If your spreadsheet has a column labelled "name," you're probably doing it all wrong, Phillip Smith writes in an exhaustive post on the PBS Idea Lab: "How often have I stared in dismay, dumbfounded even, and grumbled to myself, 'You didn't really put all of that into one column, did you!?'" Smith explains what's wrong with that, and how it ought to be done, He also lists principles to keep in mind when building spreadsheets, and best practices for working with them.
Science writing news
First-person narration is never easy to do well, but longtime New Yorker writer E.B. White showed how it should be done in his personal essay, "Death of a Pig," which ran in The Atlantic in 1948. Betsy O'Donovan analyzes White's account of a farmer's loss in this Nieman Storyboard post: "White remembers (perhaps he wrote) the golden rule of first-person narration, which is to approach readers with humility and a perspective they can share."
The inverted pyramid is dead; long live the inverted pyramid. It still tops Michelle V. Rafter's list of ledes (although she doesn't spell it "lede" or use the term "inverted pyramid"). But it's joined by such variants as the second-day, hook, feature, and anecdotal ledes: "A story’s lead can impart information, set a tone, answer questions and hint at what’s to come. But they’re not all alike. There are different types of leads for different types of stories."
You have a great idea for a book, a longform narrative article or an investigative piece, but the payment the publisher offers won’t cover the cost of the project. Skimpy funding doesn’t have to mean the end of the project, though. There are grants, fellowships, and other resources available to help you turn great ideas into reality. A new database from NASW can get you started.
Mike Feinsilber discusses common mistakes that make readers turn a page: Over-long titles, piled-up nouns, and overpacked sentences: "Try abandoning the old journalistic sacred cow that says attributions … must come at the end of sentences. People normally put attributions in front. People don’t say: 'My dog was on fire, a neighbor told me.' They say: 'A neighbor told me that my dog was on fire.'" Also, Jack Limpert on stop signs for readers.
Helen Fields sure likes her Livescribe pen and she writes about it for the Science Writers' Handbook. It costs $120 to $200, and to use it, you have to write on special pads that cost $25 per pair. But for that, you get a pen that automatically synchronizes your handwritten notes to your audio recordings: "I find the pen particularly useful for checking quotes," Fields writes. You can pre-order the NASW-funded Handbook from the NASW Bookstore.
Posterous is closing April 30, and while its bloggers can still download their content, that's not good enough, Ruud Hein writes: "They can upload it elsewhere, maybe on their own site this time, but Posterous won't setup the crucial web server status code … that tells search engines to take all their ranking information for the old URL and use it for the new URL." Hein then outlines a strategy for bloggers who want to go and stay independent.
Maybe you'll recognize somebody (yourself on a bad day?) in this "How to Work Like a Writer" post on the writing life from The Pessimist: "There’s a word for people who work with words and still manage to have fun and maintain a healthy self-image, and that word is 'sportswriters.' Forget them. You’re in it for the art, and it’s not art unless it hurts, badly." It's from the people at Despair, Inc., which sells those warped (but funny) "demotivational" posters.
If you keep at a job for more than six decades, you get a lot of windows. At least that's how it's worked out for the San Francisco Chronicle's 94-year-old science reporter (and 53-year NASW member) David Perlman, judging from the photo with this Los Angeles Times profile: "He was born in 1918, a decade before the discovery of penicillin. Pluto had yet to be discovered, let alone demoted. The ballpoint pen was invented the year he got his first real newspaper gig."