ryankemper / writings

This repo will contain various writings (articles, free-form, etc) as I iterate on them. When stuff is ready it will be published somewhere "official" (medium, personal blog, etc - haven't decided specifics yet)
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Voice problem #3

Open 0atman opened 4 years ago

0atman commented 4 years ago

@ryankemper, this issue is more difficult to quantify, but I think it's an important one.

death and serious complications due to COVID-19, while incredibly tragic, affects an extremely limited subset of the population

This is true in relative terms. 1% mortality (or 0.5 or 0.1 or whatever it turns out to be) is relatively small. However, in absolute terms, it's a catastrophe that at some point, in every country, becomes the largest killer. I believe it passed heart attacks and cancer deaths in the US some weeks ago, for example.

When talking about something as chilling as COVID, the voice of your article needs to be chosen carefully. To achieve this, imagine your reader knows someone who has died, and rewrite it to not make them close the article. Good facts must be presented well, otherwise no-one will read them. That's on you, the author.