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Old 2011-12-06, 08:02   Link #16
felix
sleepyhead
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: event horizon
Interesting you would call it critical. That’s often attributed negative sense even when we’re, supposedly, praising the damn things. I’ll take it you actually meant honest and thorough.

Your dilemma is actually quite simple. You, like everyone else, have an opinion. There is nobody else in the world who has your opinion. There might be people who share a similar opinion, but that’s only on the surface. Fundamentally no matter how much you agree with someone else you’ll see it one way and they see it another way. Semi-ambiguous mediums such as text and internet chat don’t really help. Take this post for example, the text itself is not my opinion, obviously, just a medium for conveying certain thoughts which I’ve concocted based on my own opinion, not an complete clone of my opinion into text form.

Now there are two types of opinion, for the sake of clarity I’ll refer to them as meta and factual. The factual is essentially not an opinion but an understanding of something. You can’t have an opinion on who’s the director of a show for example. With out anything backing you up at best you can guess it’s something like “Director X”, and someone can come and correct you that it’s actually “Director Y”. The meta side on the other hand is not something tangible. For example, I like the color red, and let’s just say you like the color blue. You can’t come and prove to me I should like the color blue. Deliberating over which color is best is also quite pointless. In an ideal world everything would be either meta or factual and we would live happy ever after, but the world sucks so we actual have things that are described by both. Tv shows are one such thing, plot events can be described factually, while feelings (sympathy, empathy, admiration, etc) invoked by the characters and story are meta. And long and behold people love to mix this shit up: “Clearly X is the better color-director and not Blue!” If a discussion on a show sounds too philosophical to be true, it’s probably because it’s stupid, no really! It’s not hard to make the distinction, it’s merely an writing hurdle.

From a purely editorial perspective I’d say the following are the key issues I see every day (in order):
  • fake objectivity
  • hidden agendas
  • scrambled thought process
Let’s get something straight, being objective does not mean talking about the good and the bad! Being objective means you’re not tacking sides. If you’re just ranting on about how fabulous it is or how godawful it is, and then in your other half (at best it would be half anyway) you’re just making some half ass tone deaf mention of the so called pro’s or con’s then you sir have done nothing more then fabricate some fancy advertising for yourself with the concept of objectivity. If you want to be objective don’t take sides! You don’t even have to talk about both, just talk about which one you feel like talking about. When you throw any sort of exaggerated claim or foregone conclusion, just like a tiny drop of ink in a clear glass of water, that’s it you fail.

Hidden agendas are kind of the same thing as above. How many times have you read (particularly on forums) this so called “indepth” analysis on something, but when really it’s painfully obvious the person writing it has no passion for what he’s writing. Which is not to say he doesn’t agree with what he’s saying, but rather that he’s writing it for anything but the content in question. Now we all have ulterior motives for the things we write, but what I’m talking about are people that either really don’t give a damn about the point of their analysis and are just using it to vent. On forums it’s usually under the form of this “political movement” for or against a series, and sometimes even a group. It’s not necessarily even hidden, ie. “<insert makeshift opinion/analysis> And this is why fans/haters/everyone should-like/suck blah blah blah”. Nobody cares for someone else’s dishonest opinion, okey? so make sure you avoid this like the plague.

On a last note, if you’re going to write about something even if you’re not a wizard with paragraphs and words at least try to have some resemblance of structure. Anything that can be roughly distinguished is fine, just don’t throw all your ideas into one big mess. It’s annoying enough just reading it, but typically this also results in a general state of confusion. So go the extra mile and put a little brainpower into more then your sentences. And NO, having one big paragraph or just big paragraphs doesn’t save you from it; a large body of text such as giant paragraphs should have structure in and of itself.
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