Writing would be rewarding if it wasn't all carets and sticks.

Week #3, Sept. 10, 2009.

Class focused on how to get a story started quickly, how to end it punctually, and how to write it in AP style. There were four discussions this week:

1. Feedback on the High School interview
2. AP Basics Handout
3. Discussion and Submitted Romeo and Juliet Assignment
4. Emancipation Proclamation Story Assigned

1. Feedback on High School interview
Professor Eisman peppered the High School assignment with comments and returned the papers to students. As she handed out the pages, she made some suggestions for the class. I am going to extend some of her comments a little bit.

It is easier to create attention-grabbing writing from an interesting interview than from a bland interview. The stories she recalled were of experiences of white exclusivity, church school and Guam. I, who struggled to find an exciting anecdote with my subject, had never considered doing another interview to find something fresh. Better ingredients, better pizza.

In the news business, a writer has to get into the point. It's not an essay-- where an author can take a paragraph to set up some context. In news, the context is right now. The world that readers are living in. Readers are interested in what is happening. In week 2, we looked at some effective leads and learned a formula: (who) did (what), according to (who). A story should start like lighter fluid-- fast and with danger and a flash of light.

Don't end with an opinion. After a long struggle to write down only hard-news fact, it seems tempting to end it with a penetrating conclusion that cuts through to the gut truth. Sometimes it's a wonderful insight, but more often it just looks like the writer's judging the situation. That brings the reader's focus onto the author.

Always read the writing aloud. This is a key to editing. Sometimes, when you write quickly, you make mistakes that need to be caught. Reading aloud helps prevent jargon, unclear language, unintentional alliteration and subject/verb agreement errors. Read my lips... aloud.

Don't assume. If you're wrong, you misinform the public, hurt your credibility and make your source think you didn't listen. In the real world, you should call your source back and ask another couple questions. The only assumption you should make is that people with intimate knowledge of the event will be reading the story. And they will know... Assumptions aren't careless, they're criminal.

Use quotes sparingly. Good quotes are like chocolate chips; a few sprinkled into cookies makes them delicious, but you wouldn't want to bake an entire bar of chocolate. By using a different recipe, you can make delicious cookies that don't use chocolate chips.

2. AP Style Handout

In class, we got a big piece of paper with some pointers about AP style. This is a good resource for the upcoming style quizzes.

My top five lessons:
1. Internet is capitalized. So is the Web and CD-ROM, but not online, cyberspace or email.
2. Some descriptive job titles are not capitalized. ex. assistant coach, astronaut.
3. Write out percent. ex. Half of something is 50 percent.
4. Do not use parenthesis to set off a political party. ex. Rep. Joe Willson, R-S.C., shouted at the President of the United States. (not Joe Wilson (R-SC), like on TV).
5. Heroin was once a trademark. ???

3. Lessons from Romeo and Juliet leads
Professor Eisman led the class on a discussion of what should go in the lead of the story. It seems like there is a simple formula:

discovered dead bodies > grieving families
and
grieving families > yesterday's dead bodies

I wonder if professional newsrooms have a hierarchy like this for determining the layout of stories. Certainly writers organize within stories by the inverted pyramid method. Do editors know how many dead civilians is equal to a dead B-list celebrity? Does someone actually keep an A-list and a B-list? Who? How do you measure celebrity (outside of the ability to make news)? Do news editors make celebrities by giving them prominent coverage?

It seems like the key to a news item is to deliver the five W's as quickly as possible in the story. That means leads should try to hit two or three categories in the first sentence.


4. Abraham Lincoln

The entire class had a lively discussion about what the lead for a news story about Abraham Lincoln should be. This was really a discussion about what were the important facts in the story. Some people thought the "4 million slaves" the most important part of the story. Others made the case that "only in rebel/seceded states" should be in the first sentence.

Earlier I wrote "in news, the context is right now." I think its interesting that we were having so much difficulty deciding which word to use, or how portray the announcement. We trying to put the news together, without any real sense of the context. The news lead would be what an average Sept. 22, 1862 American didn't know on Sept. 21. The Honors students in the multi-media center had different ideas of what that was. I think that made it a lot harder.