A matter of degree

Photo credit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-shot-of-a-person-holding-a-diploma-and-a-graduation-hat-12752021/*

 by Ariella Brown

I  got this question from someone on LinkedIn: "If I might ask a question, how do you feel your PhD has helped you in your content writing?"

I'm not a degree snob. In truth, you don't need a PhD to produce content. Some people manage quite well with no degree at all.

The reason I completed the degree back in my early youth is that I thought I'd make a career in academia. Several years of adjuncting disabused me of that notion.

Here's the gist of the answer: 

It helps in ways most people don't appreciate because they think about content marketing as just applying SEO tricks (plug in the keywords, use the right tags, follow a template, and put in a clickbait headline).

You get boring, predictable, and disappointing content when that's all you've got. Even if the information is accurate -- and it frequently is not -- it is not going to be a pleasure to read.

Aiming for high quality content takes more than formulas. And that's where the skills related to earning a PhD are relevant:

🗃1. The ability to do research to find out what you need to know about the industry, product, and the customers who use it to present a clear and accurate account rather than fudging things.
🔍2. Obsession with tracing quotes to the original source
This is very important in an industry in which people tend to copy each other and lose the context and the year of the stat, presenting old information as if it's current.
🗺3. Vision combined with practical planning
Completing a PhD doesn't just take a big idea but organization, persistence and an understanding of how to break down a huge project that last years into smaller steps. You have to do the same when planning a content marketing strategy and content calendar.
📚4. The best models for content in your head
I have a lot of literature in my head that I can draw on to make interesting connections and offer memorable phrases that resonate.

*Yes, I used a stock photo to represent a graduation. I didn't attend any of my own since the 8th grade. 

You can download and read my dissertatio here: CUNY Academic Works

Learn more about what I've done as a content marketing specialist, particularly for B2B tech, here: Experience and Testimonials To book a free phone consultation, use this Calendly link 

Related:

What the Little Princes teaches us about marketing

Add a pinch of salt to creative claims for AI

The perils of prompt engineering

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What Facebook's new standards mean for marketers

With nearly two billion active users and over five million advertisers on its platform, Facebook is major marketing medium. Many marketers appreciated its extended access, but what they didn't not care for was the lack of control over ad placement. Now Facebook is doing something to address that concern.  John Donahue, Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Sonobi spoke with me about the latest development.

On September 13, Facebook announced new “monetization eligibility standards“ to assure its millions of advertisers  that they can “feel confident and in control over where their ads appear.” The new guidelines offer greater “detail on the types of content that advertisers may find sensitive” so that they can decide if they want to prevent their ads from appearing on the pages that feature sensitive content.

Read more in Giving More Control to Advertisers on Facebook

Define "good"

I don't mean that in an abstract way or with the kind of depths of thought about what we mean by "qulity" that drove the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance toward madness. I just mean it in the context of "good pay."  The question arises from this job posting:

We pay really well because we want really good content.
“Really good content” means well-constructed, well-reasoned arguments that are also extremely engaging.
Articles need to be a minimum of 500 words, though analysis pieces need to be a minimum of 1,000 words
We provide you with the headlines and an initial source
We’re looking for both weekday AND weekend writers. There’s a bonus for weekend writers.
We often promote writers to management positions

Ah, I think, they say they have high standards but compensate accordingly, so I was picturing a minimum of three figures and not just with a one or two at the beginning of the number. But my illusions about some shared view on what constitutes "good" pay was shattered an instant later as I read on:

What We’ll PayPay will start at $15/article during the test period. Afterward, we’ll bump it to $20/article for weekday news articles, and $30/article for weekday analysis articles. Weekend news articles are $25/article and weekend analysis pieces are $35/article. 

So, basically, they'll pay you what teen babysitters get per hour for an article that should take you several hours to write.  Certainly, any beginning writer -- and that's the only kind who likely would apply for this job -- would likely need more than hour to crank out an article of that length that is not merely recycled platitudes.

Related: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-working-almost-for-free.html
http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2016/05/writing-for-free-is-not-deductible.html
http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2016/05/an-idiots-guide-for-writers.html

Google browser to block unacceptable ads

pic https://static.pexels.com/photos/48123/google-www-online-search-search-48123.png

How offensive or annoying is that? That's a real question for those in the business of assessing what types of ads viewers might consider beyond the pale: Especially now, when ads that don't make the cut may be blocked before any human sees them.

Ad blocking software is what many people rely on to stop annoying popups and noisy videos that play online when they want to watch or read something. However, those extensions required downloads and sometimes fail. They could prove far more effective if they are integral to the browser. Google has plans to do just that in Chrome, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The standards Google would apply would be based on the research of the Coalition for Better Ads. Its Initial Better Ads Standards drew on over 25,000 consumer ratings of digital ad experiences in North America and Europe, this past March. 

Marketers who ignore the standards, thinking that it will only affect some of their ads, may suffer unanticipated consequences. According to the Journal, Chrome may keep out “all advertising that appears on sites with offending ads, instead of the individual offending ads themselves." Like the one bad apple, one bad ad can spoil the entire marketing barrel, which is a very high price to pay for poor judgement.

Read more in Google Chrome to Ride Shotgun on Unacceptable Ads

The writing test

I'm one of the scorers for the SAT essays. That factual accuracy is not required can get annoying, particularly when you get essays that say Einstein invented the lightbulb or that Shakespeare was a novelist. Then there are the literary analyses that give me the sensation of nails on a chalkboard because they do so miss the point.
 However, as the essays cannot be predicated on any prior knowledge of a subject, the rule is that the score cannot suffer for student ignorance. What the test is about is not making stuff up so much  Matthew J.X. Malady  asserts  in We Are Teaching High School Students to Write Terribly, but in being able to formulate a position with backup on the fly. 

Here's an extract:

 “In fact, trying to be true will hold you back.” So, for instance, in relaying personal experiences, students who take time attempting to recall an appropriately relatable circumstance from their lives are at a disadvantage, he says. “The best advice is, don’t try to spend time remembering an event,” Perelman adds, “Just make one up. And I’ve heard about students making up all sorts of events, including deaths of parents who really didn’t die.”

Now, you have to remember that students are only be scored for the effectiveness of their writing. The question of truth here is irrelevant. No one is supposed to win extra points out of sympathy for their situation here. The stuff of make believe is not just a component in creative writing but can work for expository writing when offering hypothetical examples for illustration. 

The real problem is not making stuff up and deviating from facts but canning essays. As the questions are fairly general, some SAT prep places advise students to jut plan an essay ahead of time and then just connect it to the question in the introductions. No matter what the prompt is, these students come in prepared to write about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, or The Great Gatsby, or the American Revolution.  In truth, they can get away with it a lot of the time, but every once in a while, there is a prompt that really doesn't fit the canned essay. On those occasions, no matter how well stated and developed the essay is unto itself, its score will suffer for not being on target.

Another assertion I find not to be true in my extensive scoring experience is this:

 Most students choose to write what is referred to as “the standard five-paragraph essay”: introductory and concluding paragraphs bookending three paragraphs of support in between. Each essay is later independently graded by two readers in a manner that harkens to the famous I Love Lucy scene wherein Lucy and Ethel attempt to wrap chocolate candies traveling on an unrelenting conveyer belt.

Scorers are specifically warned not to award or deduct points for students who opt for the 5 paragraph essay. As a point of fact, most essays I see, particularly the ones that score a 5 or 6 tend to incorporate fewer than 5 paragraphs, though the essays typically do cover both pages. Also the idea of two scorers is one that colleges also use when scoring writing assessment tests, as I remember from my days as an instructor. It's meant as a check on standards -- in case one scorer will tend to be too harsh or too lenient. They two reader system  is nothing like the chaotic image that Malady attempts to evoke with her television reference.  Is it possible that the writer here has fallen in the the fault he attributes to the SAT essay exam? He has opted for expressing what he feels will resonate with readers rather than for digging up the actual facts.

Now, I'm not saying that the SAT essay is a perfect way to assess student writing. Certainly, some students can do a much better job if only they were given more than 25 minutes. However, it is not the be-all-and-end-all of writing standards. Certainly, from what I see in high schools teachers continue to assert their own writing standards (and many of them still push the 5 paragraph essay) rather than train their students to write for the SAT exam.

Blame the ship logs for this word

In my review of Orwell's Down and Out_, I mention that he devotes a whole section to analyzing swear word, though  "bloody"is the only one that makes it into print in the 1933 book; all the others are just represented by dashes in that wonderfully quaint Victorian device. 

 I'm not sure at exactly what point all that's fit to print allowed for more explicit language to be allowed into books, though I'd venture it was after 1970. Stephen Birmingham seems to get a kick out of including one in acronym form, saying that  "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" was recorded in that fashion in ships' logbooks next to records of punishment.  See the footnote on p. 271 of The Grandees.
I did a brief Google search and haven't found anyone who says he is mistaken in the etymology of the word.

Punctuation, pronouns, and pet peeves

 From This Embarrasses You and I*Grammar Gaffes Invade the Office in an Age of Informal Email, Texting and Twitter"
"People get passionate about grammar," says Mr. Appleman, author of a book on business writing. They sure do, which is why this Wall Street Journal piece has garnered around 600 comments in just a few days. People chime in with their views on the LinkedIn groups I shared it on, as well
. 

Some of us mess up by accident when typos creep in or due to ignorance of the rules of grammar. One of the things that makes me cringe is seeing constructions like "whomsoever wrote this." In a way it's worse than using "who" where "whom" is warranted because the latter is accepted by some as a less formal, conversational style. The person who inserts the m where it is not needed, on the other hand, is trying to appear well-educated enough to know of the word "whom" while showing ignorance of the fact that it is not to be used as a subject pronoun. 

But the most common irritant is the misuse of apostrophes -- sprinkled over the letter s when just he plural form is needed and not the possessive -- or left in "it's" when the writer clearly means the possessive form rather than the contraction of "it is."