Short is good, clear is better

Swiftmud. Softmud. PIP. GMA. CO.

All of these are acronyms that have appeared in the newspaper for which I used to work. How many of them do you know? As someone who had just moved to Florida, I didn't know a single one. I was told they are common acronyms to the area.

Funny, I queried about six other employees and not a single one knew. It seems obvious to me that if seven newspaper workers (reporters and design deskers) haven't got a clue, a good many regular old readers won't, either. Also remember that most of our population hasn't lived here forever so it's not like people grew up hearing these terms.

Swiftmud and Softmud were the subject of a lot of debate. I see these terms used in various area newspapers, but haven't run across it anywhere else.

Swiftmud is the Southwest Florida Water Management District.
Softmud is the South Florida Water Management District.

One of the most confusing stories I've ever attempted to wade through involved these organizations and the repeated use of Swiftmud and Softmud. What's wrong with southwest florida district vs. south florida district. Yes, it's more characters, but brevity does you no good if it's not accompanied by clarity.

PIP is Personal Injury Protection and surfaces in automobile insurance stories. Again, why should I have to remember PIP? Can't you just write what it is? I'm YOUR customer, after all.

GMA is the Growth Management Act. I had an argument with the reporter who used this. He wanted to save space. So he stuck in acronyms instead of doing a little self-editing and figuring out what parts of his stories were too technical and behind-the-scenes to be of value to readers. All of his stories were too long.

CO. Dear Lord. This is certificate of occupancy. What editor or reporter would ever think the average person would know this?

Printing an agenda

At one of the newspapers in my area, the city government reporter's idea of advancing a City Council meeting is to take a copy of the meeting's agenda, throw in a few extra words to string the thing together, and print.

As someone who covered that beat for years, this drives me absolutely nuts. I can't believe his editors haven't put a stop to this lazy excuse for work.

Aside from the fact that he's shortchanging all of his readers because these agendas are written by lawyers and difficult, if not impossible, to understand, he's making life harder for himself, too. Doing the legwork for the meeting in advance not only means a better advance story, it also means a reporter has a good understanding of the topic come meeting time and can save time when writing the follow-up story.

Since it's obvious this reporter usually doesn't understand what happened at meetings (sign: stringing together paragraphs of quotes, using copiuos amounts of jargon and huge holes in his stories) being forced to write an actual story to advance a meeting would help him out twofold.

Lip reading

I recently realized that I've dropped a long-time habit of mine. I guess it happened while I was working as a page designer and I never picked it back up.

The habit? Moving my lips while editing. Or just plain reading aloud.

It's a great help when self-editing; I began doing it while I was reporting and carried it with to the copy desk back in Texas. It suddenly hit me earlier this week when I was rereading something I'd written a couple of months ago and I found two very basic errors right away. My writing has suffered since I quit self-editing this way.

My new goal is to get back into this habit.