Last week, BFSkinner enlightened us on the finer points of "How to Write Good." He did a pretty good job of explaining some tips on how to make your Daily Kos diary shine, how to convey your message clearly and effectively, and also, how to write good.
But there's one thing BFSkinner didn't tell you in that diary: He didn't tell you what NOT to do. And that's what I'm here for!
In honor of Bill Maher, I've got some New Rules for Kossacks. I'm gonna be the Yin to BFSkinner's Yang. It's a meta-explosion and you're all welcome to join the ride! So sit back and enjoy my meta tips on "How to Blog Good."
(Oh, and I mean most of these rules in good fun. Mostly.)
New Rule: No more diaries with titles like "Dear Mr. President" or "An Open Letter to President Obama."
Look, I know you like to read and write about politics, and I know you spent a long time crafting that awesome response to a policy decision or a speech given by the President the other day......but please, please, PLEASE give your diary a better title than "Dear Mr. President." I'm sorry, but that's a boring title. There are at least 258,749 titles you could have chosen for your diary that are better than "Dear Mr. President." If I see a diary with that title, I probably won't read it. If I won't read it, I'm pretty sure the President probably won't either.
Yeah yeah, I know, it's just a title. Don't judge a book by its cover, right? Well, here's the thing: Having a good book is no excuse not to have a good cover! What, you can't take one or two minutes to pick out a better title than "Dear Mr. President"? I'm no literary historian, but I'm fairly certain that Catcher in the Rye would not have sold as well if J.D. Salinger called it The Angry Teenager Who Has Problems, and Pride and Prejudice would not have had any staying power if Jane Austen had instead called it British People Who Have Romantic Misunderstandings.
The White House gets a lot of letters. You shouldn't expect that the President will read your diary if you give it the same cookie-cutter title shared by just about every letter to President Obama. That would be like expecting LeBron James to know your name and your entire life story because you said you're his "biggest fan."
New Rule: Stop repeating your intro in the body of your diary.
You know what I'm talking about -- the users who copy and paste their intro word-for-word into the rest of the diary, as though I didn't get it the first time. It's unnecessary and annoying. I have no idea why they do this. Maybe they thought I wasn't paying attention? Maybe they didn't have enough material before they hit "Publish Diary," so they lifted their own stuff and duplicated it to fill the diary out?
Listen, I read your intro once. I don't want to read it again. If you were writing a paper for your college English class, you wouldn't write the same paragraph twice if you needed to hit the 8-page minimum. You just wouldn't. Maybe you could sneak a duplicate paragraph past one lazy teacher, but there's a lot more than just one person reading your Daily Kos diary. So don't do it here!
(By the way, slippytoad had the seminal diary on advocating this New Rule.)
New Rule: If you ever have to write the sentence "I know I'm gonna be HR'd for this," don't post it.
Pretty self-explanatory. If you think that what you're about to write is going to get yourself HR'd into oblivion, chances are you're right. There's plenty of evidence in the HR room if you don't believe me. Save yourself the trouble now and Don't. Click. Publish.
New Rule: Don't send me hate mail unless you're fully aware that I'm going to ridicule the dumb things you say in it.
I have to admit that when kos started doing his weekend feature "Saturday Hate Mail-apalooza," I didn't see a whole lot of point to it at first, except to laugh at a few idiot conservatives who have nothing better to do with their time than write racist, homophobic screeds. Well, after getting a fantastic hate mail message in my own inbox a couple weeks ago, I now recognize just how cathartic it is to laugh at the morons who take the time to write them.
Here are a few choice excerpts from that little gem I received in my inbox:
Fuck the DKos "community" and FUCK YOU you piece of shit.
Puling whining bleating pigs in preschool slop.
Fucking jackbooted America-hating swine.
But at least you got your fucking Focus on the Family Superbowl.
Jizzbag.
You know what my favorite part of that e-mail was? It wasn't the description of me as a "puling whining bleating pig in preschool slop" (though I do admire the way that phrase rolls off the tongue). No, my favorite part was the fact that I was blamed for Tim Tebow's Focus on the Family ad because my username is SuperBowlXX. You know, just like how Meteor Blades causes meteors to crash into the earth, and how Angry Mouse causes mice to become angry and spread filth in people's houses. Who knew our Daily Kos usernames have so much power and influence?
I'd watch out, Plutonium Page and Devilstower. If you two aren't careful, you might unleash a deadly combo of nuclear waste and Satan onto the blogosphere!
And finally, New Rule: We need to retire the phrases "Grab a Mop" and "11th Dimensional Chess."
Ooh, I know, I'm gonna take some heat for the first one, but let me explain.
A mop is used to clean up a mess that's been left on the ground. You don't use a mop to stop another mess from happening again. Grabbing a mop is something you do when that glass of milk goes crashing to the floor because it was teetering precariously over the edge of the dinner table. It's not something you do when you're working to fix some of the worst economic and foreign policy crises this country has faced in decades. Besides, even if you clean up that spilled milk, then you're just cleaning up the mess -- but there's nothing to prevent you from spilling another glass of milk in the future unless you take further steps.
Take the economic meltdown, for example. We all know how the geniuses over at the big banks like Goldman Sachs and AIG recklessly peddled billions of dollars in risky home mortgages, all while home foreclosures skyrocketed. Naturally, you'd think the robber barons who helped create the mess that screwed over millions of American taxpayers would be put behind bars, left to beg for mercy in front of a judge for their greed and negligence. Naturally, you'd be wrong. Both Goldman Sachs and AIG not only received billions in bailout money, but their executives received huge bonuses for 2009. Even if Congress "grabs a mop" to pass legislation like a jobs bill or credit bill to help homeowners, there's still the problem of the complete lack of regulation over Wall Street, and the huge battle that corporate lobbyists are waging to prevent any serious regulation from being implemented. How do we know there won't be another economic collapse in the future with these huge Wall Street banks at the forefront?
Or, take the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay during the Bush Administration. There is plenty of evidence that Bush/Cheney officials authorized the indefinite detention and torture of detainees, and refused to give them criminal trials to prove their innocence, even though many of these detainees were actually found later to be innocent. Yet, there's Dick Cheney on the airwaves, still walking as a free man and proudly bragging about how he supported and authorized waterboarding. President Obama may have "grabbed a mop" last year by signing an executive order banning torture, but his administration has steadfastly refused to pursue prosecutions of those in the Bush Administration who authorized war crimes. What's to stop a future administration from re-instituting a torture regime if you don't punish those responsible for creating one?
The truth is, our elected officials and our citizenry need a lot more than just a mop to clean up these messes. They need to take steps to ensure that these disasters never occur again. If I could tinker with the slogan, using the glass of milk analogy again, here's how I would rephrase it:
Grab a mop, clean up the mess, put the glass of milk back on the table, put a lid on the glass, put protective rails on the table edge.....and from now on, if you're going to feed the Republicans any milk, give them their baby bottles, because that's all they deserve to drink.
As for the phrase "11th dimensional chess," we need to abandon that immediately because it dishonors our 11th dimensional overlord, K'Throxematai (pictured below). He could beat your chess-playing ass in at least 10 different dimensions.