Writing Basics

Goodnight, Cliff Behnke. There will never be another one like you.

I bogarted this photo of Cliff from the obit. I’d argue “fair use,” but I probably wouldn’t argue it with Cliff.

 

Cliff Behnke, the former managing editor of the Wisconsin State Journal and generational journalist, died Sunday in Madison at the age of 80.

The irony of this piece is that it’s impossible to explain Cliff without resorting to cliches, a writing failure the man himself disdained.

Cliff despised lazy writing and wasn’t above telling writers how much redundancies, passive voice and unneeded descriptors displeased him. However, if there is one thing anyone who worked under him knew he hated most, it was cliches, so much so that the concept led his obituary this week:

 

 

Spring never sprung under Cliff Behnke’s watch.

“White stuff” didn’t fall in winter, and no reporter ever dared refer to Thanksgiving as “Turkey Day.”

Behnke was a stickler for detail and standards during his four-decade career at the Wisconsin State Journal.

(I managed to pull off a minor miracle once in a weather story when I used the phrase “a white, wintery mix” and Cliff never said a word.)

The cliches really did tell the tale of Cliff, as everyone in Barry Adams’ fantastic obituary seemed to use one now that Cliff could no longer stop them.

He was an “old-school editor,” in that he prized big-picture accuracy, clarity and value while simultaneously picking at the details that would rob a piece of any of those things. He was “no nonsense” in that staffers knew him to be serious and direct, focused and fair as he kept the newsroom moving forward. He was a “newspaperman in the best sense,” spending far more time in his college newsroom than his classes and helping to shepherd the state’s official newspaper throughout the salad days of print journalism.

In reading Cliff’s obituary, one fact discombobulated me: His age. I was in my early 20s during the three years I spent working the night desk at the State Journal. That would have put Cliff in his early 50s back then, which is where I find myself now. I can’t square those numbers, given that I have neither the skills, the seriousness or the stature that Cliff had at this age, never mind how he terrified staffers in a way that is almost impossible to explain.

I feared Cliff, as did a number of the folks quoted in Adams’ piece, but not in the cliche way usually associated with “old school” editors. He never yelled at me, nor did he have a large physical presence that had me afraid of violence. He didn’t break out a string of colorful curse words when dressing me down.

(Cliff was always on the lookout for stray curses making it into the paper. I remember him calling out a sports story that contained a quote like, “We played a hell of a game.” Cliff’s restrictions on cussing in print would make a 1950s all-girls boarding school look like a biker bar. It took at least three phone calls for us to run a quote in one of my stories about a riot with the quote “F— the pigs!” in it. And, yes, that was WITH the dashes.)

Listening to Cliff’s assessment of my screw ups was like watching a ninja throwing razor blades at me. It was just slice, slice, slice until I fell into 1,000 pieces. It could be about something big or about something small, but I still remember (and refer to) a number of them.

In one case, it was a redundancy. I was writing a photo caption about a model train railroad show when I felt the presence of Cliff lurking behind me. He began simply enough:

“Can you imagine if there were 88 model railroad layouts that were EXACTLY the same?” he asked.

“Huh?” I replied, unsure as to if I was having an out-of-body experience because Cliff was talking to me.

“Do you think it would be possible for a group of people to build 88 IDENTICAL model railroad layouts?” he said in that calm, metered voice of his.

“Uh… No?”

“Right. So why are you telling me that there are 88 DIFFERENT model railroad layouts in this cutline? Of course they’re different. That’s redundant.”

He then disappeared almost as quickly as he showed up and I still haven’t forgotten that lesson.

I also never forgot the time I should have been fired for screwing up a brief, in which I reported that a guy was dead when he wasn’t.

It wasn’t bad enough that I screwed it up, but then the local radio stations did their “rip and read” journalism on the air, letting EVERYONE know the guy was dead when he wasn’t. Our competing paper also used to love to crib our stories and then claim they had an “unnamed source” that confirmed the info, so those folks also amplified the story. It turns out everyone was wrong because I was wrong.

The man’s wife was getting condolence calls from people who saw or heard the “news” and she freaked out that the news people knew about his death before she did. After a complete clustermess of a situation, I got called into Cliff’s office for what I assumed would be the end of my journalism career.

After slowly and calmly walking me through every stupid thing I had done and every way a reasonably competent biped could have avoided that stupidity, he told me that the woman wasn’t going to sue us, but she had several demands. Aside from a correction for the paper, I had to write a letter apologizing to the man’s children for screwing up and then I had to hand-deliver it to his wife and talk to her for as long as she wanted.

“You need to go to the hospital at 10 a.m.,” Cliff said. “You will not justify your mistake. You will not discuss your feelings. If anything comes out of your mouth other than, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ‘No, ma’am’ or “I’m sorry, ma’am.’ You are gone. Do you have any questions?”

I was both young and stupid enough to have one: “Yeah. Why don’t you just fire me now instead?”

His response was perfectly Cliff: “I honestly don’t know, so get out of my office before I figure it out.”

What he taught me that day was responsibility for my actions, the importance of paranoia-level accuracy and that I needed to tough out this painful lesson if I was ever going to be much of anything in this world. As another editor explained to me when I said I should just quit, “How are you ever going to teach a student to do something tough if you won’t do it yourself?”

I didn’t work for Cliff as long as many other people did, nor did I spend much time in contact with him during my time at the paper. In reading some of the online tributes to him, he was both everything his obit said and so much more. He was generous with his time to Daily Cardinal kids, serving on the board and kindly mentoring staffers as they gained their legs in journalism. He was a giving person to friends and family who knew him less as a mythological editor and more as a human being.

What I can say is that there will never be another editor like Cliff, as the confluence of events that made him could not exist today. Nobody is going to spend four decades in journalism anymore, least of all in one state or at one publication. That means we won’t have someone like Cliff who can capture the culture and soul of the audience the media outlet serves. It also means no one will have a firm grasp on all the details that add clarity to local stories, such as if Devil’s Lake gets an apostrophe or where the East Side stops and Downtown starts. He was like Google in a shirt and tie.

Accuracy, the driving force behind Cliff’s work at the State Journal, now seems to be as antiquated as the term “newspaperman,” with people caring more about being first, getting views and making sure “their side” is winning. In the days of newspapers, mistakes were permanent and you couldn’t undo your failures. That fact helped Cliff drive the rest of us to obsess over being right. As much as I still obsess, I know that if someone finds a mistake in this thing, two quick clicks and it’s like the error never happened. As nice as it is to be able to erase public errors, it does make for some lazy journalism.

Above all else, I do wonder how this generation would take to Cliff’s brand of leadership, as to cause fear these days is hate crime and to criticize is a soul-crushing micro-aggression. I wonder how Cliff would work with people who have been known to bring a parent with them on a job interview. Not every 22-year-old who rolls off the college assembly line these days is the stereotype of an entitled snowflake, but I’ve seen a significant crop of emotional hemophiliacs who complain about everything from making deadlines to not getting enough praise for things they’re just supposed to do. The amazing thing about working for Cliff was that we knew he was reserved with his praise and generous with his critiques. That’s why his praise really meant something, unlike the vast sums of participation trophies that line the bookshelves of “kids these days.”

What I do know is that if anyone could have found a way to make all of this work well and get the best out of people in this current environment, it would have been Cliff. He just wouldn’t quit until he did.

 

It’s the first sentence of your story, not a clown car: Learn to make choices in your leads

 

The goal of good lead writing is to tell people two basic things:

  1. What happened?
  2. Why do I, as the reader, care about this?

While many leads fail to do one or both of these when they don’t include enough information, some leads do almost the same thing when they give the readers too much stuff all at once.

Here’s one about the death of a former NBA player who became an incredible businessman:

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA sixth man who rose from modest means to forge one of the most successful post-playing business careers of any professional athlete, becoming a billionaire philanthropist and, recently, a minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks team for which he once played, died Tuesday after suffering a medical emergency during an event in Louisville, Kentucky.

This 58-word monstrosity gives me way too much information and I find myself struggling to keep up with everything the writer is trying to say. The writer decides not to make any choices about what to keep in the lead and what to relegate to lower paragraphs, thus making this a difficult read.

Let’s take a look at how you can avoid this kind of problem when you have a lot of things happening and they might all seem lead-worthy.

First, let’s lay out all of the facts in the “One Piece at a Time” approach to this lead:

  • Junior Bridgeman died Tuesday.
  • He suffered a medical emergency while at an event in Louisville.
  • He was an NBA player.
  • He won the Sixth Man of the Year award.
  • He was born of modest means.
  • He had a successful post-player business empire.
  • He became a billionaire.
  • He was a philanthropist.
  • He was a minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks. (meaning he wasn’t the main owner, for folks who are unfamiliar with concept)

That’s a heck of a lot of stuff, even when you consider that it doesn’t include at least one thing most obituary-style stories like this tend to have (age of the deceased). That means we need to make decisions.

Second, start off with the most direct Noun-Verb-Object kind of approach we can take here to what matters most:

Junior Bridgeman died after a medical emergency.

We have a good noun, a solid verb and a solid prepositional phrase with a crucial object of the preposition that tells us how he died (at least somewhat).

 

Third, start looking for ways that you can condense some of the statements above, removing redundant elements or reshaping them in a more direct way.

For example, we basically say he was rich three ways:

  • Successful business empire
  • Billionaire
  • Team owner

Maybe there’s a way to either eliminate one of those or to recraft the sentence to shrink up what is there to tighten the sentence:

Junior Bridgeman, a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, died after a medical emergency.

We also say he was an NBA player in two ways:

  • Former Sixth Man of the Year
  • He played for the Bucks

We could rework that to both of those things into this as well with some tightening and structuring:

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA Sixth Man of the Year  who became a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks after his playing days ended, died after a medical emergency.

I’m at 32 words here, so if I’m going to add anything else, I’m probably going to need to make some changes. Let’s see what we add and what we cut:

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA Sixth Man of the Year  who became a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks after his playing days ended, died Tuesday in Louisville, Kentucky, after a medical emergency.

If we add the where and the when, we’re at 36. We could go one of two ways to make a cut here. We could remove the phrase “after his playing days ended” if we think it’s obvious that he didn’t become those things before or during his playing days. We could also cut the award and replace it with “player,” which would swap five words for one. We could do both if we wanted to find a way to weave his age in.

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA player who later became a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, died Tuesday at 71 after a medical emergency in Louisville, Kentucky.

This gets us to 30 words, adds in the age and allows for development later. We could swap out the age and put back the Sixth Man of the Year award, if we felt it was more valuable to the audience than his age. I’m also not a huge fan of three prepositional phrases in a row, as that starts to make this a little sing-songy. It’s a judgment call at this point. Either way, we basically have a congruent amount of information to the original lead in half the space.

The one thing to remember about lead writing is that there’s nothing wrong with pour out all the info you have into a sentence, but you then have to go back and make decisions. In most cases, the writing of the lead is in the editing, so make sure to give your lead those additional looks that can make the difference between one that’s tight and right and one that’s bloated and confusing.

EXERCISE TIME: Find a lead in a publication that you read that goes way over that 35-word limit. (The longer the better) and use this approach to get it under control. If you need to use other elements from the story to do so, feel free to dig into the body of the piece a little bit.

Then, see what other people think about your changes and be able to justify your actions as you go along.

 

Firefighters fight fire: 3 tips for avoiding the obvious and getting value out of your lead (A Throwback Post)

During the “syllabus day” for my introductory media writing course, I tell the students something they find ridiculously funny, until they realize that it’s true:

“The first graded writing you will do for me will be one sentence long and it will take you three class periods to do it.”

The looks on their faces tend to say, “Does he think we’re mentally defective?” and “This guy has no clue as to how good I am at writing.”

Then, we start the process of drafting leads, reviewing leads, editing leads and reworking leads. Bam: One lecture period, two labs = three class periods. Even then, a lot of them tell me that they’re not really sure they got it right.

“This is a lot harder than I thought,” more than a few kids have noted after we’re done.

This week, we’re working on leads, so I thought I’d bring back a good helper post that might make things easier on your kids when they’re trying to come up with that one perfect sentence that drives home the point of the piece.

At the very least, I hope it will help them avoid telling the readers something pathologically obvious.

 

 

Firefighters fight fire: 3 tips for avoiding the obvious and getting value out of your lead

The lead of any story is the most difficult sentence to craft. It requires a lot from you as a writer: clarity, accuracy, strength, interest and focus. The standard format of the summary lead requires a 5W’s and 1H approach, and that approach can work if you view it through the prism of the interest elements outlined in the books: Fame, oddity, conflict, immediacy and impact. If you don’t, you tend to build sentences that fail to provide your readers with value.

Here’s an example of how this works:

In a class exercise, I have my students review a press release from the Boone County fire department and use the material in it to write a four-paragraph (four sentences) inverted-pyramid brief. The lead should focus on what matters most and then the next paragraph should have the second most-important stuff and the third should have the next most important stuff and so forth.

Consider these opening sentences:

Boone County Firefighters responded to a reported structure fire just before 6:00 p.m. yesterday evening.

A structure fire was reported to the Boone County Firefighters just before 6:00 pm yesterday evening in Sturgeon.

Boone County Firefighters extinguished an electrical fire at a Sturgeon home Monday evening.

In each case, the focus is on the firefighters doing something, which is great if you’re promoting the fire department, but otherwise, their work doesn’t matter. Firefighters fight fire. That’s their job. What makes this story unique or valuable is what the fire did to the home:

A fire outbreak causes a $50,000 damage to a house in Sturgeon 6 p.m. on Monday.

An electrical fire caused $50,000 worth of damage to a Sturgeon family’s home Sunday night, at 520 S. Ogden.

A fire in northern Boone County severely damaged a home and required fire units to remain on the scene for over four hours on Sunday.

In these leads, you can see the fire’s impact more clearly. The focal point of the lead sentence shifts, which means the rest of the piece will cover the bigger issue of what happened to the house.

With that in mind, here are three tips to help you keep your eye on the prize while writing your lead:

Focus on the noun-verb-object “Holy Trinity” of the sentence: We use a simple sentence diagram to help the student “fill in the blanks” when it comes to the core of the sentence. If you look at the NVO basics in the first three examples, this is what you get:

  • Firefighters respond to fire
  • (Someone) reports fire
  • Firefighters extinguish fire

That’s not what you are shooting for in a lead. In the second batch, you can see more of what should be at the core of the lead:

  • Fire causes damage
  • Fire caused damage
  • Fire damaged home

Obviously, these could be spruced up a bit, but for a first pass, they work fairly well. At the very least, the focus on what matters more than those first three did.

Determine what your audience values: I like fire briefs for beginning students because fires lack nuance. The fire causes damage and that’s about it, unlike crime coverage that could require legal nuance or governmental stories that can become muddled in process. As a writing topic, fire gives the writer a clear path to the answer of, “What would my audience want to know first?”

The “Boone County firefighters responded…” lead isn’t all that rare in my beginning writing classes because a) it’s the first thing on the press release, so students gravitate toward it and b) it’s the opening of the chronological sequence of events. Almost every story we read or write, prior to becoming journalists, fits a chronological pattern.

To help break students of the chronology habit, I ask this question: “If you went home after class today and your roommate said, ‘Hey, your mom called. There was a fire at your house,’ what would be the first thing you would want to know?”

The answers are simple:

  • Is everyone OK?
  • How bad was the fire?
  • What happened/How did it start?

I then ask the student, “OK, so now imagine your roommate starts with, ‘Well, the Boone County firefighters responded…” That’s when the light goes on: You don’t want to hear about the firefighters fighting fire. You want to know if mom (and probably your stuff) survived the blaze.

Other stories lack this straightforward approach, but the principle remains. Don’t tell your student newspaper’s audience that the Board of Trustees held a meeting to discuss tuition increases. Tell the readers if tuition went up or not and if so, by how much. Don’t tell the local sports fans that their team played a game against a division rival last night. Tell them who won and what the score was.

If you place value on giving your readers value, the lead will dramatically improve.

 

Build outward from the core and shed things that don’t matter: If you build a core that has value and gives your readers some of the W’s and/or the H, you should be able to add layers to that core to augment and improve it. With a “fire causes damage” start, you could add answers to a few simple questions:

  • How bad was the fire? (It destroyed half the house)
  • How much damage was there? ($50,000)
  • Was anyone hurt or killed? (One guy suffered minor injuries)
  • What started it? (An electrical malfunction)
  • Where did it start? (A storage room near a freezer)

Not everything in here will make the cut, but that’s OK. You can write a lead by adding the key layers you think matter, answering the above questions in a way that gives the readers value.

You might use the $50,000 figure or the half the house answer, but probably not both in the lead. They essentially say the same thing for the moment: This was a big honkin’ fire. You might focus on the injuries, but you might decide against that since the injuries weren’t severe. Then again, you might think people in a small town would like to know if their neighbors are OK.

It’s easy to weave in the “electrical” part without too much trouble, so that’s probably going to make the cut. You might also include a “where” and a “when,” but maybe not the exact time and the exact location. In other words, “Sunday night in Sturgeon” would be better than “at 6 p.m. at a three-bedroom home at 520 S. Ogden in the town of Sturgeon.”

Once you build the lead, go back through and start trimming out things that might not need to be there. (Spoiler alert: references to firefighters doing anything probably shouldn’t remain in the lead.) This is where you might debate the issue of injuries versus damage or a broader “where” as opposed to the specific address. Most of what you’re trying to do here is play “king of the mountain” with your content. If it’s not good enough to be in the lead, knock it down the hill into the second or third paragraph.

AP Peeves: What are the style errors your students (or you) frequently make or that bother you the most?

A colleague who oversees the student newspaper at her college had this question about potential ways to make life easier on her staffers:

Our student newspaper does not have any prerequisite, so I have students who know nothing about AP Style. I’d love to put a poster in our lab of AP highlights.  I found some AP Style highlight posters online, but they’re outdated. Before I create my own (instead of grading…), does anyone have one they use? Something editable to change every so often?

 

The Associated Press style book is the bible (not Bible) for media writers across the board. Despite students’ protestations to the contrary, the AP is not trying to torture them or kill their grades. Rather, the goal is to come up with some standardized conventions on important stylistics so that we best meet the needs of our readers and we’re all using a similar language to do so.

If I’m being honest, it’s almost impossible to have a complete handle on everything in the style book unless you have a photographic memory or are really anal retentive (or is that anal-retentive?) because things keep changing. One year, AP stated it made something like 168 changes, revisions and additions between the previous style book and that year’s model. This isn’t always a bad thing, as the additions can explain important global issues, provide more inclusive language or help clarify difficult concepts.

One of the key things I’ve tried to get across to the students is that most of getting to know the AP book is less about trying to know everything in it and more about trying to know what kinds of things the rules generally try to address. Therefore, I don’t necessarily need to know if I spell out “Avenue” with a full address or not, but I do need to know that there’s a rule on that, so I should open the book and make sure I’m sure about it.

However, when you’re trying to learn everything that’s going in there, it can feel like this:

(Yes,  I know they misspelled bar mitzvah… No, I don’t control the internet…)

For the “Dynamics of Media Writing,” “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” and “Dynamics of Media Editing” books, we included Fred Vultee’s 5-Minute AP Guide, which did a great job of giving students a quick look at the key rules in short order. That said, I also know that a) not everyone has the books, b) not everyone makes the same mistakes and c) the request was for a poster.

I pitched the good folks at Sage the idea of building a poster based on what you all say you see most often and/or hate the most when it comes to AP style errors.

So here’s the deal: I’m starting with a few basic AP peeves of mine and I’m asking you to add yours. You can add them in the comments below,  send them to me via the Contact page, hit me up on social media or get in touch with me however you otherwise would. As long as I get your peeve, I’ll do my best to add it to the poster.

Here we go:

  • Titles: Formal titles are capitalized only in front of a name, unless the name is part of a subordinate clause:
    • RIGHT: I met Mayor Jane Jones at the grocery store
    • RIGHT: I met the mayor at the grocery store.
    • RIGHT: I met the mayor, Jane Jones, at the grocery store.
  • Numbers: Unless there’s a specific exception, spell out numbers under 10. Anything 10 or higher is a figure. (Don’t worry, I’m adding numbers to this poster like a BOSS…)
  • Time of day: It’s a.m. and p.m. not AM/PM, A.M./P.M. or any other combo.
  • Affect/Effect: My personal demon. I have to look it up every time.

 

Your turn. Go for it!

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

Let’s Reinforce the Driver’s Ed Rules of Journalistic Writing (A Throwback Post)

The view from my driveway this morning told me two things: 1) It wasn’t going to be an easy trip to the office and 2) at least 75% of my students would suddenly come down with food poisoning and couldn’t possibly make the 8 a.m. class.

The first decent snow of the year in Wisconsin provided me with the impetus for this week’s Throwback Thursday Post.

When it comes to weather like this, we generally have two types of drivers that account for 95 percent of the people on the road:

  • The driver who goes 12 mph, is constantly sliding all over the road, can’t avoid skids on curves and practically stops about every quarter mile. In spite of this, they will continue down the road and drive just fast enough to prevent you from passing them.
  • The driver who has the philosophy of “I got my jacked up 4 x 4 with brass truck nuts on it and God is my co-pilot, now let’s DO THIS!” as they fly past everyone at 95 mph on a two-lane road.

I spent my morning behind the former and noted a few of the latter had landed in the ditch all along Highway 21. (Dad’s theory on four-wheel drive was always, “It just means you get stuck deeper in the ditch.) Throughout my drive, I found myself going back to my days of driver’s ed, where I learned how to reverse the gas and brake process while making sure I didn’t stomp on a puppy. (It makes sense if you read the rest of this, I swear.)

I thought this post might also help those of us who are near the end of the semester and feeling a bit vexed by the students who STILL can’t seem to figure out how an attribution works, what a fact really is or why they should not have 21 adjectives in the average media-writing sentence.

As much as it seems like a good time to throw our hands up and say, “Screw it. Write however you want.” it’s actually a good time to double down on those “driver’s ed rules” of writing and pound them in even harder. The kids might not like it now, but they’ll come to value it later.

 

 

Teaching the Driver’s Ed Rules of Journalism

The guy who taught me driver’s ed at the “Easy Method” school was a balding man with a ginger mustache and sideburns to match. He told us to call him “Derkowski.” Not Mr. Derkowski or Professor Derkowski. Just Derkowski.

I remember a lot from that class, as he basically beat certain things into us like the company would murder his children if we didn’t have these rules down pat.

Hands on the wheel? 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock.

Pedals? Release the brake to go, release the gas to slow.

Feet? One foot only. We were required to tuck our left foot so far back into the seat that we could feel the seat lever with the heel of our shoe.

Seat belt? You touch that before you touch anything else in the car or you fail the test. (Or as one of my dad’s friends told me just before the exam, “Get in the car. Put on your seat belt. Then, have your mom hand you the keys through the window.”)

There are a dozen other things that still stick with me, ranging from the left-right-left view of the mirrors to the probably-now-unspeakable way to look behind you when backing up. (“Put your arm across the back of the seat and grab the head rest like you’re putting a move on your girl at the drive-in,” he told me once, I swear…)

After 30 years behind the wheel, I still can’t shake some of this stuff, and most of it is still really helpful. Do I use it all the time? No. (I’m sure the man would be having a stroke if he saw me eating a hash brown, drinking a Diet Coke and flipping through the radio all at the same time while flying down Highway 21 at 10 over…) However, it was important to have that stuff drilled into my brain so that I knew, when things got iffy, how best to drive safely.

When I had to drive 30 miles up I-94 in a white out, in a 1991 Pontiac Firebird that had no business being a winter car, you better believe I abided by the gospel of Derkowski.

I had my hands in the right spots, I was looking left-right-left before a lane change and I treated those pedals like I was stepping on puppies (Another one of his euphemisms, I believe; “You wouldn’t stomp on a puppy!” he’d yell at someone who did a jack-rabbit start or a bootlegger brake.)

It took two hours, more than four times what Mapquest would have predicted, as I slowly passed among the littering of cars and semis that had slid into ditches and side rails. Still, I got there alive.

The reason I bring all of this up is because with the advent of another semester (we still don’t start for two weeks, but I figure you all are up and running), many folks reading this blog will be teaching the intro to writing and/or reporting courses. That means in a lot of cases, students will be coming in to learn how to write the same way I came into that driver’s ed class so many years ago: All we know is what we have observed from other people.

My folks were good drivers, but even they were like lapsed Catholics when it came to the finicky points of the rules: Five miles over the limit was fine, seat belts were pretty optional and one hand on the wheel did the trick. Outside of them, the world looked like a mix of “Death Race” and “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Gunning engines at stop lights, squealing tires, the “Detroit Lean” and more were what I saw.

Students coming into writing classes have been writing for years, so they figure they’ll be fine at it. They also figure writing is writing, so what’s the big deal if I throw 345 adjectives into this hyperbolic word salad of a sentence and call it good? Nobody ever said it was a problem before…

The students need some basic “rules” pounded into the curriculum, repeated over and over like a mantra, to emphasize the things that we find to be most important to keeping them out of trouble in the years to follow. Mine are simple things: Noun-verb-object, check every fact like you’re disarming a bomb, attributions are your friend, one sentence of paraphrase per paragraph… It’s as close to a tattoo on their soul as they’re ever going to get.

It’s around this time I often get into random disagreements with fellow instructors about this stuff. Some are polite, while others react like I accused them of pulling a “Falwell Campari” moment. In most cases, the argument centers on the idea that there aren’t really rules for writing or that “Big Name Publication X” writes in 128-word sentences or that paragraphs often go beyond one sentence, so why am I teaching students these “rules” this way?

It’s taken me a long time to figure out how best to explain it, but here’s it is: I’m teaching driver’s ed for journalism.

In other words, you will eventually be on your own out there and you won’t have your instructor yelling at you about where your hands are or if you looked at the right mirror at the right time. You probably won’t die if you drive without your foot all the way back against the seat, nor will not maintaining a “car-length-per-10-mph” spacing gap lead to a 42-car pile up on the interstate.

In that same vein, you won’t automatically lose a reader if your lead is 36 words, or confuse the hell out of them if you don’t have perfect pronoun-antecedent agreement. Libel suits aren’t waiting around every corner if you don’t attribute every paragraph and if you accidentally (or occasionally deliberately) tweak a quote, you won’t end up in the unemployment line.

However, if the basics get “The Big Lebowski” treatment up front, there’s no chance of those students being able to operate effectively when the chips are down. (There’s a reason the military teaches people to march before it teaches people how to drive a tank.) Until those basics are mastered, the students will never know when it’s acceptable to break a rule or why it makes sense to do so.

Of all the things I remember about Derkowski (other than that godawful straw cowboy-looking hat thing he wore) was that even though he enforced the rules with an iron fist, he could always tell us WHY the rule mattered and WHY we needed to abide by it. Say what you want to about the items listed in my “this is a rule” diatribe above, but I can explain WHY those things are important in a clear and coherent way. Even if the students didn’t like them, they at least understood them.

Sure, over the years, the rules change (Apparently 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock is now a death sentence…) with AP apparently deciding to keep all of us on our toes almost to the point of distraction. We adapt to them as instructors and the ones that are most germane to the discipline, we write into our own version of gospel.

We also know that we’re not going to be there to press the point when a former student at a big-name publication uses “allegedly” in a lead. (That doesn’t mean we still don’t. Just ask any of my former students and they can tell you about conversations we’ve had about quote leads and lazy second-person writing.)

I tell the students once they get off of “Filak Island,” they can do it however they want or however their boss wants. (I also tell them to ask their bosses WHY they want to use allegedly or randomly capitalize certain words. In most cases, the answer is silence mixed with “duh face,” I’m told.) However, my job is to teach them the rules of the road, and I think that’s how a lot of us view things in those early classes.

I will admit, however, that it’s fun when I hear back from a long-graduated student who tells me how they can still hear my voice in the back of their head when they’re writing something. (It’s even more fun when they tell me how shorter leads or noun-verb attributions are now the rule at work.)

If we do it right, enough of the important things will stick, they’ll revert to the basics when in danger and they’ll be just fine, even without us there to pump the brakes.

Just tell me what happened: The difference between writing for yourself and your audience

Packers announcer Ray Scott was known for his exceptional brevity in calling the game, telling you just what you needed to know and not making the call about him or his ego. We need more media folk like Ray Scott.

 

When it comes to perfect writing for media, I tend to love the Associated Press and its approach to sports. Here’s a look at a game I cared about:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — — No. 9 hitter Brayan Rocchio drove in four runs and the Cleveland Guardians beat Kansas City 7-1 Tuesday night, extending the Royals’ losing streak to a season-high seven.

Kansas City was held to two runs or fewer for the fifth straight game and managed just four hits. The Royals’ losing streak is its longest since a 10-game skid from June 5-16 last year.

Since tying Cleveland for the AL Central lead on Aug. 27, the Royals (76-65) have dropped 5 1/2 games behind the Guardians (80-59), who have won five of six. Kansas City maintained a 4 1/2-game lead for the final AL wild card.

The lead is both simple and yet multi-faceted: I know who won (Guardians), when they won (Tuesday night), how they won (7-1), the crucial reason why the won (Brayan Rocchio drove in four runs) and the overall impact of the event (Royals lost seven in a row, which isn’t great if you’re making a run at the playoffs).

The second paragraph covers the losing streak and its historical sense of perspective. The third tells me what the impact on the playoffs is (Guardians up 5.5 games thanks to a winning streak; Royals still in the mix with a 4.5 lead for the last wildcard.)

Here’s a look at how MLB.com went after the same story:

KANSAS CITY — Tanner Bibee has proven time and time again he can pitch in the biggest moments — it’s why he’d be Cleveland’s ace for this postseason. Tuesday was no different.

The Royals loaded the bases with nobody out in the sixth trailing by two runs, but the Guardians stuck with the 25-year-old right hander to get out of the jam in this crucial AL Central matchup — and he did just that.

The lead drops me in the middle of a weird, unattributed moment. Who says he’s “proven time and time again” how great he is? He’s 11-6, which is fine, but we’re not talking Dennis McLain or Bob Gibson in 1968. We also get a weird em-dash thing, followed by an empty phrase used by poor writers: “X was no different.” (If it’s all the same, why are we writing about it? If it’s different, you don’t have to tell me that, as oddity is an interest element.)

The second paragraph again relies on weird punctuation and another empty phrase: “He did just that.”

Then there’s the third paragraph, which has the feeling of a sugared up 4-year-old telling me about his day:

Bibee kept Cleveland’s lead, allowing just one run to come home on a sac fly, to squash Kansas City’s best scoring chance of the game and lead the Guardians to a 7-1 win on Tuesday at Kauffman Stadium. Cleveland, now just a half-game behind Baltimore for the best record in the American League, moved to 4 1/2 games over Minnesota, which lost to the Rays on Tuesday, and 5 1/2 games over the Royals for first place in the division.

You get 80 words (38 and 42 word sentences) of everything you’d want to know in a pile. The second sentence has TEN prepositions, which makes it read like we’re singing this.

This isn’t to pick on anyone or say that one way of doing this is always right and the other is always wrong. In the comparative, you can see a few things that will improve your writing overall:

WRITE FOR THE AUDIENCE, NOT FOR YOURSELF: One of the things that most writers have difficulty with is considering the needs of the audience over their own interest in writing. Sometimes, it’s because we fall in love with the sound of our own voice, while in other cases, we forget that the audience doesn’t know what we know.

In the case of a ballgame, it’s pretty easy to blow off the score or the “where/when” stuff because you just experienced it. You know where you are, what time you were there and who won. That’s great for you, but your readers are still in the dark on the thing they most want to know. I know that when I go online to grab info about games, the first thing I’m thinking is, “I hope the Guardians won.” I’m definitely not thinking, “I wonder what gimmicky approach the writer is going to take this time.”

Think about it this way: If you didn’t know anything about the game, and you only had 20 seconds to live, what would you hope someone would tell you about it before you die.

 

NOUN-VERB-OBJECT IS YOUR HOLY TRINITY: As is the case with most overwritten sentences, we lack for a strong noun-verb-object core at its center. Each sentence should have a basic premise that starts with “Who did what to whom/what?” If we can nail that down, we end up in great shape. If not, we end up building our sentences on a foundation of sand rather than concrete.

Look at the lead of the first sentence and you see two sets of almost perfect NVO constructions:

  • Rocchio drove in runs
  • Guardians beat Kansas City

Now look at the lead of the second sentence and try to find that same NVO core. Go ahead… I’ll wait… (finishes laundry, grocery shopping, resurfacing the driveway…) Got it yet? OK… I’ll check back tomorrow.

If you can’t nail down the main assertion of a sentence in an NVO core, you probably have both structural and focal problems.

 

SHOW, DON’T TELL: In the case of the first chunk of text, I get a lot of clarity because the writer SHOWS me how things happened (Rocchio drove in four runs, Royals drop in the standings due to seven-game losing streak).

In the case of the second chunk of text, I get a lot more TELLING (vague telling at that) in terms of what’s going on with the pitcher. I have no idea how he got out of that bases-loaded jam or how many runs scored while the writer is waxing poetic in the second paragraph. I also have no idea what makes Bibee that “go-to guy.” Instead I get punch-phrases like “he did just that” and “Tuesday was no different.”

If you find yourself resorting to cliches, empty phrases or other “Boom Goes the Dynamite” moments, step away from the keyboard and let your adrenal gland relax a bit. Then, show me what’s going on without telling me.

 

5 Basic Rules For Writing Opinion Pieces That Will Keep You From Coming Across Like An Arrogant Chucklehead

There are many ways to convince people to come around to your way of thinking when you are writing a column. You can offer facts, you can present solid analogies or you can find ways to empathize with your readers.

In reading through a lot of contest entries, from both college and professional publications, I’ve found there appears to be a little less of those options and a little more hostility lately.

Consider the following opening to a column I read as part of a contest I judged over the break. I pulled the name of the paper and the byline in an attempt to avoid publicly shaming the author:

Over the past few weeks, I have written several columns talking about things like the “Barbie” movie and Taylor Swift. Some of you may be begging for something that’s a little less surface level, and I hear you.

Unfortunately for you, I make the rules here, and I will once again be talking about something shallow. You want something different on the opinion page? Join (PAPER’S NAME) and write your own column.

 

I feel bathed in the warmth of the writer after that, and I’m just desperate to hear what comes next…

 

Another piece opened with this salvo:

I don’t care what you do. I don’t care if you eat at (RESTAURANT). I don’t care if you shop at (STORE). I don’t care if you wear (ITEM OF CLOTHING). I don’t care if you listen to (ARTIST).

 

Right… Just like your mom doesn’t care if you ever call on her birthday…

Truth be told, opinion writing is part art, part science and even the best columnists swing and miss. I know that because George Hesselberg, who spent decades at the Wisconsin State Journal writing amazing columns in ways I will never come close to, said that even he remembers writing “a few stinkers.”

George also noted, “Everyone thinks it is easy. It isn’t.”

If you are college student  in an opinion-writing class or student media columnist who is DESPERATE to become the next big-name column writer, consider these rules to help you along:

 

Rule 1- You’re not writing for yourself.

The first and worst mistake most columnists write is that something happens to them and they feel that they need to share it with the world.

When you feel this urge, back away from the keyboard, go take a nap and come back to writing when this urge has passed.

Column writing is not group therapy. The goal in giving you a column isn’t to help with your self esteem and make you glad you shared. The goal of a column is to engage the readers and give THEM something to think about, something to learn or something to do.

In other words, it’s not about you. It’s about them. If what you’re writing doesn’t have a direct tie to the audience or doesn’t in some way involve your readers, you’ve failed before you get off the starting line.

 

Rule 2 – Know your audience

Getting to know the people for whom you write means first learning rule #1. Once you realize that you need to write for somebody else, you need to figure out who they are. Don’t assume they are “all exactly like me,” which is what one particularly arrogant columnist told me. Even if she were very similar to many people, she can’t assume that they all share her issues and concerns.

Markets defined in various ways. You have geographic interests (what’s going on around campus this weekend), demographic interests (what can you do if you’re under 21; what’s the college scene look like) and psychographics (interests, activities etc.). If you can figure out what your audience is, where it is and what it likes/dislikes, you’ve got a pretty good handle on to whom you are speaking with your columns.

 

Rule 3 – Stay local

Great columnists for “national media outlets” get a pass to write whatever they want in many cases. I’m not saying it’s a good idea, but it’s what they do. The reason is that they’ve done this job long enough and well enough to have sources on these big issues and thus they can serve as an influencer of opinions.

That’s not most of us or our publication. Think of it like the scene from Bull Durham where they discover fungus on Tim Robbins’ shower shoes.

If the purpose of a column is to reach an audience and get them to do something, chances are you’ll have much better success in doing this if you look around you and talk about things happening in your own backyard.

Yes, you want to write about why the NFL should avoid a lockout or why Joe Biden should annex Puerto Rico, but remember rule 1. You’re not writing for you. You’re writing for your readers. The chances are pretty good that our president isn’t going to hold a press briefing today and say, “My fellow Americans, I had committed to a hands-off approach in relation to the fighting in Ukraine. However, in reading Carl Smith’s column in the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh’s Advance-Titan, I have learned the errors of my ways…”

You can, however, influence local policy. The best column ever from that perspective was a scathing piece on why the university suddenly started charging a “cup fee” for water at the student eateries. The university had no real answer. Prices hadn’t changed, water was still plentiful and they just figured no one would notice or care. They were wrong and they changed back after the editorial and subsequent online uproar about it.

Seems small and insignificant, but it was something the readers cared about. Thus it mattered.

 

Rule 4 – Don’t become part of the noise

When it comes “the big issues,” there are going to be about 20 percent of the people who will agree with you, 20 percent who don’t agree with you and the middle 60 percent who will say, “Well, I don’t care. I’m going to TikTok.” Unless you have something particularly important to add to the discussion, don’t just add to the noise on these things.

Issues like abortion, gun control and more are important and tough issues. However, piping in with “Here’s MY take on this…” adds nothing to the sum of human knowledge. It also violates rule number 1. If you’ve got something that REALLY adds to the discussion or some way of REALLY tying it to your audience in a way that most mainstream media don’t, that’s fine.

Here’s what I’m talking about: I have a thing against movie reviews in college papers. I can get this stuff online from 1,002 other sources, so why would I read it here and care about what you think?

Well, I was critiquing a paper from a religious based school and I noted that they did movie reviews, but from a very audience-centric angle: They talked about issues of sex and violence in the films and to what degree people of their faith would find these acceptable or not. That’s something the folks at Rotten Tomatoes aren’t going to hit on and that made it valuable to their readers.

Same thing with “the big issues.” If they’re building a massive memorial wall to something in Washington, D.C. and you’re in Idaho, you’re probably not adding much to the discussion. However, if the issue of gun control comes up and your campus has just made it legal to carry a concealed weapon on campus, you’ve got a reason to write.

 

Rule 5 – Don’t write beyond your own level of competence

Wanting to do something and being able to do something are two completely different things. When my kid was 3, she wanted to go ice skating so I took her. Half way through, she was skittering toward the speed skaters and my wife wasn’t fast enough to catch up with her. I was going to be the hero, so I skated fast, and caught up. The kid cut in front of me and it was either maul my own kid or take a header. I took the header and wound up with a bleeding black eye that swelled shut and a shoulder injury that took six months of physical therapy to overcome.

The point is, I went beyond what I was competent enough to handle. And I paid the price.

If you don’t know what you are talking about, don’t talk about it. If you have an interest in something, research the hell out of it before you write about it. Don’t just look for things that support your point or things that seem like they’re in your area.

A columnist is supposed to be an expert on a topic, so make yourself that expert before you go after that topic. You’re not just trying to talk about something. You’re trying to convince people of something. Your charm isn’t enough to make that happen.

How to trim flabby sentences and improve your media writing (A Throwback Post)

When I ask students each year what is one thing they want to get out of the Writing for the Media course they are forced to take, they usually respond with some version of, “I need to make my writing more direct and shorter.”

I attribute their inability to write short, tight sentences to the way in which schools train them to write in general. It’s always about “making” the page requirement: “I need to write a five-page paper” or “I have to do a 10-page essay” or something like that. The goal is to GET to the required length, like they’re trying to be tall enough to ride a roller coaster.

“Your rambling, BS-laden essay on the Council of Trent must be at least this long to receive a passing grade…”

With that in mind, here are a few thoughts from this throwback post on tightening up sentences and improving them at the same time.

Take a breath: Four key ways to tighten and shorten your sentences

Following up on Tuesday’s post about good leads, one thing we didn’t discuss was lead length. This is primarily because we were looking into narrative leads, which often go multiple paragraphs before hitting a nutgraf, which sets up the rest of the piece.

A standard news lead should sit between 25 and 35 words and cover the majority of the 5W’s and 1H. It should also capture the readers’ attention and clearly explain what happened as well as why it matters.

Here is a lead that violates those elements in multiple ways:

When convicted bank robber Luis Marty Narvaez walked into the Far East Side Madison branch of Chase Bank on the afternoon of March 1, 24-year-old Charles Daehling was just weeks into his position as an armed, undercover security guard working without a state license and under contract to an unlicensed and now-defunct Nebraska security firm.

The story, which you can find here, attempts to unpack a bizarre incident in which a unlicensed security guard shot a would-be bank robber. The lead is 55 words, doesn’t tell me what the story is going to include and loses me among a wash of proper nouns and random facts.

Subsequent sentences in the story have similar issues. Here are several examples of sentences that go on way too long:

Narvaez’s head and face were covered with a black cap and black mask as he briskly stepped to a window where a teller was already helping a customer, stuck a bag under the window and demanded money but never displayed a weapon, according to a 124-page Madison police report and video surveillance footage of the incident.

<SNIP>

Daehling didn’t think giving Narvaez a verbal warning before opening fire “would have been appropriate” once he realized a robbery was taking place, because Narvaez and the female customer were close enough that he worried Narvaez could have taken her hostage, the police report says.

<SNIP>

Daehling also told police he thought about trying to provide Narvaez with medical attention after the shooting but “given that he didn’t know whether the suspect was armed, the fact that he had his hands inside his hoodie pockets and the fact that he was the only one in the bank armed and with two customers, he believed that it would be better to make sure that he covered the male suspect with his firearm, until police arrived.”

<SNIP>

Mark Warren, Strategos senior vice president and director of training, said his company no longer subcontracts with Bobbi Randall Inc. but that such subcontracting arrangements are common in the private security industry because no one particular security company can be licensed to work in every state.

<SNIP>

Chase Bank, which started using off-duty Madison police officers to provide security at the branch shortly after the Narvaez shooting, declined to say whether it has any minimal training requirements for security guards who work at its branches, or to answer any other questions about how Daehling came to work at the branch.

Those five sentences occur before the second subhead of the story. The shortest is 45 words and the longest is 78, or more than twice the length of the most a lead should be. Body copy sentences tend to be slightly shorter than the lead when done well, but at the very least, they shouldn’t make you feel like a sugar-addled toddler is telling you about his day.

To help you prevent run-on sentences like these, consider a few tips:

  • Start with the core: Both books argue the value of building a sentence from the core out, instead of from the front to the back. In other words, you want to identify the noun, the verb and the object of the sentence and build outward from that point in concentric rings of information. If you can’t find the NVO core without a searchlight and a posse, you probably have a pretty weak sentence. The NVO core should tell you what it is the sentence wants to explain to the readers. Find it in each of your sentences and then augment it with additional, valuable information.

 

  • Read it aloud: If you count words, you can usually hit the mark for a solid sentence that doesn’t wander too much. That said, the word “a” and the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” each count as a single word, so math is only going to get you so far. A good idea to help you figure out if a sentence is too long (or too heavy, as we discussed in the basic writing sections) is to take a normal, human breath and read it out loud. If you do this and you start to feel tight in your chest when you finish, you might need to make a few trims. If you run out of air before the  end of the sentence, it’s almost certainly going to be too long.

SIDE NOTE 1:When I say a “normal, human breath” I mean the kind of breath you take when you assume you can take another one relatively soon, not a “the Titanic is going under and we need to stay alive” breath.

SIDE NOTE 2: It doesn’t behoove you to cheat at this. I had a student in my class one year who was on the university’s swim team and had the lung capacity of a blue whale. She would read these enormous sentences aloud in one breath and then exhale all her extra oxygen to prove a point. OK, Freya, you got me, but that’s not helping.

 

  • Write once, edit twice: Once you write the sentence, don’t assume it works fine. Go back through with your critical editor’s hat on and dig into this thing. Strip out extra words that don’t add value. Look to see if you cranked up the prepositional-phrase machine and let it run roughshod all over your work. Determine if you are making one, solid point in the sentence or if you’re trying to do three things at once. Find the noun-verb-object core and make sure each piece of the sentence applies to that core. If not, you can always pull it out into a second sentence. Once you do all this, go back and do another fine-tuning edit to clean up any problems that remain or errors you might have introduced.

 

  • Ask yourself, “Would I read this if I didn’t write this?” for each sentence: As we discussed multiple times, you aren’t writing for yourself. You need to write for your readers, so keep them in mind when you write each sentence. If the sentence doesn’t make sense to them or isn’t valuable to them, you have failed at your job. Go back and make the necessary fixes to help your readers get the most out of your work.

Do you know the way to Inexperienced Bay, Wisconsin? (And why we’re still not fully ready for AI journalism)

I could have sworn this was a joke, but it looks more like Microsoft’s attempt at AI journalism:

(I did the screenshot because I swear this is going away when someone figures it out…)

In case you need translation, the “writer” was referring to the “Green Bay Packers,” apparently assuming the word “green” to be a synonym for “inexperienced” instead of the color/proper noun. It’s also interesting that Jaquan Brisker is apparently playing “security,” as his listed role is “safety.” In football parlance, that’s the player who is the farthest back on the field as a last line of defense against an offensive score, not Paul Blart, Mall Cop.

The “author” also had a few other moments of comedy gold:

Final season, the Bears had the worst document within the league at 3-14, and it earned them the highest decide in April’s draft.

(Translation: Last year, the Bears had the worst record in the league at 3-14, earning them the top pick in the April draft.)

That commerce netted them DJ Moore, who has been one of many recreation’s extra productive large receivers over the previous couple of years…

(Translation: That trade got them DJ Moor, who has been one of the game’s most productive big time receivers…)

Aside from the terrible use of a thesaurus, the “writer” manages to string together some truly godawful sentences that are either nonsense or just run-on messes. The conclusion of the piece captures all that is wrong while giving me a new “phrasing” moment that I’m sure I’ll be using in regular conversation:

However regardless of how a lot Inexperienced Bay and Chicago might battle, their rivalry will at all times be a spark of pleasure for his or her respective fanbases.

EXERCISE TIME: If you’d like your own “spark of pleasure,” dig around on this site (or any other AI disasterbacle of a website) and pick an article for translation. Not only will it help you better understand what’s wrong with AI, but it will also help you sharpen your own writing through word choice and improved clarity.

(h/t to Jason McMahon of the Madison area ink-stained wretches for posting the original.)

Three tips to help you think harder about your word choices as a journalist

(EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re back for the year, applying the new model for the blog with the Wednesday post being about writing and/or reporting. If you missed Mass Com Monday, you can find it here. Please continue to  send suggestions for improvement  or lists of things you need covered here. — VFF)

 

Students have often told me that when they are writing a story and they hit a lazy patch, a dumb phrase or something else that doesn’t make for good copy, they hear my voice in their heads, barking at them to fix it.

I, too, have a voice like that in my head and it belongs to Cliff Behnke, the former managing editor of the Wisconsin State Journal. Even today, decades since I last saddled up at a terminal in that newsroom, Cliff still scares the hell out of me.

He had the ability to parse words in such a way that made you feel horribly inadequate for not seeing your failings before he did. I can still remember the first experience I had where he did this. I had written a caption for a photo that noted there were “89 different model railroad train layouts” at the expo center.

Cliff made the point that, of course they’re different. Could I imagine if there were 89 of them and they were ALL IDENTICAL? So why bother with “different?”

That kind of insight became a big part of my writing, not just in shedding the word “different” (another one of Cliff’s peeves was “new” as in “They built a new school.” Has anyone ever built an OLD school?), but also in learning to challenge every word I wrote, and more than a few of them that I read. Take this headline from Deadspin for example:

Sexual assault is a horrible, terrible, absolutely no-good thing, so do we need the word “disturbing” to describe the details? I really went through pretty much every iteration of any potential detail I could think of to find one that wouldn’t fit in the realm of disturbing. I came up empty.

The headline could have used any one of a dozen other relatively meaningless words that could draw in a reader. For example, the writer could have gone with “shocking” details that might involve some really weird stuff this idiot tried as compared to the more banal details like he reeked of Polo and drove a Tesla. At least in that case, we wouldn’t have a “new/different” kind of situation here.

With that in mind, here are a couple hints on how to challenge your word choices in journalistic writing:

Addition by subtraction: In the case of “new” or “different” or “disturbing,” you find that the word really doesn’t add anything by being there. No  one would think they built an old school, had 89  identical model railroad layouts or had some fun and exciting details about a sexual assault. Thus, feel free to eliminate the word.  Occasionally, when I challenge a word in this  fashion, I go back to this scene from “A Few Good Men:”

“I felt his life might be in danger…”

“Grave danger?”

“Is there another kind?”

If you lack the internal level of sarcasm to make this work on a daily basis, I’m sure you have a  friend, colleague or definitely a professor of journalism who can help you sharpen that part of your personality.

 

I do not think that word means what you think it means:  Looking up words is always a good idea,  as not every definition fits the intended meaning. I’m sure one of my students would like to have back about two years of his music reviews in which he kept using “penultimate” to mean “super-extra-ultimate” when it really means “second to last.”

However, I’m even looking at words that people tend to use interchangeably that can add opinion or shift the truth of an issue in an unforeseen way. Consider the words “change” and “improve.”

Both can be true,  but they don’t mean the same thing, even if people involved in a situation kind of wish they did:

“Mayor John Smith said the construction will change the traffic flow along Interstate 21.”

“Mayor John Smith said the construction will improve the traffic flow along Interstate 21.”

An improvement always presupposes change. That said, a change CAN be, but isn’t NECESSARILY an improvement. EXAMPLE:

CHANGE 1: Your landlord has installed a set of handrails on your staircase to make it easier and  safer for you to get into the house. 

CHANGE 2: Your landlord has removed the steps from your house and replaced the lawn with a moat full of starving alligators.

Clearly, both change your housing situation, but only one is an improvement.Keep an eye on words that couch reality like “development,” “benefit” and other such things that really need a look to see if they’re really just a “change” kind of thing.

 

Go back to the Holy Trinity: Most of the reason we get into a jam in writing is because we don’t have that solid noun-verb-object core that makes for the start of a strong sentence. If you can start with those three elements, most sentences will dramatically improve.

Even more, the quality of each element can eliminate the need for those ineffective descriptors that we’ve discussed above.  In the Deadspin headline you get “Details emerge from complaint” as your noun, verb and object elements. “Emerge” makes it sound like something out of a sewer-monster horror movie at best. “Details” couldn’t be more vague if you tried.

Stronger focus on the noun-verb-object structure could really make for a stronger headline:

Texans’ minority owner sexually assaulted women through groping, digital penetration, court complaint states

If that feels too forward, you could go with something a little less active and a little more tame:

Texans’ minority owner accused of sexual assaults, including digital penetration and groping a woman through her underwear

Think about how concrete your noun can be and how vigorous your verb can be. In some cases, if you have to go with a weaker verb, adding clarity and value to the noun and the object can draw the readers into the piece.

Elon Musk said he “learned a lot” from his SpaceX rocket explosion. So can media professionals.

You know you’re rich when you can have what equates to a multi-million dollar firework explode after four minutes in the air and refer to it as a learning experience. Elon Musk noted after his SpaceX rocket blew up that he “learned a lot” from the flight that lasted about half the time of the Rolling Stones’ “You can’t always get what you want.”

As much as it would be fun to beat up on the guy who somehow turned Twitter into a place that has baffled Stephen King, a more valuable use of our space here might be to turn this into a learning experience for media practitioners across the spectrum.

Thus, let us begin with…

NEWS LESSON 1: When it comes to leads, just tell me what happened.

A friend and colleague sent me an array of leads as a reminder of what can happen when writers get too into themselves…

This shit is remarkable:

Washington Post:

SpaceX’s Starship lifted off the pad in Southern Texas and cleared the launchpad, its first milestone, but then began tumbling as it was preparing for stage separation and the vehicle came apart some four minutes into flight.

 

CNN:

SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, took off from a launch pad on the coast of South Texas on Thursday at 9:28 a.m. ET, but exploded midair before stage separation.

 

CBS.com:

SpaceX’s huge Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built, blasted off on an unpiloted maiden flight Thursday and successfully flew for more than two minutes before tumbling out of control and exploding in a cloud of flaming debris.

 

CNBC.com:

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Thursday launched its Starship rocket for the first time, but fell short of reaching space after exploding in mid-flight. No crew were on board.

 

Space.com:

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — The most powerful rocket ever built put on quite a show during its debut space launch.

As my friend noted, each lead seems to avoid the fact that a giant missile blew up and created quite a mess for people who were wondering if Musk’s effort would be better or worse than his work with Twitter.

The lesson here is simple. Just tell people what happened and why they should care in your lead. If you feel the need to wax poetic about a massive ship breaking free from the celestial bonds of Earth, go to a poetry slam.

 

NEWS LESSON 2: Completeness and clarity matter a great deal.

Shortly after the rocket turned into a flying junkyard, “think” pieces started to emerge about how this wasn’t really as bad as it seemed:

About four minutes after SpaceX‘s gargantuan rocket lifted from its Texas launch pad, it burst into a fireball over the Gulf of Mexico, never reaching space.

Though SpaceX hasn’t shared many details yet about what happened during Starship’s maiden voyage, one fact is known: It was intentionally ordered to explode.

This and several other stories noted that it wasn’t an unexpected explosion, but one deliberately set off by the SpaceX folks because of the risk of falling debris and other similar concerns for people on the ground.

That’s important to know, but it’s also worth noting that the REASON they blew this thing up was because the rocket had started to malfunction around that time. In other words, either way, this thing was not going to be a fully realized launch.

Both of these points are worth making clear right up front on stories that discuss the rocket, although it seemed like half the stories out there were doing some version of a “Ha Ha! Elon Sucks!” story and the other half were doing the “Oh, you simpletons. You do not understand the genius of Elon” stories.

Both are half true, in a way, but neither is clear or complete.

 

PUBLIC RELATIONS LESSON 1: Manage expectations

Dovetailing nicely with the info above, the first lesson good public relations practitioners learn is how to convey important information of interest to an audience in a transparent and direct way. In this case, that seemed to be lacking.

The follow up stories touch on how this taught people a lot, or how rockets fail a lot before they succeed or how they never really intended this thing to be totally successful. All of these things might be true, but the timing of those pieces is really terrible.

If you manage expectations people have for an event, you can better control the narrative  in terms of what people should expect or not expect. For the longest time, people got used to NASA tossing spacecrafts into the heavens with nothing but total success. Musk probably knew (I’m guessing based on what’s coming out now) that this wasn’t going to be that.

Rather than tell people, “Hey, this thing is going to be in the air about as long as it takes to blow $20 in a slot machine at the Las Vegas airport,” he didn’t mention what could happen. Thus, the reaction from pundits and suddenly all of the “we learned stuff” responses sound like trying to polish a turd.

Put it this way: If I go to the mechanic to get my car fixed and he tells me, “It’s going to cost $300 and take two hours,” that’s my resting pulse for expectation. If he comes in at $250 or it takes an hour and a half, I’m going to be thrilled. However, if he tells me it’ll cost $250 and will take an hour and a half, but instead it’s $300 and two hours, I’m going to be upset.

 

PUBLIC RELATIONS LESSON 2: Don’t give people a reason to mock you.

Perhaps the one thing people will remember most of this mess was the linguistic calisthenics that Musk and crew used to explain the rocket’s demise:

This approach to reality reminds me of the time that I covered the Mifflin Street Block Party, which devolved into fire, arrests and the destruction of a fire truck.

When I called the police to determine if they called a 10-33 (Riot in progress), I was told I shouldn’t call it a riot. I then outlined all of the stuff I saw there: A car burned to a shell, porches ripped to pieces, fires torching the street, kids screaming “f— the pigs” and more before asking, “If it wasn’t a riot, what was it?”

“It was a large, prolonged disturbance,” the officer said before hanging up on me.

A “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is not only jargon, but it’s clearly mock-worthy. I get that you don’t necessarily want to be this blunt in your assessment of the launch, but come on… You might have been better off going with “we had an oopsie” at that point.

If there’s one thing the internet is good at, it’s mockery. The last thing you want to do is softball it in for the folks out there who really enjoy roasting the hell out of you.