Bad WaPo

Erik Wemple writes about a WaPo style convention I like to call the Rule of Appositives. I use a lot of nesting in my own writing—I have to, since I'm writing about a topic for people who aren't necessarily familiar with that topic, one that has a very particular argot. So bracketed explanations don't bother me: they're efficient. But at the newspaper, the Rule is, where there's a way for an appositive, there's a will for an appositive. Wemple find two examples of things that the WaPo explains that it probably doesn't need to explain—the iPod ("an expensive music-playing device that has become a pop-culture icon") and blogs ("an online update with much of the same news but viewable by anyone with a Web connection"). You gotta assume that some portion of the newspaper's readership overlaps with the percent of the population who made the iPod popular and use the Internet.