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CHAPTER 9 Writing to Be Read
Overview
Surprising as it may be, many successful reporters have been saved from embarrassing
themselves by rewrite people and copy editors. But it is getting tougher than ever to break
into journalism without writing skills. In fact, some editors today are looking for outstanding
writers in the belief that reporting skills can be taught on the job.
To many journalists today, writing begins and ends with the lead. But good writing is
much more than that. In this chapter, we reassert the importance of good writing and help
Teaching Tips
You might consider throwing quick grammar and usage warm-up questions to your students
at the start of each class all semester long. You might also want to give regular grammar and
usage quizzes to help reinforce the importance of the mechanics of good writing. And, of
course, you can have your students work on exercises to strengthen their language muscles.
Lecture Notes
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Selections from the Los Angeles Times.
B. A challenge to produce good writing, even literature.
II. GOOD WRITING BEGINS WITH GOOD REPORTING
A. Find the details that will help tell the story.
III. ACCURATE, SPECIFIC DETAILS
A. Use concrete examples
abstractions.
B. appeal to the five senses (touch, taste, sight, sound, smell).
C. Use words precisely words should mean exactly what you intend them to mean.
IV. COHERENCE
A. Decide on the order of elements chronology is often a luxury, so create an outline.
B. Select the proper sentence structure simple vs. compound vs. complex.
1. Compound equates two or more ideas without comment.
2. Complex allows you to show sequence and cause/effect, among other things.
C. Use the precise conjunction subordinating (if, since, while, after, until, etc.);
coordinating (and, or, but, for, nor, so, yet).
D. Use transitions words and phrases that show logical progression of story structure
and ideas; road signs directing traffic.
1.
2. Parallelism.
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3. Chronology and references to time.
V. CONCISENESS AND SIMPLICITY
A. Be concise.
1. Eliminate some subject areas.
2. Eliminate redundancies.
3. Challenge intensive and qualifying adverbs.
4. Train yourself to value brevity.
B. Keep it simple.
1. Ask sources for simpler explanations.
2. If necessary, paraphrase and check for accuracy.
VI. CORRECT AND EFFECTIVE LANGUAGE
A. Figures of speech simile and metaphor.
B. Careful word choice.
1.
2. Avoid jargon.
3. Be precise (will vs. would).
C. Bias-free language.
1. Sexist or racist language is imprecise.
2. Context matters.
3. The freedom to choose precisely the right word is both exhilarating and dangerous.
D. Correct grammar and punctuation.
1. Dangling participles.
2. Subject-verb disagreement.
3. Pronoun-antecedent disagreement.
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4. Misplaced modifiers.
5. Improper punctuation.
VII. THE TOOLS OF NARRATION
A. Allow readers to see the action, to make stories as entertaining as they are interesting.
B. Scenes.
1. You have to be there to capture the sights, sounds, smells.
2. Get the sensory details in your notebook.
3. Work scenes into the story.
C. Dialogue gets the writer out of the scene.
D. Anecdotes stories embedded in stories that help entertain while informing.
1. Anecdotes are hard to get.
2. Ask sources for examples and illustrations.
3. Ask superlative questions (best ever, worst ever, funniest, etc.).
E. Sense of person describe subjects physically; tell what s in their mind.
Class Activities and Discussion Questions
Activity 1: Choose three or four different news events, and then post two different news
stories about each event on the classroom wall one story by the Associated Press and one
story by a major metro newspaper (The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street
Journal or USA Today). Put students in pairs, and have them stand at a station and read both
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Activity 2: In a computer lab with Internet access, give students 20 to 30 minutes to find
published examples of similes, metaphors, scenes, dialogue, anecdotes and foreshadowing.
Magazines that include longer takeout pieces often give writers more room to include these
Choose a category (for example, similes).
All students stand. Randomly choose one student to share his or her example.
Tell the rest of the students to remain standing if their example is better.
Choose another of the still-standing students to share.
The goal of this activity is to get students to assess the quality of their examples and generate
discussion about what makes these literary devices work well or badly. Discussion questions:
Is the figure of speech unique? Colorful? Interesting? Excessive? Too complicated? Why is
one example more (or less) effective than another?
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Activity 3: Bring in recordings of, or online links to, several radio news stories. Try to
include some AM news radio stories, as well as some NPR-style stories. Play the stories for
students, and have them note the transitions in each story. Transitions can be smooth and
seamless, or they can be bumpy and forced. Ask students to rank the transitions they heard
Activity 4: Pick stories from sports, features, news and business that use figures of speech.
Give students the basic facts from the stories, and ask them to work in pairs to create specific
analogies, metaphors or similes to be included in the story. For example, you might tell the
students the basic facts from a story about a lopsided baseball game and ask them to come up
through their relief pitchers like someone flipping through a rack of che
Activity 5: Since 1982, Professor Scott Rice and the English Department at San Jose State
University have sponsored the annual Bulwer-Lytton
George Bulwer-Lytton, who began his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford
0 grand prize winner, by Molly Ringle of Seattle:
stolen rendezvous with a kiss a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking
a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the
Prose category:
The dark, drafty old house was lopsided and decrepit, leaning in on itself, the way an
aging possum carrying a very heavy, overcooked drumstick in his mouth might list to
one side if he were also favoring a torn Achilles tendon, assuming possums have them.
-up in the 2010 Purple Prose category, by Dennis
Doberneck of Paso Robles, Calif.:
The wind whispering through the pine trees and the sun reflecting off the surface of
Lake Tahoe like a scattering of diamonds was an idyllic setting, while to the south the
same sun struggled to penetrate a sky choked with farm dust and car exhaust over
Bakersfield, a town spread over the lower San Joaquin Valley like a brown stain on a
rtunately, this story takes place.
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Solutions to Textbook Exercises
1. The goal, of course, is to help students recognize prepositional phrases and reduce them.
2. Your journalism blog. Concrete details: The entire paragraph is full of concrete details;
there are no similes in the paragraph. The verbs are strong and specific
s should reflect
on how it takes excellent reporting to be able to generate this kind of detailed paragraph.
3. a. ensure
b. annoying
c. refuted
d. mitigating
4. The focus of this exercise is to have students practice writing that develops a sense of
person, as described at the end of the chapter.
5. This exercise is similar to exercise 4, except now the emphasis is on developing a sense of
place in student writing.
7. Sample: Comparing the student council budget to the local city budget is like comparing a
cherry tomato to a Roma . . . they look somewhat similar, but one is more than twice the
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size of the other. (The student coun
7. In Microsoft Word, you can measure the readability score of any story. Select Tools, then
After a story is checked for spelling and grammar, the Flesch Readability score will
Solutions to Workbook Exercises
1. a. Students are asking many questions about the new university-wide academic honesty
policy.
b. Prof. David Meecham is offering practice sessions for the Law School Admissions
Test to prospective law-school applicants.
c. The Tigers played their first baseball game of the season on a day when the
temperature reached a record low.
2. a. threw g. its
b. h. all right
c. principal i. More than
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f. l. well, good
3. a. effect o. from
b. Because
c. torturous
d. farther
e. oral
p. sewage
q. While
r. disinterested
s. sighted
4. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
5. a. The car, which he smashed just a block from his home, is in the garage. (Point out to
b. enile delinquency.
c. Everyone stared at the woman in the low-cut gown who was dancing with the dean.
d. My wife was annoyed with me because I spilled paint all over the carpet.
g. Cooking in a fireplace saves energy.
h. In the second half, James Carver returned punts 35 and 16 yards. That set up
touchdown drives of 41 and 28 yards to make the score 27-3.
i. Jumping over a fence, he ripped his pants.
j. The company said its earnings are down from last year.
k. The owner and his wife are in the racing business. The owner trained the 8–year-old
gelding.
6. This story opening is exposition. These are facts delivered with skill but, nonetheless, in
ower of expository writing.
7. This story opening is narration. The writer has taken readers into the emergency room.
Readers can watch and listen to the action as if they were watching it on a stage. The
reporter is nowhere to be seen.
8. a. The writer has the characters talking to one another rather than to him or her. The
writer has added context so readers can see the scene.
b.