Writing Basics

Confidence or Thuggery? A quick look at avoiding double-standards in journalism writing

In the wake of the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship game, the question of double standards emerged as a major plot point.

During LSU’s 102-85 defeat of Iowa, Tiger star Angel Reese made the “can’t see me” hand gesture toward the Hawkeyes’ Caitlin Clark as a form of trash talking. Clark had made similar gestures throughout the tournament toward opposing players.

In one case it was deemed “confident” and “self-assured.” In another case, people decried the “lack of sportsmanship” and “thuggery.”

If you can’t guess who got which critique, here’s a clue: Clark is white and Reese is Black.

William Rhoden, a distinguished author and sports journalist, broke down the entirety of this situation on Andscape, drawing on prior examples of this throughout athletics:

On Sunday, Reese simply gave it back to Clark. Many neutral observers and Clark’s fans were not pleased and played the sportsmanship and class card. Double standards: When we do it, it’s bravado. When you do it, it’s crass. When we play hard, it’s gritty. When you play hard, it’s thuggery.

I saw this this firsthand in the 1980s with John Thompson’s Georgetown team. They were routinely cast as villains and thugs. We saw the same thing with UNLV’s great teams of the 1990s. When UNLV played Duke for the national title in 1990, Duke’s players were cast as “choirboys” while UNLV players were cast as villains and thugs. Then, of course, there was Michigan’s Fab Five which, critics say, introduced hip-hop elements into basketball.

Now that the women’s game has grown and African American women continue to become increasingly prominent, the same stereotypes are emerging: Black women portrayed as rough-and-tumble street fighters, their white counterparts as stalwart, heady competitors.

And let’s not even get into the whole history of Don Imus and his “nappy-headed hos” review of the Rutgers women’s basketball team…

We’ve talked about this kind of thing at length a few years back when stories had framed women based on their gender identity first and their accomplishments as an afterthought. We also touched on the issue of race and framing of athletes back when Brian Flores launched his discrimination suit against the NFL.

As a brief reminder here to journalism students, consider the following issues when including descriptors or making word choices in ways you might not initially consider:

WOULD YOU USE THE DESCRIPTOR OF THE SITUATION WAS REVERSED?: One of the key ways to determine fairness in language or description is to turn the tables and see if it still works for you. My favorite example comes from Jim Bouton’s book, “Ball Four,” in which one of his teammates notes that he wouldn’t mind the papers referring to him as “the black first baseman” if only they would refer to his counterpart as “the white first baseman.”

The same is true of descriptions like “the female mayor” or “the woman CEO” and so forth. Feminist scholars have long noted the incongruity in language as to how men and women are described. A few common pairings include:

    • Women are “pushy” while men are “assertive”
    • Women are “bossy” while men “take charge”
    • Women are “stubborn” while men are “persistent”

Calling attention unnecessarily to an attribute that you wouldn’t flip the other way is clearly an indicator that you might want to rethink that descriptor. I can’t remember seeing headlines about “the white quarterback” or “the male company president” and I bet most of you can’t either. Same thing with references to a “straight wedding” or a “cis gender politician.”

I can’t imagine someone calling Caitlin Clark a “thug” for her trash talking, but I know that word showed up in a number of discussions involving Angel Reese. That’s clearly part of the problem.

 

DOES THE TERM HAVE A LOADED MEANING?: I can’t think of any time I’ve heard someone described as “a looter” or “a rioter” and had a positive reaction to that person. Those terms carry with them some negative baggage.  Conversely, I’ve seen an array of meanings ascribed to the term “clowning around” that range from bright and happy to racist.

A few years back, I remember seeing an analysis of the term “unskilled labor.” In a post on this term, someone noted that all labor is skilled. If you took Bill Gates and stuck him with a road construction crew, he would be as lost as can be. If you took Jamie Dimon and put him in charge of a Naperville McDonald’s during lunch rush, he would probably end up with a crowd of really angry people and some severe grease burns. The term “unskilled labor” is meant to diminish the value of what certain people do and thus make it easier to discount them or pay them less.

We could go on for days, but the point is that language matters in how we tell stories and how we frame the characters in them.

When to “use” partial “quotes” to make them “effective”

Prepare the "Laser" - Dr Evil Austin Powers | Make a Meme

Not “exactly” a “powerful” use of a “partial quote.”

The point of a partial quote is to use quality paraphrase to set up a word, word pairing or short phrase to make a significant impact on the story you plan to tell. For some reason, a number of the stories I’ve been reading aren’t written with that mission in mind.

Here are a few examples where the authors used partial quotes in relatively ineffective ways:

People close to President Trump said the indictment caught him and his advisers “off guard.” 

On the day of the shooting, she informed her boss that the student was in a “violent mood,” the complaint alleges.

Lilly Lima noted that coffeehouse does “have lattes,” but that she preferred other forms of coffee that were missing.

In each case, if you took the quote marks away, you would not lose any impact because the words aren’t particularly valuable or special as they relate to the story. In addition, you lessen the impact of any future partial quotes because you’re over using them.

Here are three ways in which writers can use partial quotes effectively, based on a few important premises:

(EDITOR’S NOTE: These words or phrases were actually used in the media and some of them are quite harsh. Not all of them are used directly from the same source, or in the exact sentence the original writer built, but they are real. I wanted to flag folks who tend to worry about “unnecessary cursing” and other vulgarities. Still, that’s one of the key reasons we use partial quotes: Someone says something we surely don’t want readers think came from us.)

With that in mind, here we go…

EXAMPLE 1: A source uses a word or phrase that is vulgar or otherwise offensive and we want to make clear what that source said without letting the reader think we, as the writer, came up with it:

An NCAA investigator referred to UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian as a “rug merchant,” a term Tarkanian’s wife said was a slur against her husband’s Armenian heritage.

An employee at a Domino’s Pizza in Michigan was fired after he cursed out a customer and called her a “fucking retard.”

Mardela Springs Mayor Norman Christopher faced a hostile group of citizens this week after referring to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as “Buckwheat’s birthday.”

The last thing you would want as a writer is to have anyone thinking you said that stuff. The quote marks make it clear you are merely conveying the content so that the readers can judge for themselves how upset they should be. (My answer would be pretty damned upset…)

EXAMPLE 2: Someone uses a phrase that is eloquent, unique or has some kind of panache in describing someone or something. It could be clever or insulting or merely just odd, but you want to use the words and they’re clearly not yours:

During his SNL monologue, comedian Dave Chappelle referred to Senate candidate Hershel Walker as “demonstratively stupid.”

The plan to hire retired sex workers as crossing guards was “a case of absolute dipshittery,” the mayor said in an email to the city council members who proposed the bill.

Truman shot back that Eisenhower, who’d later win the election, knows less about politics “than a pig knows about Sunday.”

Quotes themselves are intended to allow a source to use language in a way that provides vibe and feel to a piece, so this is a pretty good way of doing it, if a complete sentence or two aren’t going to work.

EXAMPLE 3: Someone says something that comes back to bite them in the keester.

Despite saying Saturday that he would remain the university’s president for “the foreseeable future,” Carleton James announced Monday he had taken a job with an online educational organization and would be gone by semester’s end.

Gov. John Smith said at Tuesday’s Education Roundtable that improving the state’s schools was his “No. 1 focus,” despite stating less than 24 hours earlier that his “No. 1 focus” this year would be crime reduction.

A lot of times, people say things and it becomes pretty clear that there is no way they mean what they say. To that end, using their own words to impeach their character can do a world of good for your readers.

Hope this “helps” you and your students make “better use” of partial quotes.

(OK, I’ll “stop” now…)

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

Simple solutions for frequent writing problems: The paraphrase-quote structure

In an attempt to help writers fix simple problems that have tended to crop up in the pieces I’ve been grading lately, we’re going to spend this week giving each one a quick look with some examples of things that went wrong and some simple solutions.

Today’s menu item: Structural problems involving quotes and paraphrases.

Despite the fact I never drink coffee, this is one of my favorite gifts from a student.

BASICS OF THE PROCESS: The paraphrase-quote pairing approach in media writing is one way to help readers learn key information from a source and then get some extra spice or flavor from a quote that augments and improves upon that paraphrase.

Generally speaking, this means you’ll need to follow a few basic rules:

  • The paraphrase and quote should come from the same person, or at least not different people. In some cases, a quote from a source, who is commenting on a trend or a report can work. However, having Person A in the paraphrase and Person B delivering the quote gets awkward.
  • The paraphrase and the quote should be attributed, just in case you move stuff around, or in case readers could get confused. (More on this next time.)
  • The paraphrase and quote should work in tandem to get a point across. I often make the case that a good pairing is like a diamond ring: The paraphrase is the ring part with the big prongs that helps set the foundation of the ring and helps display the big shiny thing. The quote is the diamond, as it’s sparkly and engaging, but it needs something to properly display it for the world to see.
  • The paraphrase and the quote should be separate paragraphs

PROBLEMATIC APPROACHES: As simple as this seems, there are plenty of ways to screw it up. Consider these trends that the journalism hivemind have noticed:

  • Telling me you’re going to tell me something soon
  • “When asked” paraphrases
  • Redundant paraphrases and quotes

Let’s examine each of these and talk about why they lead to bad writing:

TELLING ME YOU’RE GOING TO TELL ME SOMETHING: This approach has taken hold over the past couple years in my classes, and I guess I’ll blame it on cliffhangers on streaming shows. Regardless of its origins, this annoying trend of setting up the quote by telling me it’s coming has to stop. Example:

  • Mayor Bill Smith had this to say:
  • Although it costs a lot of money to attend college, Hailey Jones had some good reasons for attending.
  • Quarterback James Carlson mentioned several things that cost his team the game

In each of these cases, all the paraphrase is doing is telling me that the quote coming up will tell me something. Given that we only get so much space to work with in these stories, and that people now have an attention span that’s shorter than that of a goldfish, providing dead-space content in the story isn’t a great idea.

 

“WHEN ASKED” PARAPHRASES: Not to place blame, but this trend started as a result of media convergence, as broadcast and print journalists started blending their approaches to content. Broadcasters often used first person in their stand-up segments or in the Q and A approach after the main package was done during the live shot:

ANCHOR: Jane, did the mayor say if he planned to support the “Doggie Doo” bill?

REPORTER: I asked the mayor how much political capital she planned to expend to make sure people picked up after their pets, and she told me, “I’m going all in on this one.”

Since print reporters eschewed the use of first person, but they still wanted to do this kind of thing, they somehow came up with the “when asked” approach:

  • When asked if she supported the bill, the mayor said, “Absolutely, I do. We need to hold people accountable for cleaning up after their pets. Dog poop is a scourge on our parks. There’s no reason someone should ruin their shoes because other people are lazy.”
  • When asked about his position on increasing tuition, the chancellor had no comment.

This is bad for two key reasons:

  • “When asked” is simply a passive-voice version of first-person writing. (When asked by me…) We want to avoid passive voice AND first person writing, so you clearly don’t want to do  both of these things at the same time.
  • I can’t imagine why you think it’s important to tell me that the person was asked something. Are you concerned that your readers might think this person just randomly engaged in a soliloquy? Also, it’s hard to imagine a moment in your reporting life where, totally unprovoked, a random person came running over to you and said, “Hey, you look like the kind of person who would be writing a story about parking on campus, so I’m gonna tell you that my name is Jim Jackson and I think parking here sucks and you should totally quote me on that.”

In short, we know they were asked something. Stop including that.

REDUNDANT PARAPHRASES AND QUOTES: The goal of a paraphrase is to set up a quote and provide context about the upcoming quote and value for the reader. If they do exactly the same thing, you are clearly wasting space:

Mayor Bill Smith said firefighters don’t need as much insurance as others do.
“The firefighters don’t need as much money for insurance as anyone else does,” he said. “If they think they do, they can pay for it themselves.”
In some cases, it’s even just the use of similar phrases that can be a problem:
To reach the playoffs, the Oshkosh Wildcats need to be more dedicated to the fundamentals of the game, Coach Jane Wilson said.
“We need dedication to the fundamentals,” she said. “Making the playoffs is a challenge for any team, particularly if that team can’t do the little things right.”
As noted earlier in the “telling me that you’re going to tell me” examples, you’re clearly wasting space here and the readers are going to get bored right quick.
SOLVING THESE PROBLEMS: The obvious answer is to stick to the paraphrase-quote pairing to avoid mushing together the paraphrase and quote in a “when asked” way. The problem most people have is that they often feel like they can’t write a decent paraphrase that will set up the quote without repeating the quote. Thus, they default to the “telling me” approach or get stuck in redundancy hell.
One of the easiest ways to solve this problem is to look at the entirety of the quote for additional information that you’re not going to use in the direct quote and use THAT information for your paraphrase.  Let’s use two of the above examples here:
  • When asked if she supported the bill, the mayor said, “Absolutely, I do. We need to hold people accountable for cleaning up after their pets. Dog poop is a scourge on our parks. There’s no reason someone should ruin their shoes because other people are lazy.”
  • To reach the playoffs, the Oshkosh Wildcats need to be more dedicated to the fundamentals of the game, Coach Jane Wilson said.
  • “We need dedication to the fundamentals,” she said. “Making the playoffs is a challenge for any team, particularly if that team can’t do the little things right.”

In each case, we can slice a bit off of the quote to make a stronger paraphrase that would then refocus the point of the quote and increase its value to the reader:

The mayor said she supports the “Doggie Doo” bill because the city needs to hold people accountable for cleaning up after their pets.

“Dog poop is a scourge on our parks,” she said. “There’s no reason someone should ruin their shoes because other people are lazy.”

AND

Coach Jane Wilson said the Oshkosh Wildcats need to dedicate themselves more to the fundamentals of the game if they want to have a successful season.

“Making the playoffs is a challenge for any team, particularly if that team can’t do the little things right,” she said.

If you’re concerned that the quote is getting sliced too thinly, go back to the interview and grab the sentence above the one you plan to use at the start of your quote and summarize that. Conversely, you can look at the sentence after the last one you want to use in the quote to see if that provides some fodder for paraphrase. Either way, you’ll be capturing words and concepts that are not going to end up in that direct quote and thus you will improve the overall paraphrase-quote pairing.

 

Simple solutions for frequent writing problems: How to deal with the time element in a lead sentence

In an attempt to help writers fix simple problems that have tended to crop up in the pieces I’ve been grading lately, we’re going to spend this week giving each one a quick look with some examples of things that went wrong and some simple solutions.

Today’s menu item: Problematic placement of time elements in the lead:

Putting the “when” in a lead is crucial in most cases, given it’s part of those “5Ws and 1H” professors preach and the way “immediacy” is included in the FOCII interest elements (Fame, Oddity, Conflict, Immediacy, Impact) used to drive audience-centricity.

Placement problems tend to arise in two key ways:

  • Misplaced modifiers
  • Overvaluing the time element

The first one happens a lot in speech or meeting stories, when the time element incorrectly reflects what the writer is trying to say about the event:

Mayor Bill Smith said he planned to eradicate poverty Wednesday on the steps of the city building.

A 28-year-old Oshkosh man was accused of stealing 100 computers from city employees in court on Monday.

In both of these cases, it sounds like the protagonist in the lead is really going to be busy: The mayor will get rid of all the poverty in the city on Wednesday, while the 28-year-old man stole 100 computers on Monday. (The “where” elements make these leads sound even weirder, but we’ll save that for another day.)

The second problem happens when we try to avoid the first problem by stuffing the time element at the front of the sentence:

On Friday, the West Smithton Bulls defeated the East Smithton Jaguars, 41-28, to claim the “Hamhock Trophy” in the city’s annual rivalry game.

Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced he planned to send 1 million troops to help Ukraine push back advancing Russian forces.

In moving the time element to the front of the sentence, it avoids the modifier concern, but it also tells your readers that the “when” element is the most important thing in the sentence, which can’t be right in almost any situation. If the most important thing you want to tell me in the most important sentence of a story is WHEN something happened, you have some significant problems with that lead.

Notice that in the “big type” we have things like “WAR” and “INVASION” not “TUESDAY!”

SOLUTION: Get the time element as close as possible to the verb to which it applies.

Mayor Bill Smith said Wednesday he planned to eradicate poverty  on the steps of the city building.

A 28-year-old Oshkosh man was accused Monday in court of stealing 100 computers from city employees.

President Joe Biden announced Tuesday he planned to send 1 million troops to help Ukraine push back advancing Russian forces.

The West Smithton Bulls defeated the East Smithton Jaguars, 41-28, on Friday to claim the “Hamhock Trophy” in the city’s annual rivalry game.

In each case, we now have the time element more appropriately couched in a spot where it doesn’t create an incorrect assumption or overvalue the “when” element. That doesn’t mean these are GOOD leads, but they are improvements on the ones we had.

The better way to fix the leads would be to emphasize what matters more in the lead from a thematic standpoint that emphasizes some of the other FOCII elements.

Poverty has devastated Springfield for too long, and the city will now make its eradication a top priority, Mayor Bill Smith said Wednesday on the steps of the city building.

A 28-year-old Oshkosh man, who police say stole scores of governmental computers and sold them for more than $1 million via eBay, was charged Wednesday with 100 counts of theft.

The United States will deploy more 1 million troops to Ukraine to help the country push back advancing Russian forces, President Joe Biden announced Tuesday.

The West Smithton Bulls broke a 58-year losing streak against rival East Smithton, earning the “Hamhock Trophy” by defeating the Jaguars 41-28 on Friday.

Obviously, there are other ways to fix these as well, but these quick rewrites show how refocusing your priorities in the lead can improve the value of the content and avoid the problems that tend to crop up when the time element is in the wrong place.

 

Lead Writing 101: Start with the “holy trinity” and move outward

Today’s coverage of the earthquake that decimated Turkey provides an opportunity to discuss some lead-writing basics

Here is a lead from CNN (and a second paragraph) that demonstrates how passive voice and weak structure can undermine a lead:

More than 1,500 people have died and rescuers are racing to pull survivors from beneath the rubble after a devastating earthquake ripped through Turkey and Syria, leaving destruction and debris on each side of the border.

One of the strongest earthquakes to hit the region in a century shook residents from their beds at around 4 a.m. on Monday, sending tremors as far away as Lebanon and Israel.

The lead has potential, but it’s buried (no pun intended) in the middle of the sentence (earthquake ripped through Turkey and Syria). The other problems come in here:

    • Two sets of passive voice/helping verbs kick off the lead (have died; are racing)
    • Redundancies (rubble, destruction, debris)
    • Lack of context (a lot of earthquakes do damage. What makes this one special?)
    • Missing the “when” aspect

With that in mind, let’s go back to the basics of lead writing:

    • Tell me what happened
    • Tell me why I, as a reader, should care (usually done by focusing on the FOCII interest elements)

Then, let’s apply the “core-out” approach, starting with the “holy trinity” of noun-verb-object

    • Earthquake kills people

Add in the next layer, which is probably going to add impact details and focus on the “where” and “when”

    • An earthquake killed at least 1,500 people between Turkey and Syria on Monday morning

Look for things that add value in terms of impact and oddity. We have impact (1,500 people), but the oddity factor could be helpful in providing context:

    • One of the strongest earthquakes to hit the Turkey-Syria region in more than a century killed at least 1,500 people Monday morning.
      (NOTE: I have no idea how the folks at CNN are defining “one of” or “the region,” so I’m a little hamstrung with this lead. If I had the core info about this, the descriptors would be tighter and clearer than “Turkey-Syria region.”)

Then polish out some additional elements regarding the continuing efforts on the ground:

    • One of the strongest earthquakes to hit the Turkey-Syria region in more than a century killed at least 1,500 people Monday morning, as rescue workers continued digging through rubble to free survivors.

Perhaps not the greatest lead of all time, but it gives you a few key interest elements (Oddity, Immediacy, Impact), it works in active voice (earthquake kills people) and it has a goodly amount of the 5W’s and 1H.

EXERCISE OPPORTUNITY: Have your students pull a story on the earthquake (or if something else is happening in your area that has a lot of coverage and interest) and see how well the author did at nailing an active-voice, N-V-O lead. Then, have the students rewrite it, working from that core NVO and moving outward. It would also help to share the leads among the class, with the students explaining what they did and why they did it. It could also be helpful to have them explain why they think their work is better than the original piece.

 

Get to the point: Lead Writing 101 (A Throwback Thursday Post)

In talking to my writing class on Wednesday, it dawned on me why they have such trouble with leads: They have been trained to write for length, not quality.

If you think back to every paper you ever wrote in college, or ask students about any paper they have to write now, everything is predicated on length: 5 pages on the outcome of the Civil War, 10 pages on the stages of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, 20 pages on the history of war deployments in modern America.

Students under these requirements know that getting to the point quickly is detrimental to their grades. They need to fill space.  Therefore, they start off with epic, sweeping introductions that start at the dawn of modern time and end with a thesis about the invention of the donut. They toss every possible adjective and adverb into every sentence, in hopes of squeezing out one more line to make a page look more full. They restate every point in detail as part of an overly detailed conclusion.

To help them make the transition to journalism, here is a throwback post that looks at what good leads do and how to fix bad leads. Hope it helps:

 

 

Just tell me what happened: Lead writing 101

The lead is the most important thing you will ever write in a story. It’s supposed to grab your readers by the eyeballs and drag them into the guts of your story. It’s supposed to explain who did what to whom in a clear and concise fashion. It’s also supposed to be between 25 and 35 words, lest it get wild and unruly. This is one of those skills you need to work on constantly, even if you are a pro.

Consider a few of the following leads and what went horribly wrong with them:

 

Lead 1: It’s the most sensational, inspirational, celebrational, muppetational…

Hyperbole is the art of creating overblown excitement for no real reason. A straw man approach is the ability to set up a weak argument or premise that no one has stated so you can refute it and establish your point of view. If you put both of them in a lead, you have something like this story’s opening:

Delivering wheelchairs to disabled kids across the country from Bozeman may sound like a pipe dream, but it’s exactly what ROC Wheels does.

I don’t know much about Bozeman, Montana, but I’m guessing its entire populous doesn’t stay awake at night aspiring to deliver wheelchairs to people. Also, who says this aspiration would likely go unmet if my supposition in the previous sentence were incorrect? What is this “On Bozeman, Montana’s Waterfront?”

 

The author has overstated her point, and that’s just one problem with this lead. Here are two others:

  1. The story isn’t about ROC’s past. It’s about the launch of a new program involving veterans building and delivering chairs as part of a therapeutic activity. Thus, the lead is buried in the second sentence.
  2. The origin of the term “pipe dream” relates to the smoking of an opium pipe and the wild visions this activity evoked in people. Eeesh.

This is a clear case of what happens when a writer tries to do too much with a lead. Just tell me what’s going on and why I care: Veterans will build and deliver wheelchairs, an activity that helps the recipients as well as the veterans.

 

Lead 2: How can we bore people with a story about sex?

Question: How can a lead about sex toys be bad?

Answer: Like this.

Zach Smith had sex toys delivered to him at Ohio State‘s football headquarters in 2015, according to an online report Friday, raising more questions about the former assistant coach’s conduct while employed there just as the university prepares to conclude its investigation of the program and head coach Urban Meyer.

This 50-word monstrosity manages to pour a ton of random facts into the mind of the reader, like that scene in “A Clockwork Orange.” Even more, the lead skipped several other elements of the report that were far more likely to grab the readers’ attention:

  • He spent more than $2,200 on this stuff, including on items named “WildmanT ball lifter red, candyman men’s jock suspenders (and) PetitQ open slit bikini brief,” none of which are the most offensive items he purchased. Plus, that’s almost twice what I spent on my first car…
  • His lawyer threatened the reporter over the publication of these documents and refused to engage in the premise that this was a legitimate story.
  • Smith apparently had a “photography hobby” of sorts, namely that he took shots of his genitalia while at work, including multiple photos believed to have been taken at the White House during a celebration of the team’s national championship.

I’m not saying you should always go with salacious details in a lead. The point is that if you pick a key element of a situation like this for the lead, don’t lose the thread as you try to weave in six other plot lines. This is a sports story, not a “Grey’s Anatomy” episode.

LEAD 3: Something happened! Oh… you wanted more?

Here’s the lead on a story about a county conducting alcohol-compliance checks where you learn nothing more than what I just told you:

ENID, Okla. — Garfield County Sheriff’s Office and PreventionWorkz partnered earlier this month to conduct alcohol-compliance checks throughout the county.

This is a version of the standard “held a meeting” or “gave a speech” lead. It often shows up in sports reporting as well where someone will explain that Team X played Team Y on Friday or something. The problem with every version of this lead is that it fails to tell the readers the outcome of something. Instead, it simple explains that something happened. In this case, the writer could have focused on a number of things:

  • In the 25 random checks, four places sold alcohol to the underage person, down from eight sales in March.
  • In all of the cases, the clerks checked the person’s ID, but the four sales came from reading the ID wrong.
  • Of the four sales, one person had sold to a minor and been cited at least once before.

There’s also some information about upcoming legal changes that will require sellers to take a course in IDing people and such. Finally, the story noted that the authorities look to hit 100 percent compliance, but it never mentions if that ever happens. In any case, telling me an alcohol check happened isn’t telling me much of anything as a reader.

Lead 4: Here’s your lead. Guess the story:

Quote leads are always difficult for readers, because they lack context. Try this one:

“There is not a man under the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”

It’s a great line from a great man: Frederick Douglass uttered it in his 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” However, dropping it up at the front of a story doesn’t make it a lead.

Whether the quote comes from a source in the story, a movie, a poem, a song lyric or a famous person, as is the case here, the reader will likely be unable to determine the point of the piece. Quote leads are always dicey for exactly this reason: It feels like you were dropped into the middle of someone else’s conversation at a party.

By the way, you can find the whole story here and see how close you were to guessing the point of it, based on that lead.

Jargon or Vocabulary? 3 ways to determine which one you’re using

The use of simple language is the bedrock of what we do in journalism. Introductory writing courses pound the idea of eliminating complex terminology, removing unknown acronyms and generally cutting anything that might be considered jargon.

This approach makes a lot of sense when it comes to general-interest, mass-media publications, in which a wide array of readers who might be unfamiliar with the verbiage of a particular field come together to understand a complex topic.

However, the media isn’t always so “mass” these days, which means writers are serving thinner slices of narrower target audiences with content on niche topics. To that end, what might be “jargon” to a broader group of readers is merely “vocabulary” to the people who are reading, watching or hearing it.

Here’s a fun example from one of my favorite movies, “Dazed and Confused:”

In less than 15 seconds, Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) proudly describes his beloved car, Melba Toast, to Clint (Nicky Katt) in a form of shared “gear head” language. Clint clearly isn’t impressed, but he’s also not confused.

(If you are confused, here’s a general translation of what he said. If you don’t care, skip past the bullets and pick up after them to get to my point):

So, how do you know if you’re relying on shared vocabulary or burying people in jargon? Here are some helpful hints:

WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE?

When it comes to writing for your readers, you need to have a strong sense of who is out there and what they know or don’t know about your subject. This might require you to do some additional research about the people who are in your target audience before you start whipping around insider terminology. It might also require you to write various versions of the same piece for different groups of readers.

For example, in public relations, you might do some internal PR that explains some changes to the way in which your company’s factory will be dealing with the creation of certain product lines. If the readers are all coworkers who fully understand the ins and outs of the old process, some company-based shorthand and shared verbiage is probably fine. However, if you then have to put that information in a press release for general media outlets or shareholders who don’t have those same insights, you need to rework your writing to meet their needs.

In the blogging class, I find myself working with students who write about competitive swimming, sorority recruiting, offensive line play, k-pop and “mumble rap.” In each case, I am reading at a level well below what the expected audience will be, but I’m still expected to be able to help the writers reach those readers.

Thus, I often ask, “Is this a word/concept/process your readers would understand?” I then ask them other questions, like “At what level of swim do you learn this concept?” or “Is this a term that sororities use outside of UW-Oshkosh or even outside of Wisconsin?” After we poke at that idea for a little bit, it either stays or it gets a rewrite.

Not every reader will be able to follow everything you write, regardless of what that topic is or for whom you are writing, but knowing who you’re trying to reach can help you make the first cut on the jargon versus vocabulary decisions.

 

HOW EDUCATED IS YOUR AUDIENCE ON  YOUR TOPIC? 

Probably my favorite story about this came when I was reading a draft of a final project story one of my reporting students was doing on the concept of raw milk. The student was a farm kid, who saw firsthand the various people who had angles on the topic, including farmers who wanted to sell it, organic fans who wanted to buy it, legislators who were for its legalization, legislators who were against its legalization, milk conglomerates who opposed, food-safety administrators who had concerns about its safety and more.

I’m reading through this thing and I’m learning a ton about this, as the writing was complex and yet clear. I had heard about this concept before, as the local newspaper had covered it, but not to this extent. With that in mind, I suggested to her that she should get it published, but that she should target one of the farm publications that dotted the newspaper racks around here.

When I mentioned those publications, she looked at me the way that a parent looks at a small child who just said something adorably innocent.

“Um…” she began. “This is a little… basic for people who read those papers…”

I still laugh thinking about that moment because it perfectly captures the concept of writing at the acumen level of the audience. For me, she had to make certain things a bit less (OK, a lot less…) complicated in how the farming stuff worked. She get more detailed with the legislative stuff, because it was more universally understood. However, she used the right words to make her point based on how educated her audience was on the given topic.

As mentioned in the earlier point, not every reader is going to be at the same level as every other reader in your audience, but understanding the level at which you should be writing will make life easier on everyone involved. For example, if you’re writing about something like car repair, you might be targeting people with Wooderson-level acumen or people who want to be able to solve a few basic problems to avoid going to the repair shop for everything.

So, if you’re writing about what to look at when it feels like the gas pedal isn’t working, you need to determine how much knowledge your audience has in advance. For the regular folks, you might say, “Open the hood of the car and look at the right side of the engine, next to the big plastic piece that says ‘NISSAN’ on it for a small half-circle of black plastic with a silver cable attached to it. Have a friend step on the gas pedal and see if this moves at all. Also see if the cable moves but it doesn’t rotate that half-circle.”

For a gearhead, you might  say, “Look to the right side of the engine block and find the throttle body. Rotate it to see if the engine responds. Check the throttle cable to see if it has become dislodged or detached.”

This kind of thing applies a lot for student media outlets because some things are universally understood by students from the first minute they hit campus while others might be common knowledge to seniors but new concepts to freshmen. (I once went to a summer camp at a university where I was the only person from outside of that state. The students kept saying “I’ll meet you at the duck,” so I went looking for a statue of a duck or a pond. Eventually, I found out it was the DUC, which stood for Dobbs University Center.)

Everything from what you call the transcript of your classes as you move toward graduation (the STAR report at UWO) to the nearby off-campus housing (the J-Slums at Mizzou) is up for grabs based on how well your readers know your topic.

 

IS THIS READABLE CONTENT OR ALPHABET SOUP?

Regardless of how much you know about your audience or how smart those folks are, you still want to create readable content. When you start tossing around a boatload of acronyms, abbreviations and inside lingo, you can really find yourself sounding less like a storyteller and more like this scene from “Good Morning, Vietnam:”

 

As with most things in writing, the discretion of the writer and the editor come into play here, but make smart decisions when it comes to which items get the shorthand and which ones get some additional explanation. For example, “mph” is pretty much understood university as “miles per hour” so that car blog would be fine using it regardless of any user. However that CFM abbreviation might need expansion for some audiences and almost no explanation for others. Either way, when you find yourself writing something like, “The CFM determines the MPH or KPH based on the RPMs, IMA, MJ, CAT and the presence of an HIC.” you want to do a significant rewrite.

Time once again to give thanks for journalists who avoid holiday cliches (A Throwback Post)

With Thanksgiving mercifully two weeks away, I’m sure most of us are ready for a well-deserved break in the semester. What we’re probably less ready for is the deluge of cliches that accompany it, and the rest of the holiday season.

Given that we’ve just gone through an election in which well-worn phrases have pelted us like a hail storm (red wave, radical agenda…) that it feels like we won’t get a break from this kind of stuff unless we all pitch in to prevent this kind of thing.

With that in mind, here is a throwback post to the cliches we tend to see the most this time of year:

—-

 

‘Tis the season to kill these 17 holiday cliches that will land you on the naughty list and get you coal in your stocking

The holiday season brings a lot of things to a lot of people, including family, gifts, joy and faith. Unfortunately for journalists, it also brings a ton of horrible, well-worn phrases that sap your readers’ will to live.

I tapped into the hivemind of jaded journos who were nice enough to come up with their least favorite holiday cliches. Avoid these like you avoid the kid in class with a cough, runny nose and pink-eye:

Turkey Day: The event is called Thanksgiving, so give thanks for journalists who don’t use this cliche. In fact, it took almost 300 years for turkey to become a staple of this event, so you might as well call it “Venison Thursday,” if you’re trying to be accurate.

T-Day: Regardless of if you are “turkey perplexed” or not, you’re compounding the problem with the above cliche with simple laziness. That, and you’re really going to create some panic among distracted news viewers in the military.

‘tis the season: According to a few recent stories, ’tis the season for car break-ins, holiday entertaining,  to propose marriage, to get bugs in your kitchen and to enjoy those Equal Employment Opportunity Commission year-end reports!

The White Stuff: Unless you are in a “Weird Al” cover band or running cocaine out of Colombia, you can skip this one.

A white Christmas: The only people who ever enjoyed a white Christmas were bookies, Bing Crosby’s agent and weather forecasters who appear to be on some of “the white stuff.”

Ho-ho-ho: It’s ho-ho-horrible how many pointless uses of this phrase turn up on a simple news search on Google. None of these things are helped by the inclusion of this guttural noise.

On the naughty list: The toys “on the naughty list” in this story “all have some type of hazard that could send a child to the hospital. The majority pose a choking hazard but parents should be aware of strangulation, burns, eye injuries, and more.” Including a cliche diminishes the seriousness of this a bit. Also, don’t use this with crime stories around the holidays: The first person to find a story that says Senate candidate Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. or Kevin Spacey landed “on the naughty list,” please send it to me immediately for evisceration.

Charlie Brown tree: Spoken of as something to avoid. You mean you want to avoid having a tree that demonstrated looks aren’t everything and that tries to capture the true deeper meaning of Christmas? Yep. Can’t have that stuff.

“Christmas starts earlier every year…” : Easter, maybe. Christmas, no. It’s the same time every year. Check your calendar and stop this.

War on Christmas: Be a conscientious objector in this cliched battle, please.

“… found coal in their stockings”: Apply the logic of “on the naughty list” here and you get the right idea. The story on the Air Force getting coal for Christmas after tweeting that Santa wasn’t real could have done without the cliche. Then again, maybe we’d all be better off if the Air Force was right, given the picture included with the story.

Making a list, checking it twice: A all-knowing fat man has a list of people who are naughty and nice and will dole out rewards and punishments accordingly. Sounds cute when it’s Santa, but less so when an editorial is using this to talk about Steve Bannon. Let’s be careful out there…

Grinch: There is probably an inverse relationship between the number of people who try to use this cliche and those who actually get it right. Let’s let John Oliver explain:

Jingle all the way: Nothing warms the heart like an in-depth financial analysis of a multi-national retailer like a random reference to Jingle Bells.

Dashing through the snow: This product pitch isn’t improved by the cliche, but it might help you survive hearing the use of it over and over and over…

It’s beginning to look a lot like…: Well, it apparently looks a lot like Christmas for small businesses, at Honolulu’s city hall, through a $1.5 million investment in lights at a Canadian park, and at a mall in Virginia. It’s also looking a lot like 2006 in the NFC. Oh, and it’s beginning to look a lot like Watergate as well. Get ready with that naughty list and coal, I guess…

The true meaning of…: Nothing says, “I understand and want to engage with my readers” like lecturing them on “the true meaning” of something, whether that is Christmas or a VAD.

Wishing you all the best in this season of cliche…

Vince (The Doctor of Paper)

Three tips that will keep your blog operating at full steam in good times and in bad

blogging

The conversation with the PRSSA kids yesterday went really well, considering that we’ve got the accreditation team on campus, it was hour 13 of my day and I was still wearing a tie at that point in time. We talked about a number of things that would lead to a good blog and I honestly think a couple folks there might want to take a shot at developing one of their own.

One of the questions that came up during the discussion was that of “best practices” when it came to running a blog. In other words, if they got past the three basic rules I laid out for blogging, well, then what?

We picked through a couple examples that were based on their interests and kind of came up with three basic areas of importance that separated the good blogs from the ones that died on the vine. They aren’t anything particularly shocking, but understanding why they matter can make a huge difference:

Educational Acumen

Having expertise is a great thing, but you have to be able to use that expertise in a way that effectively communicates it to the people who are reading your blog. Otherwise, it’s a waste and the readers will become frustrated and leave.

This is where knowing your audience becomes crucial, as you can meter your use of jargon, your level of explanation and your overall approach to the content based on who is reading.

For example, let’s say you want to run a blog about how to fix old pinball machines. You have spent half your life working on these things and you have repaired more than 100 games that ranged from mild tune ups to massive rebuilds.

If your audience is comprised of first-time pinball owners, you will need to use a lot of visuals to show them what things like coils and targets are. You will need to explain how to do simple things like remove the glass or disconnect a coin mechanism. You will need to offer more caution regarding dangerous things to touch or things that can break.

If your audience is comprised of more veteran repair folks, you can skip some of the basics, rely more on shared terminology and even go into deeper rebuild topics. As one of the students asked, “If people in your audience are really into your topic, can you use jargon?” I explained that it’s not jargon if the people understand it; It’s shared language. Jargon is stuff that you use that other people in your audience DON’T understand.

Additionally, you’ll need consider word choices to help people complete tasks in an effective way. So if you want them to use a hammer on something, there’s a world of difference between “hit” “pound” and “gently tap.” Experts will likely know these differences instinctively, while newbies will need more hand holding.

Passion

Being good at something and liking something are not the same thing. This is the argument I have with my mother to this day: She thought I should have been a political speech writer. Her point was that I was good at speaking, speech writing and that I could really make a difference in how people saw the world. My point was that I hated politics and I hated politicians, so no matter how good I was at this, I was never going to go anywhere in this field.

Or to quote a professor who spoke to my dissertation prep class, “Pick a topic that you really love because you’re going to be with it in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, until death or doctorate will you part.”

To be good at something and to do well at it constantly, you need to have a passion for the thing you are doing. Never is this more true than in blogging, because without the passion, you’re never going to make it. Here’s why:

  • You have no deadlines. It’s easy enough to blow off an assignment when you have a deadline. When you don’t, you can always push something down the road a bit further. If you don’t believe me, consider the ugly yellow plastic windows we had on one of our kitchen cabinets back at our previous house. When we moved in, Amy asked me, “When you get a chance, could you get rid of those and put new doors on that cabinet?” When we sold the house two years ago, the plastic remained. We got to know the most-recent owners of the home and got a tour of the place a few weeks ago. Ugly plastic is still there. In short, when I WANT to get something done, I’ll get it done in a New York Minute. When I don’t have a deadline, I’ll blow it off.
  • The quality of the work suffers: Mom used to read the State Journal every day when I was working there. She’d often call me up and talk to me about the articles I had written. In one case, she told me, “I read X. You didn’t really want to write that one, did you?” The truth was, I hated the story she was talking about, but I wanted to know what led her to figure that out. I asked if there were flaws or mistakes or whatever and she said, “No. It read fine and there wasn’t anything wrong. I could just tell that you didn’t want to do this.”
    If you don’t have a passion for the topic, as in you love this thing and you want to spend a lot of time with this topic, writing to other people about it, you’ll end up with a really lousy blog. You can’t just have a passing interest. You have to love it. If you don’t it will show up in the writing and people will tell.
  • You will run out of stuff to talk about: People who love a topic will talk about nothing other than that. If you don’t believe me, go back and watch Forrest Gump again and listen to how Bubba talks about shrimp. You want your blog to be like a diesel engine: It might take you a little longer to get started, but once it gets going, it can run long and hard without stopping. If you don’t have a passion for the topic, it’ll be like a bottle rocket: It’ll take off in a hurry, explode quickly and then dissipate.

Dedication

This puts together the above two with the idea of understanding what it takes to make this thing work and forcing yourself to do it every day or every week or whatever. You must make sure you are constantly looking for things to add to the blog. You must make sure you post when you are required to post things. You can’t just blow it off when you don’t feel like writing. You can’t push it down the line because you can’t think about something or because other things become more important. If you are going to develop an audience that has an interest in you, you must continue to find things to give them.

Dedication leads to consistency and leads to success.

Nolan Ryan pitched in the major leagues until he was 46 years old and he credited his workout regimen after games for a lot of his longevity. When he won his 300th game, his family wanted to take him out and celebrate right after the game. Instead, they had to wait for him to finish his post-game workout before they could go out. Even though they pleaded with him to skip it “just this once,” he said, no and went to work.

Think about all the things that you might have succeeded at or failed at. It could be the New Year’s resolution to work out. You get going all gangbusters and then it’s really, really, REALLY cold outside and you don’t want to get out of bed and suddenly, goodbye exercise.

It could be a diet where you have meals planned and things are going along fine, but then you get caught short of your health nut mix and Hello, Taco Bell!

A blog can’t be like that if you want to be successful at it because it takes a long, long time to get an interested and engaged audience and it will take no time for them to leave you like a cheating fiancée on Temptation Island.

Honestly, not every day will be an academy award, but you have to ply your trade every day no matter what.

Fun with Filak-isms that can improve your writing on a Throwback Thursday

A number of years back, it dawned on me that my mouth quite frequently overrides my brain’s veto when it comes to self-expression. It came to a head the other day when we were going over fire briefs in my writing class and a student had parroted a poorly written press release:

“The fire was deemed electrical in nature.”

As we picked through the content, I was trying to find a polite way of explaining the jargon in that sentence lacked value in telling the story. This is what fell out of my head:

“Electrical in nature? As opposed to what? Electrical in spirit? Did the fire aspire to be a forest fire when it grew up, but when it attended fire college it couldn’t get past the science requirements? Y’know, so it went home and joined its dad’s electrical business, because people need electrical work, and it had always been in his nature to stay close to his fire family…”

This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, in that year after year, former students will tell me something I said that stuck with them like, “I’m at the third paragraph and I haven’t thrown up yet, so I think we’re good,” or “If you have a problem with anything, don’t be afraid to come see me. I’ve yet to stab anyone in the face with a pencil for asking a question, and I’m not looking to break that streak.”

My reaction is usually, “I don’t remember saying that, but knowing me as well as I do, I’m pretty sure you’re right.”

With that in mind, here are a collection of “Filak-isms” that I do remember using to help kids improve their writing. I hope these help:

 

 

“It’s an attribution. It’s not the front pocket of your suitcase.” (Fixing flubs in writing with Filak-isms)

Filak-ism: A random observation, borrowed idea from a movie/song/TV show/book, odd concept or weird phrase that has been warped in the mind of Dr. Vince Filak for broader application within journalism situations.

Today’s post marks the 150th blog entry since July 1. In recognition of this… um… achievement (?) I figured I’d celebrate with a few famous Filak-isms meant to help your writing. Hope I don’t break anybody’s brain with these…

Here we go:

“It’s an attribution. It’s not the front pocket on your suitcase.”

The idea behind an attribution it to tell people who said something in a direct or indirect quote. That’s the whole reason for its existence. However, for some reason, people try to do more stuff with it and make their copy almost unreadable:

“There are a lot of opportunities for officiating in our community,” explained physical education teacher Sean Stout, who will teach the class beginning next fall or next spring, depending on how many students sign up.

“People know Bach more than they might think,” said the Dutch singer Anne Horjus, who will perform Bach cantatas Saturday with his wife, Deanna Horjus-Lang, at Portage Center for the Arts.

“I can’t say enough about what AAU did for me when I was younger,” said Heise, who graduated from Lena in 2017. “It allowed me to really zone in on my skills and perform at a higher level, which helped me play at the top of my team in high school and then in college.”

The attribution isn’t supposed to be like that front pocket on your suitcase, where you cram all the crap you forgot you needed to pack in your bag. In each of the cases above, you could probably write an entire paragraph of paraphrase out of what these folks stuffed into the attribution. Doing so would have made the content more readable and less cumbersome.

 

“Says who?”

Journalists rely on sources to tell the reader things that are important. When opinions show up, they need to be attributed to a source. This is especially true when the opinion is something this weird:

“Some things just go together: a good restaurant on a good golf course.”

OK, it’s a review, so you get a bit of an “opinion pass,” but where did you get the “golf courses just scream great food” thing? Country club? Sure. The Par-3 muni track out near the lakefront? Yeah, you’re not even getting any Grey Poupon to put on your luke-warm wieners out there.

 

“Honey? I unexpectedly severed one of my blood-carrying vessels! Could you transport me to a nearby medical facility?”

I have two passions in life that can lead to a lot of unintended medical bills: I refinish and restore old furniture and I repair and restore my beloved 1968 Mustang Coupe. In the course of both of these hobbies, I have on various occasions, caught my hand in a running fan, dumped brake cleaner in my eyes, set fire to upper arm, cumulatively swallowed a quart or two of coolant, sanded off the top of my thumb, punched a hole in my index finger and cut my hand so deep my wife could see my thumb’s tendon.

And that’s all I can remember. That might have something to do with me smashing my head into a few things.

In all of those experiences, never once did I rely on jargon to express myself:

When the determination is made to proceed with an involuntary Baker Act, private medical transport services (i.e. American Medical Response or similar private medical vehicle transport services) can be used to transport younger students to the mental health receiving facility. In the case of a formerly violent/combative student (during the crisis) or a combative student, the private medical transport service can transport the student to the nearest mental health receiving facility.

 

In addition, EPA found Syngenta failed to provide both adequate decontamination supplies on-site and prompt transportation to a medical facility for workers exposed to the pesticide.

If you find yourself using words you would never actually use in real life, consider rephrasing your work so that you don’t sound like a person perceived to be lacking intelligence, or someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way. (AKA an idiot)

 

“Congratulations. You just drafted a punter with the first pick in the draft.”

The idea of a good lead is to have information that is most important at the top of the story. The 5W’s and 1H give you some direction and the FOCII elements provide you with a good lens through which to view the who, what, when, where, why and how.

That said, the order of the elements in the lead matters as well.

I’ve explained to students before that you should look at your lead like it’s the first round of an NFL or NBA draft: The best players should be in that round and the best of the best should be at the front of the round while lesser great players are found near the end.

When you decide to lead with the “when” aspect of the story in the lead, you’re essentially wasting that first pick:

On Monday morning, paramedics from the Joliet Fire Department responded to a single-vehicle crash on the Des Plaines river bridge on I-80 eastbound and a four-car crash at I-80 westbound near Larkin Avenue.

 

A May 31 jury trial was scheduled for Renee L. Lange, 46, Oconto Falls, on charges of identity theft to avoid a penalty and identity theft to harm a reputation in connection with an incident that allegedly occurred Feb. 3, 2017.

 

One year ago, Will County hired Dr. Kathleen Burke as director of substance use initiatives.

If the most important thing you want to tell your readers in the most important sentence you are writing is a time element, you really need to go back through your story and rethink your whole approach.

 

“Take a normal human breath, not a ‘The Titanic is going under and I need to survive’ breath.”

A good way to determine if a sentence is too long or too involved is to take a breath and read it out loud. If you start feeling a tightness in your chest by the time you finish, it probably needs a trim. If you run out of air, you definitely need to go back through the sentence and do some serious cutting.

The point is to keep the sentences short, not to test the tensile strength of your lung tissue, like these sentences do:

The 17-year-old Portage High School junior, who won’t be old enough to vote until November, became the first high school student to be appointed to a city board or commission, when the Common Council voted 6-1, with one abstention, to appoint her and three others to the Historic Preservation Commission.

 

Following the backlash over images of a seven-year-old boy being placed in handcuffs, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools on Saturday unveiled changes to the district policy that dictates when teachers and other school staff can call police to deal with emotionally troubled students.

These sentences are 50 and 43 words, respectively and unless you have the lung capacity of a blue whale (or the student I had one year who swam distance for our university), you aren’t getting through them on one breath. That doesn’t mean take a bigger breath. That means go back and cut these down.

 

“Really? Did you check with every guy in Burundi?”

Burundi is a relatively small, landlocked African country of about 10 million people. I think I learned about it one night when my daughter, Zoe, was an infant and I had both a need to get up with her every two hours and a really lousy cable package. Not much on at 4 a.m., let me tell ya…

In any case, I think back to this place whenever I get sentences like this:

Several years ago, nobody thought a space transportation service could be a lucrative business.

 

President Trump himself entered the 2016 election as a long-shot candidate who nobody thought could win.

 

When the Bulls signed the moody Rondo in the summer of 2016, nobody thought he would evolve into the difference between winning and losing a first-round playoff series, yet Rondo’s injury against the Celtics, more than anything, shortened the playoff run.

Really? NOBODY thought any of these things? How do we know that none of these things was even an inkling in the mind of a visionary, a dream sequence on “Dallas” or the imagination of an autistic boy that kept us riveted for about six seasons of “St. Elsewhere?” Better yet, did you survey the entire nation of Burundi to make sure nobody thought about whatever it is you’re telling me with absolute certainty that nobody thought about?

Every time you think about using an absolute term (nobody, everybody, all, none), think about Burundi and reconsider it.

 

I’m sure if you took a class with me, you remember your own personal favorite Filak-ism, so feel free to hit me up and ask for an example. I’ll add them to future posts.

The Self-Interest Gap: Learning how to care less about what you want to write and more about what the audience wants to know

Self-interest is perhaps the one commonality humans share these days and it can be summed up in a simple question: “What’s in it for me?”

When you are on the “receiver” end of the process, it’s something we understand very easily. We know almost instinctively what is of value to us and what we care about right away. That said, when we put on the “sender” hat, we tend to focus more on what we want to tell people, forgetting that those people have their own set of interests we should be focused on.

Case in point, I asked the students to write a brief based on a press release about a fire. Here are the opening lines of a few of those briefs:

  • Firefighters responded to an engulfed single-story house shortly after 6 p.m. Sunday…
  • Boone County Firefighters responded to a call of a Sturgeon house fire…
  • Sunday evening, Boone County Firefighters responded to a call at 6pm on an electrical house fire…
  • A structure fire occurred at 520 S. Ogden in Sturgeon on the evening of Sunday…
  • Boone County Firefighters responded to a home engulfed in black smoke…

What we learn essentially in these things is either:

  1. Firefighters responded to a fire.
  2. A fire occurred somewhere.

If you were on the “receiver” end of the information, how much of this stuff would you care about? Of course the firefighters responded to the fire. That’s what they do. Also, fires occur everywhere from giant farm fields to the burn barrel in my yard. However, as a “sender” we tend to ignore that until we are forced to switch perspectives.

In thinking about this issue, I posed a question to the students meant to tap into that idea of self-interest: “Let’s say you get home after class and your roommate says, ‘Hey, your mom was trying to reach you. There was a fire at your house…’ What would be the first thing you would want to know?

Answers came quickly and easily:

  1. Is everyone OK?
  2. How bad was the fire?
  3. What happened out there?

In this case, a good response might be:

“The fire destroyed the house, but nobody got hurt.”

That’s the core of a good lead, with a strong focus on what matters most (big ticket item) and what people cared about most (answer to the first two sentences). When it’s your mom or your house, you have specific interests that a good source of information will attend to. If you can take that perspective and play on the audience’s self-interest, you can have a much sharper focus when it comes to telling the story directly and clearly.