Category Archives: About writing

Life lessons from journalism

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What can you — an accounting, marketing, MIS (whatever that is) major — get out of studying journalism? As the semester winds down and you long for the day when you can forget everything I’ve taught you, I’m betting you’ve asked yourself this question.

Professors (and probably your parents) have told you over and over that effective writing is important. That is true. People judge you by how you communicate. And I know that you want to be able to get your point across.

But surely the lessons of our journalism class are applicable beyond that.

Let’s start with the basic guidelines for good writing: Be clear. Get to the point. Be active rather than passive. It’s a process — and if you skip part of it, the result might not be very impressive. Follow the rules.

Those are all fairly decent life lessons, don’t you think?

Now let’s talk about the lessons of journalism specifically: Get the facts straight. Seek the truth. Accuracy is important. Flowery embellishment is not necessary — and sometimes irritating. Give credit where credit is due. Be fair to everyone. Learn to recognize your own prejudices. Know the difference between facts and opinions.

Those are all lessons you could print on a plaque and hang on the wall.

And what have you learned about consuming the news? Know what’s going on. Seek out reliable sources of information. And I’m sorry to repeat, but know the difference between facts and opinions.

Early in the semester, it was hard for you to write stories without using first person. Now there’s a life lesson for sure. There are about 7 billion people in the world, so it’s safe to assume that, at least most of the time, it’s probably not about you. A friend of mine (an accountant, by the way) likes to say, “You wouldn’t worry so much about what people thought of you if you knew how seldom they did.” If you shift the focus to others, you will find life more satisfying.

We’ve spent lots of time writing leads. Why? Well, that’s a life lesson, too — you only have one shot at it, so make it count.

And how do you write a good lead? You figure out what’s important and put it first. It makes sense to put the important things first in life, but for some reason, both in writing and in life, that’s not our natural inclination. We tend to putter around with meaningless warm-up. Writing a good lead — and putting the right things first in life — requires an intentional effort.

Here’s the other thing about leads — it’s harder than you think to figure out what’s important. Remember speech stories? Every last one of you thought it was important that somebody “gave a speech” on campus. But it turns out that it’s what the person said that’s important. Otherwise, why would we care that someone “gave a speech”? To figure out what’s important, you have to dig deeper.

In journalism, you use the news values to determine what’s important. Could that work in life? Well, I can’t resist trying!

• Timeliness: Pay your bills (and traffic tickets) on time. This will keep you out of lots of trouble. If you don’t do things in a timely manner, you will waste a lot of your time cleaning up the mess.

• Prominence: Focus on people who are important to you. Your spouse, by definition, is important. So if she wants to see the ballet, go. If he wants to see the baseball game, go. Your boss, by definition, is important. When the boss gives you a task that you don’t think is important, do it anyway.

• Proximity: Things that happen in your community are important. You should be community minded and care about those around you. Your professional field is also a community, so it is important to serve there also.

• Impact: How much does something really affect you or those important to you? Don’t waste your time on other people’s drama. Stay focused.

• Magnitude: Can what you do — or neglect to do — affect a lot of people? The greater the number of people who will be affected by your actions, the more important your actions are. And it doesn’t matter how mundane the task is. If you forget to bring the spoons to the ice cream party, well now, that’s going to be a problem, isn’t it? Care about the impact you have on others.

• Conflict: If there is a problem or conflict, try to resolve it. You might not think the issue is important — like a housework spat with your spouse or roommate — but it often comes back to haunt you. That’s just the nature of conflict. That’s why conflict is a news value — conflict makes things important. Conflict needs to be addressed.

• Emotional impact: Emotional times demand attention. Go to funerals. Go to weddings. Express your sympathy when someone is sick or when someone dies. It’s important to be present during emotional times.

• Oddity: Things stick out when they are strange. Sometimes their value will be short-lived — they are only important on a slow news day. But if something is unusual, that’s a reason to look at it and evaluate whether or not it is important. Sometimes the fact that something is unusual is indeed important. But sometimes not.

Well, have I convinced you? Do you feel better about the many hours you have spent honing your writing skills and learning about journalism values? I hope so.

So here’s your (buried) nut: Figure out what’s important to you. Then put it first. And I would really appreciate it if you did it with proper grammar.

Passive aggression

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Some of you have said you are having trouble distinguishing between active and passive verbs. And when we throw “being” verbs into the mix, it can get even more complicated. (A “being” verb is a form of “to be”: I am, you are, she/he is, they are, he was, they were, etc.) So here’s a brief review.

When you are active, you are doing something. When you are passive, you are not doing anything, but something could be happening to you. So think of yourself as the subject of the sentence.

If the subject is doing something, the verb is active. If something is happening to the subject, then the verb is passive.

A car hit Sally.

Car is the subject, and it did something, so the verb is active.

Sally was hit by a car.

Now Sally is the subject, and she didn’t do anything. Someone or something else did something to her. So the verb is passive.

GrammarFlowersWhether the verb is active or passive depends on the subject — did it do something? It’s active. Or was something done to it? It’s passive. It’s not based just on the words that you use. A passive verb does use a “being” verb — “was” or “were.” But the presence of those words does not mean it’s passive unless the subject receives the action.

So I could say: Sally was happy to see her mother. In this sentence, “was” is just a plain old “being” verb, and “happy” is an adjective.

Or how about this: Sally was walking to the store, and she was hit by a speeding car.

The first “was” in the sentence is part of a present progressive verb — but I doubt you care to know that! But you can tell that it is NOT a passive verb because Sally, the subject, is doing something — she is walking. But in the second half, the “was” is a passive verb, because Sally was the recipient of the action. The car hit her.

Being verb: It was a dark and stormy night.

Passive verb: She was murdered on a dark and stormy night.

(Here you don’t know who performed the action, but “she” received the action — murder. When you don’t know the actor, it might be a good time to use a passive verb. Trying to avoid it can result is something wordy that is not an improvement: Her murder occurred on a dark and stormy night.)

And sometimes, of course, only a “being” verb will do the job. I tried to eliminate them from this blog, but how else can I say: That one is a “being” verb. A “being” verb is like an equal sign, so if that’s what you are trying to express, go ahead.

So a “being” verb provides a clue that the verb might be passive, but the presence of a “being” verb does not always indicate a passive verb.

By the way, try not to use too many “being” verbs either. Most sentences with a “being” verb can be improved. In particular, avoid starting sentences with “there are.” I’ve noticed that “being” verbs tend to be addictive, or at least habit forming — once you start using them, you can’t seem to stop. The same goes for “has” and “have.” Yes, “has” is technically an active verb, but it’s kind of blah and doesn’t provide very much information.

For example, this paragraph has a “being” verb, then a passive verb, and then a “has” verb:

The Gov. Bill and Vara Daniel Historic village is open again after it was renovated. It now has air conditioning and heating units, plus insulation to keep the 1900s-era building more comfortable for visitors. (34 words)

Let’s try it with active verbs:

The Gov. Bill and Vara Daniel Historic Village reopened after a two-year renovation. The university added air conditioning, heating units, and insulation to the 1900s-era buildings to make them more comfortable for visitors. (33 words)

The active verbs in the second version make the writing tighter — it provides more information with fewer words. In the first one, you didn’t know that the renovation took two years or that it was the university in charge of doing it.

So if I told you that you needed to “tighten up” sections of your feature story — and I think I told almost everyone — look for passive verbs, “being” verbs, and “has.” I don’t mean that you must eliminate all of those; sometimes you need them. But I do want you to reconsider each one. Doing that will prevent you from using them habitually in a repetitive pattern.

Why not me? (Mrs. Cullar’s rant about first-person writing)

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Imagine you are at a party. As you belly up to the . . . punch bowl, you hear a voice speaking behind you. Someone is describing a concert by your favorite rock star. Naturally, you want to hear what your rock idol did at her concert — what she said, what she sang, what she was wearing. But the punch bowl voice mainly describes what he said to his friends, how he got stuck in traffic, what he was wearing. Before long, you lose interest. You don’t know this guy, and you’re not interested in his experience.

That’s what it’s like to read a story in which a writer injects first person into a narrative that is not about him.

It’s certainly easy for a young journalist to be led astray these days, because today’s “narrative” journalism is overflowing with examples of first-person writing. Many are bad examples, with writers jumping unannounced into a story that belongs to someone else.

Paula LaRoque, former writing coach for the Dallas Morning News, has written an excellent essay on this topic. LaRoque explains, “The problem is one of focus. The best writers focus tightly and relentlessly upon some subject other than themselves. They are like cinematographers. They illumine the subject, and they themselves stay offstage.” Her excellent essay is here:

Me, Myself and I 

An example of intrusive first-person writing appeared in a 2011 Southern Living story about Dean Faulkner, the niece of writer William Faulkner.

It began this way:

It’s a Southern rite of passage, the moment you decide you are ready 
to read William Faulkner. For me, it happened a few months ago when I found my late father’s yellowed copy of “As I Lay Dying.”

A month later, I was on my way to Oxford on a literary pilgrimage that might be cliché if my personal guide were not the last living Faulkner.

The reader couldn’t help but wonder: “Who is this person who just now discovered Faulkner? A Yankee possibly?” But alas, no further introduction appears.

It’s not that the writer was unskilled. In fact, other than her intrusion into the story, the writing was vivid and engaging. The next paragraph is terrific and quickly establishes that Dean’s relationship to her famous uncle was more of a father-daughter bond. But consider this passage later in the article, where the writer is standing prominently in the middle of the scene.

“I had a hand-me-down dress and a hand-me-down daddy,” Dean says, showing me a photo taken just before her wedding at Rowan Oak. Wearing a gown that belonged to her cousin Jill, Faulkner’s only child, who died in 2008, Dean stands slightly swayback, trying in her 1-inch heels to look shorter than Pappy, who was just 5’6”. I ask Dean if she remembers what they were saying at that moment.

“I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I said, ‘Pappy, was Judith real?’” Judith was the star of the ghost stories Faulkner told to the children in his life, a lovesick girl who leapt to her death from the balcony above the entrance to Rowan Oak. “’No, I made her up for you and all the other children,’ he said. ‘But I believe in her. Don’t you?’”

Rewriting it with just Dean and her uncle takes only minor tweaks (changes in bold):

“I had a hand-me-down dress and a hand-me-down daddy,” Dean says, looking at a photo taken just before her wedding at Rowan Oak. Wearing a gown that belonged to her cousin Jill, Faulkner’s only child, who died in 2008, Dean stands slightly swayback, trying in her one-inch heels to look shorter than Pappy, who was just 5’6”.

Dean remembers what they were saying at that moment.

“I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I said, ‘Pappy, was Judith real?’” Judith was the star of the ghost stories Faulkner told to the children in his life, a lovesick girl who leapt to her death from the balcony above the entrance to Rowan Oak. “’No, I made her up for you and all the other children,’ he said. ‘But I believe in her. Don’t you?’”

Aren’t the Faulkners enough to carry this vignette? In the new version, the writer doesn’t get quite the same attention for her insightful question. But the focus is now clearly on the Faulkners.

On rare occasions, first person is appropriate in a feature story. Consider a Texas Monthly feature story on the 50th birthday of Farrah Fawcett in 1997. (Good examples are rare and memorable!) Skip Hollandsworth, a well-known voice to Texas Monthly readers, was the writer. He quickly established why he was employing first person, describing Fawcett as “the ultimate Texas bombshell and the foremost sex symbol of my youth.” Throughout the article, he maintained a persona as the “every boy” who had grown up worshipping the Charlie’s Angel star. And it worked.

An article in a March 2012 issue of Newsweek took a similar approach. Part of the 1960’s themed “Mad Men” issue, the story was written by veteran newswoman Eleanor Clift. Here’s the beginning:

It’s a rainy morning in Los Angeles, and Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy in the television series Mad Men, is standing outside the stage door smoking. On the set the actors are restricted to herbal cigarettes, which is why she has ducked out for what she calls “the real thing.” I explain who I am (a reporter from Newsweek) and why I’m there (I started as a secretary), and she exclaims, “I am you!”

Clift maintains the theme, contributing information from her own office days of the 1960s, but not overshadowing the characters who are the focus of the story. She occupies the story as an expert witness.

In both the Texas Monthly and Newsweek examples, the writers introduced themselves. When new characters enter a story, there should be an explanation of who they are, by job title or some other description. But reporters who lapse into first person often fail to say who they are. A writer who insists on putting himself or herself into the story should at least provide a proper introduction. And they’d better have a pretty good reason for being there.

Writers who throw themselves willy nilly into a story that clearly belongs to someone else often come across as intrusive. And that’s often what they are.