Online copy… writing for man & machine
The pun is dead reports Press Gazette’s Dog Watches Blog. It’s the other side to the argument that new media sets words free. As more of us receive our news via RSS feeds and the like, we need meaningful headlines to click on not jokes taken out of context.
More worryingly, machines have not only started writing, they reckon they’re better at it than people.
Spammers increasingly place random text at the bottom of their messages to make each unique and help it past the filters. At first glace such random jottings can appear quite authentic; one randomly generated ‘scientific paper’ was recently accepted at a conference. It seems nobody read it properly. (The technical have a reputation for writing in gobbledygook, so perhaps the reviewers feared admitting to incomprehension would make them look stupid.)
The technical response comes from the Indiana University School of Informatics, which has come up with an Inauthentic Paper Detector. This could not only save conference organisers’ blushes, it could be incorporated in spam filters and by search engines like Google to weed out meaningless computer generated content. But it’s rubbish.
The problem with the Inauthentic Paper Detector is that it is really a human error detector. It searches for repetitive patterns, for example, that good writers avoid. So while bad human writings score well, good human writings are labelled fake. That could lead to well written content being pushed down the search engine rankings, because some robot thinks it contains too few errors to be real. We’ll have to switch off the spell check and grammar checkers to get ahead.
Contact Stephen Newton
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[...] reports of the death of the pun may be exaggerated [...]
SEO copywriting: Scientists save the pun / August 3rd, 2007, 10:43 am / #
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