Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker wrote Going Clear, a biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Michelle V. Rafter mines Wright's book for a half-dozen tips on writing longform, including the importance of going slow: "Take your time. The news business places a lot of emphasis on being first with a story. While there's definitely a market for that, there's also a market for a tale that goes into the nuances of a subject, which takes time to report, and time to tell."
Tricks of the trade
Retired magazine editor Jack Limpert discusses another bad writing habit — sentences that do too much explaining: "I edited several writers who were savvy researchers-reporters and were good at explanatory pieces," Limpert writes. "Their problem was they couldn't resist scattering topic sentences throughout their stories. A high school or college English teacher had drummed into them the need for topic sentences to help the reader understand what he's reading."
The Lofty Ambitions blog offers pointers from some sources other than the usual suspects, such as this from Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato, co-authors of Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction — and Get It Published: "You must understand that how well you can write your book, indeed how good a writer you are, doesn’t initially come into play. First an editor must determine if your project is, in concept and focus, commercially viable."
The American Scholar recently published a list of its favorite sentences from Hemingway, Didion, Hersey, and others, and Roy Peter Clark responds with an analysis of what makes those sentences so good. Of Hemingway's "Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation," Clark writes this: "Place the least emphatic words in the middle. The second most important go at the beginning. The most important nails the meaning at the end."
From the Journalist's Resource project at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, Justin Feldman explains how to make sense of scientific research: "Before journalists write about research and speak with authors, they should be able to both interpret a study's results and understand the appropriate degree of skepticism that a given study finding warrants," Feldman writes. He includes, for example, an explanation of the difference between dependent and independent variables.
Walter Frick interviews Jim Tankersley of the Washington Post on why neither data nor narrative is sufficient for producing great journalism: "I can get a lot from one great visual chart … and I can get a lot out of a story about someone like me doing something that is interesting to me. But I think that when you bring them all together what you get is this experience where people have a process of discovery for themselves which I think is important for learning."
Faith Goumas on the Public Relations Society of America web site has a roundup of writing tips for success in the PR business. They include five "little" ways to tighten your writing, and a full-out attack on the jargon beast: "'Landmark,' 'revolutionary,' 'groundbreaking,' and 'breakthrough' top the list of words to eliminate from your content. Phrases such as 'cutting edge,' 'best of breed' and 'world-renowned' also serve as 'timeless examples' on the list of jargon."
From the companion web site for the NASW Idea Grant-funded Science Writers' Handbook, Michelle Nijhuis shares what she learned from doing more than 20 radio interviews in two days for her recent National Geographic feature. "Writers tend to think of interviews as raw material, but on the radio — especially live radio — an interview is a performance. So while you do want to 'be yourself,' be mindful of how you're presenting that self."
Akshat Rathi offers a checklist for science writers who want to head off mistakes in their stories. At the top of the list is a simple question: "Are you exaggerating?" Rathi explains: "Only a few science papers published in any year will actually lead to great advances or have wide-reaching implications. Are you sure you are writing about such science? You don't want to write stories such as 'Recreational pot use harmful to young people's brains,' only to be shot down.
Simply dumping your news releases into dozens of journalists' email inboxes is a quick ticket to their spam folders, Matt Shipman writes. But Shipman then lists three ways in which news releases can still be useful — on distribution sites like Newswise or EurekAlert, in "churnalism" sites like Phys.org, and in tailored pitches to individual writers: "I think mass email distribution is what is dead (or dying)," Shipman writes. "News releases are alive and well."