is simply leftover goodwill subsidized by past publishing successes. Several paeans to the death of journalism have been produced recently on film and TV; online, media-guru-cum-doomsayer Clay Shirky has predicted that municipal corruption will increase in cities under 500,000 as news organizations there become economically unviable. Whether or not such a strong correlation between printing presses and parliamentary corruption can be firmly established remains to be seen. But as the glacier of paid journalism recedes, there’s no question that un-sexy political muckracking must be defended as the last Alamo. Everything else can be sacrificed to the entertainment gods.

Magalogues and advertorials

Magazines, on the other hand, went down the content road a long time ago. There are literally only a handful of English-language newsmagazines remaining, thanks to various market forces such as the cost of production and delivery, the speed of the news cycle, the shrinking middle class, and the bottomed-out ad market. Whatever the reason, I would argue that most magazines, even editorially driven ones, seek mainly to promote themselves and exist mainly for their own sake. Apart from original investigative reporting, the rest, no matter how interesting or useful or critical or cultural or informative, is content meant to titillate the consumer and, by extension, please the advertiser.

Traditionally, advertising and editorial departments always thought of each other as the “content” or the “filler,” and themselves as the main attraction. Now, with most consumer magazines, it’s pretty much impossible not to side with the ad reps in that debate. The heady, go-go era of the early aughts saw the rise of “the magalogue,” the brand extension, and the custom publication, and this has precipitated a new era of ad-driven content, even in today’s downward economy. Meanwhile, content itself, which is less lucrative, has, for more practical reasons, continued to drift away from paid print media and towards the Web.

Is “content” a dirty word?

Perhaps we resist “content” because, like “consumer,” it’s a bit unsettling when taken literally, which renders the figurative sense a bit artless. From an economic perspective, it’s all the same whether we “consume” a bottle of wine by pouring it straight down the drain or passing it through our digestive tract first. But this doesn’t leave any room for “externalities” like cellaring it, sharing it, or savouring its bouquet of aromas. And while we don’t consume content in the same way, we still want to believe that ours is of the vintage variety, and not just a bunch of old, smelly grapes.

Of course, like wine, not all content is created equal. Much of it may be pedestrian, but there is still plenty of vintage that is interesting, entertaining, provocative, and compelling. Nor is quality content monopolized by professional producers, or publishers: today, everyone is a publisher as well as a consumer of content, and we’re all competing for each other’s attention. So I say we should embrace content – and may the best writers, editors, designers, photographers, directors, producers, and creatives win.

The things that people “ask” Google can be touchingly earnest and a little sad. They also serve as a sort of anonymous Internet zeitgeist. Case in point: here are some screen shots — taken in late October 2009 — of auto-complete suggestions from Firefox’s Google toolbar, based on the first word or two that I typed (“how do,” “what is,” “when will,” “where was,” “who is,” “why is,” and “why”):

In the debate over how best to pay for news online (and, increasingly, whether or not it’s possible at all), publishers would do well to look at revenue models that work for other Internet ventures, rather than trying to import their print-based models to the Web. As any spunky tech startups will attest, obscurity is the biggest threat they face when starting out online. Whether it’s iPhone apps or social media services, many companies offer their core service or content for free, then try to convert a portion of their most dedicated users into subscribers.

To be fair, publishers, too, have used premium-based models successfully in the past: subscriptions are an obvious example, both in and of themselves (“save 89% off the newsstand price!” “Have it delivered right to your door!”) as well as part of any other value-added proposition (“Subscribe now and get this collector’s edition item / get front-of-the-line ticket access / be entered to win!”).

When newspapers first got serious about the Internet (say, ca. 2002), they opted for a similar premium model, whereby print subscribers were also given an online login (to read the same articles  that they’d already and paid for and read in print, apparently) and online-only readers had to pay for monthly or per-article access. Either way, you had to log in to read on the website, and as more and more free options flourished, it became more and more of a deterrent. By about 2007, most had moved to a all-free-all-the-time system, mostly because competitive forces drove them that way.

In between, newspaper and magazine websites toyed with various combinations of free and paid current and archival content, and some stuck with them — to various degrees of success, depending on the size of the audience, the exclusivity of the material, and the degree to which the publishers were “with it” when it came to the Web. In every case, the “bait” for publishers has been their content — but in trying to get people to pay for what they can get for free elsewhere, I would suggest that they’ve been using the wrong hook.

If there’s one thing that people are willing to spend their money on, even in these recessionary days, it’s the ability to communicate with each other. Cellphone culture has been pervasive for the past decade, and smartphones are quite arguably (for once) the biggest thing since sliced bread. Teens and twenty-somethings today wouldn’t even blink at a $50/month phone bill, provided they could check Facebook on the ten-minute bus ride between their glowing rectangles at work and home. Here in Canada, where we have some of the highest rates and lowest bandwidth in the developed world, that will barely get you a basic voice & data plan (though yours truly manages to subsist on $10/month pay-as-you-go with Virgin, which is possibly the cheapest deal around).

At a recent meeting of publishing minds that I attended, Vancouver Sun managing editor (and ardent newspapers-aren’t-dying advocate) Kirk Lapointe quipped, “I’m old enough to remember when water was free and you paid for music.” It’s a funny enough one-liner, but it also contains a more subtle bit of wisdom that applies to publishers as much as it does to record labels: it’s not that people today are a bunch of penny-pinching freeloaders — in fact, they’re willing to spend lots of money, even on needless trifles, even during a brutal recession, and even for things they could get for free (e.g., tapwater, face-to-face conversations). Unfortunately, their tastes are fleeting, arbitrary, and not commensurate in any way with their social value, but there you have it.

A quick glance at a news site with any kind of audience will reveal that people’s thirst for content, comments, and conversations is insatiable. A certain sect has always provided fodder for the letters pages and call-in shows, but now everyone and their dog has an opinion to share, be it a simple thumbs up or a profanity-riddled diatribe from “birthers,” “truthers,” and cranky old men.

So here’s what I propose: publish your core content online, for free, for all and sundry — then charge for the ability to comment on it. Of course, not everyone would opt for this service, but the point is, some surely would. After all, only a fraction of readers is responsible for the bulk of the comments on most sites anyway. At least this way the non-paying majority wouldn’t be shut out from the content itself (which is, in many cases, arguably too socially valuable to restrict).

In fact, many news sites have moved toward login-based commenting systems already, partly to increase accountability, partly to decrease spam, and partly to cultivate a dedicated, core readership — in other words, the people most likely to convert to premium membership. Since these lists and systems exist already, it would be simple enough to roll out such a program, provided that the transition was well communicated and smoothly executed.

At any rate, it’s clear that readers (or at least a critical mass of them) aren’t going to pay for content itself. It’s also clear, due to the Ten Percent Problem, that even as print audiences migrate to the Web, advertising revenues aren’t going to come along with them. But premium subscriptions, like online ad sales, could be part of the revenue stream, and part of the solution.

Of course, online audiences, who are just as used to free comment threads as they are to free content, may resent (and abandon in droves) a premium-based site, just as consumers resent the “bait and switch” tactic favoured by TelCom companies. But they might also come around to it, as long as the process was simple, the cost was unprohibitive, and the content was compelling. The point is, you’ve got to hook them somehow. [sic]

After reading an inspired rant on “curly quotes” and online typographic standards by prof. John Maxwell on the TKBR publishing blog at SFU, it got me thinking about the death of punctuation in general. While much has been written in print and online about the apostrophe and its correct usage (see ApostropheAbuse.com, ApostropheCatastrophes.com, the Apostrophe Protection Society, etc.), I thought I would address an issue that Maxwell touches on but that goes largely unaddressed in the larger grammatical discussion: the technological impediments to proper punctuation.

I’m talking, specifically, about text messaging. But this isn’t an easy pot-shot at the supposed SMS assault on our society’s collective language skills — in fact, several studies (including this one) have debunked that myth. But thanks to the physical limitations of today’s ever-smaller hand-held devices (and, arguably, the linguistic limitations of those who design them), actually invoking the apostrophe symbol — curly or straight, ASCII or Unicode — can be prohibitively difficult, even for those whose possessive intentions are good.

Take my phone, for example (please): Virgin Mobile’s standard-issue Samsung M300. All in all, a decent, if basic, phone, except when it comes to texting — then it makes me long for my ca.-2004 Motorola v551 (which, in texting terms, is positively paleolithic). The M300′s predictive type function is glitchy: without getting into too much detail, suffice to say that it can’t properly incorporate punctuation marks, so I have to enter them manually. It’s not so bad with commas, periods, etc., which are available using the “old-fashioned,” alphanumeric multi-key method, and which come at the end of words and sentences. But not only does the apostrophe usually come mid-word (which causes the predictive function to crash on my phone), it’s buried on the third page of the “symbols” function.

So, if I’m inclined to type I’ll, for example, while using predictive text (still my preferred method), I have to hit

>Function>Alphanumeric>Shift>4/4/4>Function>Symbols>#8>5/5/5>5/5/5>Space (and then >Function>Predictive to resume).

Whereas on a QWERTY keyboard (including on a phone), it would be

>(shift) I>(shift) ‘>L>L

And it’s not just my phone: my brother has the exact same model with the exact same problem, and he’s sent it back three times to no avail. Of course, I could just not use contractions (which perhaps the strictest of grammarians would advocate) — or, you know, get a nicer phone (though the jury is still out on the touchscreen keyboard). But for people with $10/month pay-as-you-go plans like me (yeah, all eight of us), I don’t think our frugality in choice of “handset” (which, incidentally, has come to replace the “timepiece” on my wrist) should be an impediment to upstanding grammatical citizenry.

Plus, from what I understand, many other “handsets” have equally convoluted punctuation methods, including near-complete QWERTY keypads on various slider phones and CrackBerries. Anyone have any handset horror stories of  their own?

At any rate, I don’t think texting is corrupting our society — if anything, I think there’s been an anti-bad-grammar backlash among the texterati of late — but if our devices make it too hard, it will still prohibit the lazy messaging masses. It’s like voting: most people say they’re going to vote, that they believe in exercising their democratic right, etc., but come election day, if the polling station isn’t five minutes from their house and they don’t get six pieces of mail reminding them, they’re going to watch the results on TV instead. So for the sake of freedom and democracy, please, phone makers of the world, break down the barriers of apostrophe usage — then we can start worrying about whether they’re curly or not. [sic]

Ladies and gentlemen, on this magnificent occasion, it is a privilege to address such a/an tan-looking group of captains. I can tell from your smiling pools that you will support my ordinary program in the coming election. I promise that, if elected, there will be a/an tooth brush in every zebra and two bears in every garage. I want to warn you against my stingy opponent, Mr. Mike. This man is nothing but a/an vast Internet. He has a/an freezing character and is working crayon in glove with the criminal element. If elected, I promise to eliminate vice. I will keep the teeth in the public till. I promise you witty government, grotesque taxes, and cranky schools.

Remember Mad Libs? Those little flip books where you blindly filled in the blanks with nouns, adjectives, and adverbs to produce humourously nonsensical (and usually lewd) stories? Well, they’re still around (published by Penguin), and they’re still a great way for kids — and adults — to learn about the structure of language. Even though I haven’t actually owned a Mad Libs book for years, I still like to use them as an example of how compound adjectives — one of the most poorly edited elements of writing — are supposed to work.

Most editors and writers will tell you that they understand compounds, but few people seem to have a genuine grasp of when and when not to stick a hyphen in there. As is often the case with grammatical pitfalls, those who claim to be knowledgeable in the area — but who in practice only get it right about half the time — can invariably be found to adhere strictly to “rules” hammered into them by a stern, aged, vaguely British-sounding teacher from their childhood (or, barring that, a stern, aged, vaguely British-sounding book that they bought in university).

In the case of compound adjectives, those who bother to investigate the matter at all tend to subscribe to the following maxim: use a hyphen if the compound comes before the thing that it’s modifying, but don’t bother with it if the compound come afterwards. For example:

A) We had front-row tickets to last night’s concert

B) Last night’s concert tickets were in the front row

While the hyphenation in both of these sentences is correct, it’s not because the compound modifier “front row” comes before The Thing in A) and after The Thing in B). Or rather, while “front row” does appear afterwards in B), and while it’s rightly unhyphenated, it’s not because of its post-Thing location, meaning this “rule” is a post hoc fallacy.

The real reason there’s no hyphen in B) is because in this case, “front row” isn’t acting as a compound anymore — it’s now part of a descriptive phrase (“in the front row”). Syntactically speaking (i.e., regardless of whether it made sense), this phrase could just as easily read “near the exit” or “expensive.”

As it happens, this descriptive phrase comes after The Thing it describes. But it’s unhyphenated because it’s a simple, unambiguous phrase like any other (and not a compound), not because of its relative position in the sentence. Hence what I shall now call the Post-Position Fallacy.

Hyphenated Compounds Explained

The reason “we had front row tickets” (or “we had near the exits tickets”) is wrong, and why hyphenated compounds exist at all, is because without the hyphens the phrase is ambiguous. Of course, one could argue that most reasonable people would interpret “front row tickets” to mean “tickets that were located in the front row” and not “row tickets that were located in the front,” since “front-row tickets” is idiomatic, there is presumably some contextual information about concert-going, and moreover there is no such thing as “row tickets.” But the point is it shouldn’t be the job of the reader to figure that out, regardless of the relative and subconscious ease required. One of the golden rules of good writing is that any easily avoidable ambiguity that causes a reader to pause and decipher its meaning — what Geist editor Mary Schendlinger calls a “reader stopper” (or, more accurately, a “reader-stopper”) — should be avoided. And disambiguating “front row tickets” is easy: it just needs a hyphen.

As we’ve now established, this phrase could, strictly speaking, be taken to mean either “tickets that were in the front row” or “row-tickets that were in the front.” Here’s how the two sentences would be parsed grammatically — and here’s where Mad Libs come in.

The Mad Libs Rule

Compounds are treated as single grammatical elements, and they’re always hyphenated; if no hyphenation is called for, then it’s not a compound.

C) “we had front-row tickets” = Personal pronoun verb (past tense) adjective noun

D) “we had front row-tickets” = Personal pronoun verb (past tense) adjective noun

Clearly, these two sentences have the same underlying structure. The ambiguity lies, then, in how “front,” “row,” and “tickets” are allotted: “front” is, in this case, an adjective, while “row” and “tickets” are nouns. Therefore, “front-row” makes for a compound adjective, while “row-tickets” makes for a compound noun. But in terms of grammar, a compound adjective is simply an adjective, and a compound noun is simply a noun — that is, a single element in a sentence. Or in the case of Mad Libs, a single blank that needs to be filled in.

Here’s another example, this time with a four-word compound:

E) “This is a turn-of-the-century antique” (“This is a/an adjective noun“)

F) “This antique is from the turn of the century” (“This noun is from the noun of the noun“)

G) “This antique is turn-of-the-century” (“This noun is adjective“)

H) “This antique is old” (“This noun is adjective“)

All four of these phrases are grammatically correct, with E) and F) comparable to A) and B) above. In E), “turn-of-the-century” is a compound adjective modifying “antique,” while in F) “turn of the century” is part of the descriptive phrase “from the turn of the century” (the presence of a preposition, in this case “from,” is a reliable tip-off indicating a phrase instead of a compound). Meanwhile, G) is hyphenated because, unlike F), “turn of the century” remains a compound that happens to come after the thing it’s modifying (“antique,” which in this case is a noun). In fact, G) is simply E) rearranged, whereas F) is E) rewritten. Clear as mud? That’s what I thought ; )

Here’s another hyphenation example, rendered as a Mad Lib, to whet your syntactic appetite. Try it with your friends!

“I’m on a pay-as-you-go plan” = “I’m on a/an adjective noun”

“My plan is pay-as-you-go” = “My noun is adjective”

“This plan lets you pay as you go” = “This noun lets personal pronoun verb as you go”

And finally, see if you can find the humour in these hyphen-less phrases:

“Those carbon tax supporters will say anything” (is there any other kind?)

“I’m looking for an out of print book directory” (good luck — try Abe Books)

Editors, writers, and the like argue over the merits of the serial or Oxford comma the way some people debate stem cell research or the Israel-Palestine conflict. And while no blood has been shed in the publishing industry over this matter (at least as far as I’m aware), that’s not to say it hasn’t resulted in at least a few gaza-esque territorial disputes that have cleaved newsrooms in half and unjustly displaced thousands, if not millions, of innocent punctuation marks. Therefore, despite the risks it presents to my personal safety and professional reputation, I still feel the need at this late date to weigh in on the subject with a (hopefully) fresh perspective.

Before I go on, I should disclose that I am an unrepentant, hard-line proponent of the serial comma. That said, I am confident that I can provide a reasonably objective and rational overview of both sides of the debate — and then proceed to systematically annihilate all counter-arguments.

Some debates are blindly partisan (see U.S. health care reform); some, while hypothetically valid, are in practice impossible to settle (see Muhammad Ali vs. Mike Tyson); some, while unable to deliver 100% consensus, nevertheless provide sufficient grounds to lead a reasonable person to a given conclusion (see climate change); and some are matters of pure, geeky opinion (see Star Wars vs Star Trek).

In all cases, combatants on each side can be relied upon to trot out the same hackneyed arguments — often extreme and disingenuous examples that are impossible to disagree with. It’s therefore important in these debates to zero in on what point people actually differ on. For a wholly inappropriate example, take (for a very brief moment, and mindful of the Google-bots) the ab—n debate: nobody is actually *pro* killing ba—s; the real distinction centres on whether the practice should be exercised in some cases or not at all.

Likewise (well, sort of), only a few very silly people are in favour of total serial-comma abolishment, and they get no quarter here; most serious editors are either pro usage in all instances, or pro usage in some instances. Of course, every style guide in print today has a section on the serial comma, and while I am the first to admit that many (most) come down on the side of occasional usage, some recommend blanket usage, and I have yet to come across any guide that recommends never using it.

With that lengthy preamble out of the way, here’s my earnest attempt at representing the two major factions in this debate. I’ll keep the nerdier-than-thou linguistic jargon to a minimum and try to use mundane rather than extreme examples.

The “always use it” argument:

There are two main instances where a serial comma is inarguably necessary (as with a good joke, I’ll spare you the explanation):

(1) Where it is needed to reduce ambiguity between lists and clauses:

“He met Tom, the president and the vice-president”

vs “He met Tom, the president, and the vice-president”

(2) Where it is needed to separate and disambiguate list items:

“I made toast, bacon and eggs and orange juice for breakfast”

vs “I made toast, bacon and eggs, and orange juice for breakfast”

(2A) Alright, I lied, there’s a third: when there are multiple comma-separated list items, a serial semi-colon is necessary:

“For breakfast I had toast, bacon and eggs, and orange juice; for lunch I had soup and a sandwich; and for supper I had a stir-fry with peppers, bean sprouts, peas, sweet and sour sauce, and egg noodles.”

(I don’t even want to contemplate an unpunctuated version of this sentence, the likes of which occur more often than you might think, especially in fact-spewing newspaper articles)

Now for every “only when necessary” argument I’ve come across, some of which have more currency than others:

Redundancy argument #1: If you have a list of three or more individual items, the last comma is redundant, since it and the “and” essentially represent the same thing: a conjoiner. The other commas provide pause and stand in for silent “ands,” and the final “and” provides pause and stands in for the comma. Beautiful.

Redundancy argument #2: Even if you have a list of comma-separated items, humans are smart enough to figure out which natural pairs go together, provided that the author generally writes in an unambiguous way

Aesthetics argument #1: Being redundant, the serial comma is unstylish and should therefore be removed whenever possible

Aesthetics argument #2: Being redundant, the serial comma needlessly consumes a character space, which could make a difference in terms of page economy, at least in print

Am I missing any? Please feel free to add one as a comment below.

OK, now for my rebuttals:

First, I would counter that the serial comma is not redundant — that is, the “and” and the comma don’t mean exactly the same thing. The earlier commas don’t actually stand for “and”: if “and” was meant to be there, the writer would have written it, just as a speaker would have said it. Written language, after all, is meant to replicate speech, whether read out loud or in one’s head. Likewise, the final “and” doesn’t stand in for a comma, nor, in speech, does an “and” represent a pause. Using “and” instead of a comma in a list is a deliberately more hurried and less measured way of listing things (think of a child rattling off a birthday wish list).

Moreover, even if a bit of punctuation is redundant, so what? It doesn’t make it strictly incorrect. Unless you’re one of those 19th-century simple-spelling reformists, like Noah Webster or George Bernard Shaw, you accept the fact that sometimes in English there are double-consonants or superfluous vowels. Generally speaking, clarity and brevity are good editorial principles (though the merits of minimalism constitute an entire blog post of their own); as with any value-based system, however, one value will inevitably be pitted against another, and one will have to take precedence. In this case, brevity, which is a good, is up against clarity, which I say is the highest good.

With redundancy, the strongest anti-serial argument, out of the way (it at least concerns logic and semantics), it’s a simple enough matter to tackle the remaining aesthetic counter-arguments. Since when does style — editorial, typographic, or otherwise — trump readability? Isn’t that the point of style and type decisions — to not draw attention to themselves?

What if I don’t understand the semi-colon? What if I don’t like the cut of the question mark’s jib? Can I just avoid using them? And if saving space is an issue, the answer isn’t to remove all the vowels, even if our brains could probably fill in the gap 90% of the time. The answer is to tweak the type size or the line spacing or other visual, not grammatical, aspects. Anyway, it’s a myth that tiny characters like commas and apostrophes add typographic bulk to even the biggest doorstop of a book: justification, tracking, line breaks, chapter breaks, etc. absorb it all easily, especially with modern desktop-publishing software (and if you’re still composing in metal type, you’re probably composing an art book where space is not an issue, and probably not reading a blog). The point is, it’s not about what I think looks pretty. It’s about logic; it’s about semantics; it’s about clarity.

At this point, all I’ve really done is reiterate what most of us should already know: that the serial comma is *sometimes* needed. And despite my lengthy tirade, I don’t really have any quarrel with people who genuinely understand the intricacies of grammar and use the serial only where necessary. What makes me so fervent about this issue, and what makes me side with the always-use-it camp, is that virtually every day, in print and online, I see missing commas that are the result of overzealous anti-serialites getting their hands on a red pen. Usually it’s just a case of a comma being omitted in a list with “and”-paired items, but all too often copy-editors have been lulled/terrorized into striking any comma that occurs before the word “and” — an apalling error that shows no intuitive understanding whatsoever.

Because allowing some serial-comma omissions is such a slippery slope, I say just use it all the time. It’s never wrong — even if it’s (debatably) sometimes redundant. It’s also more consistent, which is what all guide books and house styles ultimately strive for. So what’s there to argue about?

MPub Technology Essay #3 (April 2009)

ARGUABLY THE TWO MOST SALIENT FEATURES of the Digital Revolution that is currently underway (and it is a capital-R Revolution, on par with the Industrial variety) are the mass amateurization of the creation of content and the accompanying reduction in the cost of this content. Though this new-found ease in informational exchange is generally regarded as a progressive and democratizing sea-change, it is also, incidentally, terrible news for publishers, whose business has traditionally been to create content professionally and then withhold it for payment. In the digital realm, however, where it is easy and cheap to create and distribute an infinite number of perfect copies, publishers no longer have an automatic monopoly on digital content as they once did (and still do) with analog content. Yet if professional publishers are to exist at all, and preferably to thrive, in this new digital economy, they must find a way to coexist with amateur creators — the teeming masses that threaten to Twitter their way into the institutional towers.

Media theorist Clay Shirky has argued that traditional publishing institutions are under threat from collaborative networks as “coordination costs” fall and publishers no longer hold the “information monopolies” they once did. The most obvious example of this, he says, is blogging, which “has sent the professional class of publishing down into the ranks of mass amateurization.” Shirky argues that in collaborative environments, institutions are obstacles (in this case, to the free exchange of information) and that many traditional publishing institutions are currently in denial of this fact. As a result, “the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self-preservation,” which Shirky says accords with the first of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. To this stage, I would add anger (e.g., attempting to ‘lock down’ content with Digital Rights Management), bargaining (e.g., loosening certain restrictions and embracing certain elements of digital distribution), depression (e.g., the angst, soul-searching, and ubi sunt motifs within the publishing industry that are clearly underway), and finally acceptance, the theoretical future stage in which publishers reconcile their analog pasts with their digital fates and create profitable new models within and alongside the collaborative environment. Shirky predicts that this final, chaotic transition could last up to 50 years; however, I would suggest that in the case of publishing, the future is, for the most part, already here.

The Networked Publisher

So what kind of digital service-experience can publishers provide that people will be willing to pay for? Taking a cue from current trends, the answer is almost certainly the ability to communicate and interact. As Bob Stein points out, “reading and writing have always been social activities, but that fact tends to be obscured by the medium of print. We grew up with images of the solitary reader curled up in a chair or under a tree and the writer alone in his garret.” The demand for this type of literary sociability is only increasing: one need only to follow publishing guru Mike Shatzkin to detect these trends. Shatzkin’s most recent project, FiledBy, is an attempt to foster both author-to-reader and reader-to-reader interaction — a natural complement to what he sees as the future of the book-reading experience itself. The “objectives” of such an “enhanced book,” Shatzkin says,

“Surely include more deeply engaging the reader, more fully documenting material in the book, promoting the author, enabling the house or the author to promote other authors, or delivering additional content, products, or services that enhance the user experience for the reader of the book.”

However, hypertextual functions, though useful, apply to a more solitary sense of intellectual inquisitiveness. For a truly social reading (and writing) experience, Stein offers his notion of the “networked book,” in which the text is produced by amateur collaboration, as Shirky predicted. For Stein, however, this type of publishing can still be professional and institutional; in fact, he says, it “resolves the professional/amateur contradiction,” with the author acting as the leader-expert who harnesses the contributions of amateur collaborators, the editor as the producer, and the publisher as the professional aggregator of this content, but whereby “readers will increasingly see themselves as participants in a social process.”

As an example of this process, Stein points to GAM3R 7H30RY, which was written collaboratively among its author-leader McKenzie Wark and various amateur contributors. However, as the book’s website demonstrates, the text was grossly compartmentalized in the process, to the point where it no longer resembles a long, flowing series of cohesive and intricately woven thoughts (i.e., a book). Curmudgeonly complaints against the Twitterization of content and annihilation of attention spans aside, any argument for GAM3R 7H30RY ’s success in evaluating collaborative versus institutional models is disingenuous in that it is an apples-to-oranges comparison of the final product.

While amateur content is bound to occupy an increasingly larger space in the digital realm, it does not necessarily represent a threat to professional publishers, so long as they don’t try to beat collaborative groups at their own game. To borrow from Stein again, the successful publishers of the future “will build brands around curatorial and community building know-how and be really good at designing and developing the robust technical infrastructures that underlie a complex range of user experiences” (emphasis added). In order to maintain their favoured institutional positions, publishers should allow readers a more socialized and interactive experience while not jeopardizing the creative process itself. Thus the modern, experience-based publishing economy must be one of professionalized content and collaborative participation — of networked publishers and networking readers — in which value is both shared and created.

MPub Technology Essay #2 (March 2009)

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

—Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:12

“But anyone with any understanding would remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways and from two causes, namely, when they’ve come from the light into the darkness and when they’ve come from the darkness into the light.”

—Socrates to Glaucon, in Plato’s Republic

THAT DIGITAL MAGAZINE TECHNOLOGIES are being developed is a given: there has been plenty of entrepreneurship and innovation on the technical side, where there is relatively little competition and even less historical rooting — and potentially huge financial gains as a result. Mygazines, Nxtbook Media, Olive Software, Zinio, and Texterity all offer digital reading and delivery services in tandem with the decidedly more conservative magazine industry, which is just getting into the game as its traditional revenue streams dry up. As a result of this economic insecurity, the transition to the digital realm is being driven almost entirely by advertising, not editorial. But whether or not these technologies will appeal to readers remains unclear: virtually all market research in this field has centred around pacifying nervous would-be advertisers and convincing them that digital ads allow more flexibility, creativity, feedback, value, and measurable results.

Of course, digital editions do make sense, especially in the case of B-to-B and controlled-circulation publications, as there are substantial savings to be had on printing and postage, with little to lose from changing the delivery method for a more utilitarian (not to mention non-paying) readership. There is undoubtedly interest on the consumer side as well, from long-distance subscribers for whom postage is uneconomical, to ardent environmentalists who wish to read paper-free, to the so-called early adopter crowd that marketers cherish so much — the gotta-have-it gadgeteers who love technology for technology’s sake and line up around the block for untested devices. But for those whose pleasure in magazines derives chiefly from the act of reading, as opposed to the raw harvesting of information, the appeal is far from obvious.

Robo-steeds and digital natives

First, there is the matter of terminology: to the extent that publishers make facsimiles of their print publications available in various electronic forms — perhaps with a few animated ads and hyperlinks thrown in — these offerings might more appropriately be termed digitized magazines than digital magazines. Unlike the new breed of digital natives who promise to make up an increasing portion of reading audiences, and unlike some e-books, the contents of digitized magazines are not born digital; that is, they’re not designed from the beginning to be produced and consumed in electronic form. Rather, they are a sort of grotesque, post-modern reversal from digital to print and back again.
In his 2008 review of the first edition of the Amazon Kindle for the Columbia Journalism Review, Ezra Klein finds the device at once remarkable and mundane — complementary to, but not a replacement for, printed text. As he puts it,

The Kindle tries to compete too directly with paper. It attempts to electronically mimic the experience of reading a book. But the book is very, very good at providing the reading experience of a book. In this way, the Kindle occasionally comes off as if Ford, failing to make the conceptual leap to the car, had instead built a motorized horse. Sure, there would be some advantages: the robo-steed would never grow tired, and could be outfitted with more plush seating. But horses are pretty good at being horses. And books, like horses, have evolved to maximize their advantages.

Though a similarly mono-functional device for digitized magazines doesn’t yet exist, the same question can be asked: what is the ‘car’ in the magazine’s case? What conceptual leap is necessary in order to create a genuine advancement in e-reading technology, and not get saddled with the publishing equivalent of the horseless carriage?

Through a Reader, Darkly

The oft-quoted biblical metaphor to which the title of this essay alludes is typically taken from the 1611 King James Bible, but that long-outdated translation contains two linguistic trip-ups for modern readers: first, ‘glass’ should be taken as ‘mirror’; and second, ‘through’ should be taken as ‘in’. Thus the suggestion is that our mortal, earthly perspective is akin to looking in a mirror — a dingy, bronze Renaissance-era mirror — and not through a (dirty) window pane. Likewise, a modern, digitized edition of a magazine is a mere reflection of its content — not the content itself. Of course, ‘content’ that is digitally composed and typeset, exported to PDF, burned into an aluminium plate, inked up, and offset onto paper, and of which there exist thousands of copies, is not in a sense the genuine article either. But unlike printed magazines, digitized works are not immediately graspable, either physically or, arguably, intellectually; the reader is simply granted a look, but cannot reach out and touch it. Granted, there are certain functions with digitized editions intended to replicate the print experience, such as page-flipping and zoom-in effects, but such technical gimmickry only serves to underscore the parody at play.
To invoke another ancient but enduring metaphor, Plato famously likened knowledge to light and ignorance to darkness — literally the notion of enlightenment, 2000 years before the movement really caught on. In Book VII of The Republic, Socrates describes a group of cave-dwellers who have for their entire lives only seen a combination of light and shadows flickering from a nearby fire, so that “the prisoners would in every way believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts.” Eventually,  when one of them breaks free and exits the cave, he is nearly blinded by natural sunlight, enduring a painful but necessary transition to an enlightened above-ground existence. Upon returning to the cave and recounting his tale, his former companions are unable to make the same conceptual leap and ostracize him, but he knows nonetheless that his heightened perception is more genuine and that his previous understanding was merely a set of shadows — not genuine understanding. Likewise, digitized magazine contents can be seen as mere shadows of their print — or truly digital — selves.

Hamlet’s Blackberry

While the line between reading and learning has been drawn and redrawn since at least the 18th-century Enlightenment, the connection between the quality, clarity, and immediacy of the reading experience and the degree to which it enlightens is perhaps  more tenuous. But reading is not, or at least is no longer, solely about education and rationalist self-improvement; it’s also about experience, especially in today’s highly commercialized publishing environment — and analog and digital content offer two distinct reading experiences. As National Journal media critic William Powers argues in his brilliant 2006 essay on the history of paper, with digitized editions, “the online reader expends a great deal of mental energy just navigating. Paper’s tangibility allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden, freeing up the brain to think.” Though Powers cautions against clinging for purely sentimental reasons to analog delivery of information, paper, he argues, has a certain authenticity and utility that even the most advanced technology has yet to replicate, citing Hamlet’s mnemonic “writing tables” as an example.
Apart from any practical utility, Powers argues, “paper itself is the inescapable metaphor, the paradigm, the tantalizing goal”8 in developing digital reading technologies. “The new medium,” he says, “will be deemed a success if and when it is no longer just an imitation of paper, but the real thing – when it becomes paper. It’s not as easy as it looks.”9 Current digitized editions, Powers says, such as the New York Times’ then-newly unveiled Times Reader to which he regularly refers, are “two-dimensional and intangible, so they don’t ‘relate’ to the hands, eyes and brain in the same way.”10 True digital authenticity, he argues, would necessitate “a new medium that brings digital reading into the third dimension,”11 one in which the reader can more directly engage with the text.

Ophelia’s iPhone?

Such an ability to touch, fold, flip, feel and dive in to the text is essential — something that is finally possible with modern screen technologies. Apple’s iPhone12 offers touch-screen functionality and unprecedented activity, while E-Ink Corporation’s Electronic Paper Displays can be folded and rolled up. Now, thanks to the iPhone’s built-in Safari browser, Texterity is available on the ubiquitous handheld device — a major, if incidental, leap towards a three-dimensional digital reading experience. Of course, true three-dimensional reading would entail a fully submersive virtual reality, which we’re a long way from achieving, if ever. But certainly Apple’s touch screens offer something beyond the mere height and width dimensions of letter-forms, whether on paper or a 3.5″ screen. Perhaps, then, ‘2.5 dimensions’ is a more accurate, if equally fanciful, concept — two-dimensional text into which the reader can ‘touch’ the contents.
Thanks in part to Apple’s myriad devices, digital readers are abundant. But this perfect double-entendre leads to the million-dollar question for digital magazine publishers: sure, the electronic form of digital readers exists, but does the human form? Millions of music- and movie-obsessed iPod users aside, far too little is known about the reading habits of tomorrow’s digital natives, and it remains to be seen whether the magazine industry’s current digital offerings will prove to be a satisfactory print replacement, or whether  Zinio and the like will operate as a mere spinoff industry, much as horse-drawn carriages still transport their fares alongside motorized taxicabs in popular tourist destinations today. Without question, digital content is inevitable in publishing, much as human transportation persists in various forms today; but it’s likely that as with the quaint, rickety vehicles of the early 20th century, we’ll be looking back in only a few years and laughing at the digitized offerings of 2009 — if we’re not laughing already.