Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

Thanks to Yahoo's writing style guidelines, I've shaped up my writing. No more wasting space for me! My title has things that everyone is interested in: sexual theme, reference to illicit drugs, and a meaningless reference to music. Everyone feels comfortable with this Cliche!

This is actually a post about my results from the Writers Diet. I'll assume that by this point, most of those who began reading my post have gone back to trolling Facebook or laughing at Cat Memes. The writers diet is a program which examines one's writing and quantifies, rates, and graphs the authors use of the the parts of speech. The analogy is that the Writers Diet is a doctor looking at your blood sugar and vitamin levels and making suggestions on what food groups you need to cut back on.

I feel pretty good about my results. Hopefully this picture can draw some of the readership back into my story, so here goes:

I'm led to feel pretty good about this. Never in my life have I been called "Fit and (or) Trim," so this is a pleasant change of pace. I think I mainly need to thin out my use of prepositions (of, for, in, from, to, etc.)  so I've decided to embolden all of the prepositions I see. Aside from my flabby prepositions, I'm as happy as a seagull with a french fry. 

The Canary.

I felt, when I started this blog, that people would be able to enjoy my writing and maybe even learn a little bit from its contents. It's odd, though; I consider myself a decent writer, I try to keep all of my online writing simple and enjoyable. I think it makes sense, people aren't interested in being assaulted with complex verbiage. The Internet is a place in which writers should be free to write as themselves, at least, in an ideal world that would be the case.

Yahoo.com offers a list of tips and techniques for writing on the Internet... Take a second... Imagine the sort of advice an Internet mogul would offer...

It's quite disheartening. Yahoo proposes many useful techniques; techniques that all people writing for the a large audience should think about: be direct in your prose, make your opening and closing sentences interesting, craft an interesting title. Here, take two of these and call me in the morning.

I'm rambling, let's take a step back for a second
Yahoo insists that what I'm writing at this point in my blog post will not be read. In this article about eye-tracking, analysts propose that people only look at your title. I guess that makes sense, if someone writes a piece on the Internet that does not have a title that catches my attention then why would I read it? I'll just get to the meat of it: Yahoo claims that anything of value in web writing needs to be in the top third of the page:

• People scan the main sections of a page to determine what it’s about and whether they want to stay longer.
• They make decisions about the page in as little as three seconds.
• If they decide to stay, they pay the most attention to the content in the top part of the screen.

I guess I shouldn't be so bothered by this, but it's downright offensive to me to claim "web readers have the attention span of a goldfish." If people are only interested in writing with a content value no greater than that exhibited in a tweet, then I guess I'll have to be your canary.