Does my writing differ according the audience?

Methods adopted

Microsoft Word was used to analyse the readability of 15 texts: five academic papers where I was the primary author; five feature articles I have written for Research Information; and five blog posts I have written for www.davidstuart.co.uk. All tables, pictures, and bullet points were extracted from the documents before carrying out the analysis. The were analysed in terms of:

• Number of words per sentence - generally speaking longer sentances may be considered more difficult to understand.
• Characters per word – longer words are considered more difficult.
• Number of passive sentence – passive sentaces are thought to inhibit the flow of reading and make it more difficult.
• Flesch reading ease – a readability test where the higher the number the simpler it is thought to be. [0.0 - 30.0: best understood by university graduates].

If my writing does indeed vary according to the audience, it would be expected that the results would look like this:

With the academic articles being more difficult to read than the professional articles, and the blog posts being the easiest to read of all.

Results

Academic Papers:

Professional Magazines:

Blog Posts:

Whilst I may not think that there are vast differences in the writing style or vocabulary I use in different forums, reducing it to a few crude numbers would certainly suggest that there are. The only unexpected result was that there were more words per sentance within my blog posts than within my professional magazine articles.

It is also comforting to see that the numbers go in the right direction. If I had discovered that my blog posts were more turgid than my academic articles, it would have probably been time to hang up my keyboard.

Conclusions

The main conclusion is that I am far too easily distracted from work, and if I continue I will probably end up in the poorhouse….although it might be interesting to do a webometric study combining readability with impact factor….

Anyone looking for a cheap hotel in Wolverhampton is likely to quickly come across the Britannia Hotel and the Connaught Hotel. Both are large hotels offering double rooms for £39 a night, and as I had two nights until my girlfriend’s return I thought I would compare the two.

Britannia Hotel

The Room – I was given a double room overlooking the main road, which meant it was quite noisy, even on a Tuesday night.  It had seen better days and there was a noticeable mark on the carpet where the radiator had leaked in the distant past, but it was clean and comfortable. The usual tea, coffee, kettle, and a couple of biscuits.

The Bathroom – The usual soaps, shower gels, shower caps, and a shoeshine kit, and about a million towels.

The TV – Just the five terrestrial channels (and Sky News if memory serves me correctly).

Breakfast – Booking online meant that breakfast was included in the price. It was a buffet breakfast including all the cooked breakfast essentials – even the all important black pudding.

Bars & Restaurant – As well as its own restaurant the hotel has its own bar – The Wave Bar. The Britannia web site claims that it’s a “regular meeting place for theatre-goers”, but I am doubtful. It’s a very cheap bar, and the clientele tend to be locals who are there all day long. Luckily as the hotel is in the centre of town there are plenty of other  places to get a drink.

Service - The staff were polite and efficient.

Connaught Hotel

The Room – I was given a room at the back of the hotel, but it was by no means quiet, lots of noise from the lift. The room had a stupidly sized bed, as it was in fact two single beds pushed together. Nonetheless clean and tidy, and not as rundown as the Britannia.

The Bathroom – Shower gel – like it or lump it – which is very annoying as I’m a soap man and was in the mood to shine my shoes.

The TV – The main five, plus half a dozen others, including Sky 1, Sky Sports News, and Nickelodeon.

Breakfast – To have breakfast included was £45 (£52 for two people). I don’t know if it was just because it was quiet, but rather than a cooked breakfast buffet you had to order it. Full English consisted of 2 sausages, bacon, fried egg, beans, and half a tomato; which is pretty rubbish as it costs £9.95 if its not included in your room price -although you can have as much cereal and toast as you want. Unfortunately breakfast was accompanied by GMTV on a giant screen.

Bars and Restaurant – The hotel seems addicted to have ITV1 on televisions in public rooms, and my evening meal was accompanied by Emmerdale in the hotel bar. Both the beer and the food were expensive for a cheap hotel: £3.20 for a pint of Carling, and £9.95 for a burger and chips. However, by being a bit further out of town they have a captive audience. In the end I paid £10.05 for a cheese sandwich, some onion rings, and a pint of Carling. It definitely wasn’t worth the money, and despite asking me twice whether I wanted the onion rings and sandwich at the same time, they came about 10minutes apart.

Service – Bloody awful from first to last. Despite booking through the hotel’s web site, and giving my card details at the time, they had no record of my booking or paying; this means I now have to keep an eye on my bank account for the next couple of days to see if they’ve charged me twice. Ordering both drinks and breakfast involved a lot of standing around waiting for staff to appear, or else trying to hunt them down. Even checking out the hotel was annoying, as the receptionist failed to even bother looking up from the computer screen as I handed her the key and she grunted a response. And for some reason the hotel has decided to save on signs, so if you want to know where anything is bar, restaurant, lift, or toilet, you have to ask.

Conclusion

Next time I lock myself out I’ll be choosing the Britannia for a cheap Wolverhampton hotel. It may be more rundown than the Connaught, but I preferred the overall experience. Those who prefer their hotels ‘all fur coat no knickers’ will prefer the Connaught -  their addiction to ITV1 says it all.

[Nb. I locked myself out without  my laptop, so have no experience of the wi-fi, and I don't really have enough hair to test the hairdriers.]

[UPDATE: Indeed the Connaught Hotel did charge me twice! It turns out they charged me once for taking the room, and once for failing to turn up and take the room!!! They have assured me I will be getting a refund, although I don't have much confidence in their abilities.]

“Britain’s benefits bonanza: How 100,000 households rake in more than average wage in welfare every year”

Such stories are just part of the usual right-wing crap – along with bringing back hanging, workhouses, and compulsory Latin. They couple their news story with the details of the Davey family’s lifestyle – 42″ tv, people carrier, etc…obviously to the average Daily Mail reader anything more than gruel, sterilization, and a sound thrashing is too good for them.

What is clearly missing from the story is the fact the Claire Davey deserves every penny as a national treasure! She’s about 11 months pregnant with her eighth child by my calculations. When they first wheeled the family out on April 13th she was 7 months pregnant, and when they repeated the story 3 days later they were even more  precise saying she had 9 weeks to go, and today she is seven weeks overdue! Will she ever have her eighth baby, or will she just keep growing larger and larger as the Daily Mail wheel the family out again and again.

There are a couple of points here: 1) the Daily Mail is a crap newspaper 2) Shouldn’t someone be stepping in to stop the repeating of a story with no news value which is so obviously to the detriment of the children (if indeed the family even exists).

[nb. Oops - this post was actually intended for my Politico-Mania blog...oh well.]

So my phone of choice – Nokia’s N900:

Actually Nokia don’t market it as a phone, in fact it’s a small Linux(Maemo)-based tablet computer that happens to have some phone capabilities – even something as universal as MMS requires the installing of  an additional application. Nonetheless it is a great little computer, and pretty much anything you can do on a Linux laptop you can do on the N900, including running OpenOffice and GIMP. When I updated from an N95 to the HTC Touch Pro I was disappointed that I didn’t notice a significant difference in what I could do with the HTC, this time I really can.

Great things about the N900:

• A great browser with Flash 9.4 – I’ve pretty much stopped using apps to interact with web sites as the N900 browsing experience is so close to that of the desktop. You can even interact with the full versions of Google Wave and Google Docs! It’s also great for the streaming of BBC content – one day everyone will use HTML 5 and we won’t need Flash, but for now I’d rather be with it than without it.
• FM Transmitter – I’m not sure when I’ll ever need an FM transmitter, but nonetheless there is something very enjoyable about transmitting your own sounds through the radio.
• FCam (and FCamera) – An open source C++ API to help create new camera applications – i.e., Camera 2.0.
• Macro lens:

On top of which the usual essentials, e.g., GPS, QWERTY keyboard, touch screen, massive storage (32GB!!).

The N900 is by no means a phone suitable to everyone, but if you were the sort of person who mourned the passing of the home computer in favour of the next generation of consoles, then the N900 is for you. In fact, the chances are there will be an emulator of your old home computer available, and with a QWERTY keyboard and 3.5″ screen there are no excuses not to be programming away on it.

So what do my readers pay to read? Highly insightful works on social media, library and information science, and various metrics? Do they take into account the books I’ve read and recommended (or at least linked to)?

The only book someone bought that I had actually linked-to or read was Click: What We Do Online and Why It Matters, although one of my readers also bought Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.
The most books, however, were sold to a demographic my blog had mostly been ignoring – the teenager girl into vampire romance:

I’m not sure why someone would decide to buy 4 Twilight books after reading about a monkey on Chatroulette – but that person made me £0.88!

I still have to pick a theme, and then add all the side bar junk that is essential to any blog, but hopefully it will be a visual delight sooner rather than later. There will, without a doubt be a few teething problems as old and new URLs fail to match-up, and other issues I have yet to think of, but hopefully those problems will be solved in the next couple of days.

If you want to see what the original Webometric Thoughts looked like, or are occassionally nostalgic for Blogger’s old fashioned ways, you can always relive Webometric Thoughts in it’s traditional glory at oldwebometrics.blogspot.com

The aim of the 4amproject is to gather a collection of photos from around the world at the magical time of 4am. Everyone can take part and join in! All you need is a camera. We want to see what you see at that moment in time on that one day. What’s your view at 4am?

Obviously, as a man who needs at least eight hours sleep a night, my view is that I should have been fast asleep dreaming of unicorns or some such tosh. However, my girlfriend had other ideas. Although I contemplated sending her out into the night with hundreds of pounds worth of photographic equipment to confront the last drunken stragglers staggering home from the pubs and clubs of Wolverhampton, I knew everyone would blame me if she ended up mugged or dead in a ditch (however misplaced such blame would be).

It’s been about 15 years since I was serious about photography: with multiple lenses, filters, films, and access to a dark-room. 4am didn’t strike me as the best time to start again, so I went along purely in the role of observer – with the exception of ‘twitpicing’ a single photo from the worst camera-phone in the world at 4am:

The world is very different at 4am, and all in all it was a pleasant stroll around Wolverhampton’s West-End:

View 4am Project in a larger map
Without a doubt, the most interesting – and least tiring – part of the day has been watching some of the other pictures, posts, and films that have been put online throughout the day.

-Lee Allen’s video of other 4am participants in Wolves
-4am Project Flickr Group
..and of course…
-My girlfriend’s view of the world at 4am

What’s particularly interesting is that hardly any of the traffic has come directly from TechCrunch, in fact only 112 of the visits over the last three days. Instead the traffic has been mostly a massive surge of visits to my home page from StumbleUpon. I’m not sure why, but nonetheless – Hello Stumbleupon Users *waves*

As a particularly unsocial social media researcher I decided to do a quick quantitative study of first impressions of the people I came across on the site: clothed or naked/obscene, male or female. As I didn’t particularly want to engage with anyone, but needed to put the web cam on to encourage the broadest cross-section, I set it up for Mr Shifter:

Results
Out of 100 web cams in which the subject was identifiable.
79% were men.
5 contained more than one man.
11 were obscene.
10% were female.
2 contained more than one woman.
1 was obscene.
2% were mixed sex groups
9% were objects- mostly signs saying “show me you boobs”.
In addition, I also came across one camera supposedly of a man who had just hung himself…I wasn’t too sure where to place that one.

So what did I find out? The world is mostly just looking to talk, there’s some weirdos out there, and one bloke who wanted to see the monkey dance…and was thrilled when he obliged.

I’ve just finished reading Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar & Co. (via @research_inform), which gives advice on making sure your journal articles are indexed and highly ranked by academic search engines (e.g., Google Scholar). There are numerous points I disagree with on both an ethical and a practical level:

• “…tools that help in selecting the right keywords, Google Trends, Google Insights, Google Adwords”
• “Synonyms of important keywords should also be mentioned a few times in the body of your text, so that the article may be found by someone who does not know the common terminology used in the research field.”

When I write an academic paper my primary audience is academics in my specialised field, not the wider public that are likely to use different vocabulary and dominate services like Google Trends by their shear numbers. As an academic reading a paper I wouldn’t appreciate the introduction of inconsistency and ambiguity through the use of synonyms, which are necessarily near-synonyms in the precise scientific world.

• “..to achieve a good ranking in Google Scholar, many citations are essential. Google Scholar seems not to differentiate between self-citations and citations by third parties.”

Self citation has always been rife and needs little encouragement. Later they state that “…any articles you have read that relate to your current research paper should be cited“; although surely discretion is an important factor unless we are going to shoe-horn in crap and further exaggerate the Mathew effect of the high ranked papers.

• “…publish the article on the author’s home page…an author who does not have a Web page might post the article on an institutional Web page”

Ignoring the curious turn of phrase, the general consensus is that the vast majority of academics should publish in their institutional repository irrespective of whether they have their own web site. The institutional repositories should have the procedures in place to ensure long-term archiving.

• “…an article that includes outdated words might be replaced by either updating the existing article or publishing a new version on the author’s web site.”

As the authors acknowledge “…it may be considered misbehaviour by other researchers.” At last we have a point we agree on.

As you have probably guessed from the above criticisms, I thought that the article was a piece of crap. Academic SEO should in no way effect how you write an academic paper, or the subjects we choose to write about. Unfortunately academic SEO is a topic that is likely to get a lot more attention amongst bad scientists if another practice I recently heard of takes off: Paying academics bonuses per article. A colleague told me last week how his former university had a pot of money from which academics were paid €4,000 (split between the number of authors) for articles published in certain ‘quality’ journals. It is a small step to start paying individuals for articles that reach a certain threshold of citations, at which point we will have finally dumbed-down science.