Are you blogging a dead horse?

As in most intellectual endeavors, quantity does not imply quality. And the same trash is repeated on many sites around the world as erstwhile bloggers discover just how hard it is to be original every day of the week.

On Labor Day, when I started to think about writing this month’s column, I had a modest writer’s epiphany of sorts. I had just been surfing the Web in search of laser-related blogs (Web logs) that might be useful to the readers of Laser Focus World (for more on photonics-related blogs, see Working the Web, p. 61). And I was totally appalled. Blogs there were by the gazillion on subjects both esoteric and mundane, and more than a few were allegedly about lasers.

I was not so much surprised by the sheer number of blogs but how bad the blogs read, for the most part. Hiding behind the shields of arcane user names, the writers-and I use that term extremely loosely-can barely string three words together and sentence and paragraph construction is evidently almost nonexistent. I will spare the guilty by not mentioning their pseudonyms-you know who you are.

British playwright George Bernard Shaw once said of writers, “He who can, does, he who cannot, teaches.” I would add: he who can neither write nor teach, blogs. As in most intellectual endeavors, quantity does not imply quality. And the same trash is repeated on many sites around the world as erstwhile bloggers discover just how hard it is to be original every day of the week. Whatever blogging is, it is definitely not journalism. What these putative writers need is a strong dose of Dick Haitch. Let me explain.

On Labor Day in 1966, I wrote my first news story for Electronic Design, then a leading magazine for electronics engineers. It was not exactly the happiest day of my life. I had sweated for several hours producing a measly 1200 words on Wescon, at that time a major exhibition and conference in San Francisco. I was afraid that I had laid an egg. And as Brooklynite Chief Editor Howie Bierman so delicately put it, “Youse call dis Englitch? Wassamadderwitchyou? Fuggedabahdid!”

When I had ripped the yellow copy paper out of my trusty old Underwood typewriter, I had stared long and hard admiring my precious copy and its trenchant prose. In so doing, I inadvertently started a violent clash with the magazine’s part-time copy-editor, one Richard Haitch, a formidable fellow with strong views on reporters and reporting (he disliked them both). Dick was moonlighting at Electronic Design as a copy editor, mostly on weekday afternoons. He then hopped a cab over to The New York Times editorial offices on West 43rd St., where he slaved on the Metro desk from 4 p.m until midnight, barely making the last bus back to suburban Teaneck.

Dick was forever “on deadline,” so he took his highly sharpened editorial scissors and blunt black copy pencil and savaged my excessively highfalutin verbiage into good, plain-spoken American English that was not only readable but also informative. “Remember this,” Haitch snarled, “Good writing is clear thinking made visible!” Words to live by, Dick, then as now. “Be in my office at 10 tomorrow,” he mumbled.

Fearing that this might presage a preemptive end to a less-than-promising journalistic career, the following morning I slunk into Dick’s tiny cube of an office, littered with weeks-old plastic coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays, broken stubby pencils, and ripped sheets of copy paper. From the depths of a chaotic filing system, Dick produced four sheets of tattered paper headed, “Haitch on News, 101.” He glared at me for a few moments and sighed, “You don’t appear to be a complete idiot, so read this and keep it by your typewriter.” So I did just that and, mirabile dictu, I seem to have made the grade. Thanks , Dick Haitch, wherever you are.

What was on those four pages? Some very pithy writing from an old hand. Ask the six key questions: who, what, where, when, how, and why. How to pick a lead. How to structure a news story so it can be cut from the end, how to use quotes, how to make one last phone call, and how to pick a kicker (a closing sentence). And, most important, in my view, “You could always look it up!”

OK, Dick, let’s go with this one! COPY!