As a graduate student in communication who just finished writing my thesis on political campaigns, I have read dozens upon dozens of articles, both scholarly and not, written on political communications. Recently I read Colin Delany’s Online Politics 101 article from ePolitics. In the article, Delany went into great depth explaining the different (possible) components of an online campaign. While I would give Delany an ‘A’ for the breadth and depth of this piece, the quality of writing was inconsistent and at times incoherent.
As I say, Delany does a good job of explaining why the internet is a useful tool, describing how easy it is, how it can disseminate information quickly and to all corners of the world, and the benefits of the interconnectivity of the internet. He details rules to be followed for online politics in order to maximize the benefits of the internet. Delany then explains nearly every mode, or at least every mode that I’m aware of, for getting a message out to the public online. From tips to creating effective websites, to email lists, to social networking tools, and more, Delany provides an in-depth outline on how to use each of these tactics effectively.
While his content was informative and showed his vast knowledge on the topic, his editing could use some work. As I was reading, I stumbled upon this sentence “How much is does online politics have in common…” How much is does? I took it to be a slight error and continued reading. “Is does” was followed by “Your readers don’t want clever- the want to find what they’re looking for”, and “if readers can’t see how old it is, the can’t know IF…”, and “…a person’s propensity to give money to a campaigh…”, and “…how does a search engine finds your site…” As I’m re-writing these sentences, I notice little green and red squiggly lines under certain words. Shouldn’t “the” be “they”? Why, yes it should. Did you mean “campaign” rather than “campaigh”? Well, as a matter of fact, he did. As someone with such a profound knowledge of computers, I hope that Delany would know these elementary word processing editing tools as well. Delany referred to credibility several times through his 65 page article, and, for me, I find credibility to drop as spelling errors increase.
In contrast to Delany’s lengthy article, Dr. Alan Rosenblatt’s four articles on The Dimensions of a Digitally Networked Campaign were brief and focused, while being professional and well written. His articles clearly indicate and detail the 1-, 2-, and 3-Dimensions of digitally networked campaigning, describing their level of measurement, the direction of communication, the activity, and the amount of message control for each.
I happened to appreciate both the straight-to-the-point writing of Rosenblatt as well as the colloquial jargon used by Delany. I found Delany’s article entertaining (and informative) to read. Having said this, I thought about how, when sifting through articles on the internet, trying to broaden my knowledge on a topic, I tend to discredit those where I am distracted from the content by keeping tallies of the spelling errors. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, of LOL and J, I have noticed a growing trend, and Delany’s article brings this to light but is by no means an extreme, of unedited and sometimes less than professional work on the internet. If one wishes to be taken seriously then write in whatever style or dialect you choose, just please pay attention to those green and red squiggles.
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