Tweaks

A newspaper's core business is integrity. News is not a product like a tire or a paper towel. It is what we journalists say it is. The reader has to believe. So, of course, do we. A newspaper's "brand" is trust -- trust in its judgment, its independence, its values. That's what remains constant. The news changes every day.
-- Richard Cohen

Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honorable behavior, involving the reporter and reader.
-- Martha Gelhorn

A writer's first objective, it seems to me, is clarity.
-- James J. Kilpatrick

The badness of bad writing is never visible to the bad writer.
-- John Bremner

A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
-- Aristotle

While reporting, keep searching for a narrative thread -- a timeline, an internal debate. Create a storyline by asking interviewees for their take on the same incident or anecdote. A narrative will blossom.
-- Ken Auletta

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
-- James Thurber

Whether intended to clarify or cloud, jargon obscures news for outsiders and chases them out of the newspaper. We all know that, but with jargon coming at us faster than ever and from news sources, it's no simple thing to deflect it on its way toward print.
-- Joe Grimm

Big ideas are hogwash. Just tell the story.
-- Howard Hawks

I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is
impossible to tell which side the author is on.
-- Leo Tolstoy

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
-- Thomas Mann

Be careful that you write accurately rather than much.
-- Erasmus

Make it happen, don't talk about its happening.
-- John Ciardi

Cultivate discipline. Good work doesn't happen with inspiration. It comes from constant, often tedi-ous, and deliberate effort. If your vision of a writer in-volves sitting in a cafe, sipping an aperitif with one's fellow geniuses, become a drunk. It's easier and far less exhausting.
-- William Heffernan

A newspaper should be proud of the enemies it makes.
-- Joseph Pulitzer

Remember your roots. None of us was always so big and smart, either; someone gave us a break, too.
-- John C. Quinn

Editors are armed with The Second Guess. They are upholding Standards. They are defending The Language against change. They are people who know what they don't want - after they see it.
Source: Don Murray, author of "Writing for Your Readers"

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
-- Karl Kraus

It is perfectly OK to write garbage -- as long as you edit brilliantly. In other words, until you have something down on paper (even it it's terrible) there is nothing you can improve. The audience neither needs nor gets to see the less than brilliant first draft, so they won't know you weren't brilliant all along.
-- C.J. Cherryh

When there are two conflicting versions of the story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.
-- H. Allen Smith

Journalists are obligated to question and to critique, to magnify weak voices and to comfort the afflicted, to tell the truth as we see it, to challenge the powerful, to be skeptical of pronouncements, especially those from sources we respect or whose ideals we personally endorse.
-- James E. Shelledy

The gifted editor and copy editor, like the gifted writer, is not above taking a chance. Risk is the name of the good writing game.
-- Lucille DeView

Bad writers are those who express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

We have had bad ideas before in our business but the old ideals still survive -- fierce independence and dedicated public service and the determined protection of news values not only from enemies but also from friends who would subordinate them, dilute them, transform them into something more contemporary -- and cramped, as well. Into something aimed at nothing more capacious than filling a niche in the lives of readers. It is always a fight to sustain these ideals.
-- William F. Woo

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
-- Walter Bagehot

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams -- the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
-- Robert Southey

The writer makes his living by anecdotes. He searches them out and craves them as the raw materials of his profession. No hunter stalking his prey is more alert to the presence of his quarry than a writer looking for small incidents that cast a strong light on human behavior.
-- Norman Cousins

With rivals, and as a matter of decency with others, select your words with caution. Sharp words make more wounds than surgeons can heal. There is always time to add a word, but none in which to take one back. The astute in business use soft words and hard arguments, for neither a word nor a stone let go can be called back.
-- Baltasar Gracián

If you constantly forget to write a background paragraph, you need to make a note to yourself whenever you write. When you start to write your story, type BACKGROUND PARAGRAPH HERE in bold and fill in the space before you file your copy. Don't leave it to editors to fill your holes. It's your byline. It's your work.
Source: Gregg McLachlan, The Simcoe Reformer. Ontario, Canada

I am never bored. I overhear what is said and not said, delight in irony and contradiction, relish answers without questions and questions without answers, take note of what is and what should be, what was and what may be. I imagine, speculate, make believe, remember, reflect. I am always traitor to the predictable, always welcoming to the unexpected.
-- Don Murray

Always stop the day's work when you know exactly what your next paragraph will be when you start up again the next day. It keeps one from the frustration of starting the day staring at a blank page. And it also keeps your mind churning, analyzing and writing even after you've put down the pen, typewriter, computer or whatever.
-- William Heffernan

Don't be afraid to discard work that you know isn't up to standard. Don't try to save junk just because it took you a long time to write it.
-- David Eddings

Every once in a while, there comes a story. A story that blows your mind. One where you know you've made a difference. That's what makes it all worthwhile. That and the anticipation. It's addictive, because you never know when it will happen, but when it does, nothing in the world is as important.
-- Edna Buchanan

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give to your style.
-- Sydney Smith

Don't socialize with other writers. Make friends with real human
beings, or at least furred mammals, instead.
-- Ralph Peters

The only qualities essential for real success in jounalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.
-- Nicholas Tomalin

It is much easier to rock the boat when you're not in it.
-- Nancy Woodhul

I do not consider a liberal necessarily to be a leftist. A liberal to me is one who -- and it suits some of the dictionary definitions -- is unbeholden to any specific belief or party or group or person, but makes up his or her mind on the basis of the facts. That defines what I am. I have never voted a party line. I vote on the individual and the issues.
-- Walter Cronkite

You cannot be a good writer -- or reporter -- if you do not care what you are writing about. You have to have a genuine interest. If you don't care about education, you cannot write informatively and interestingly and gracefully about it. Simply because you don't care. I'm not saying you should have an agenda -- indeed, if you have an agenda you should not be in the newspaper business. If you want to change the world, you are in the wrong business. If you want to change the world, become a teacher or a politician or a sociologist or a mom. Do not be a reporter.
-- Michael Gartner

When a person has a poor ear for music, he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it.
-- Mark Twain

Over the years I have often paused to reflect on why so many people talk to reporters. The main reason, I believe, is that no one else ever listens. Just as we live in age of know-it-alls, we live in an age of talkers. Radio and TV talk shows are filled with people who talk, shout and scream, often at the same time. Talking all the time, yet feeling that no one listens, paradoxically increases feelings of isolation. The supposed cure -- more talking -- only makes things worse. Many people, as a result, are lonely. They are waiting for you to call.
-- James B. Stewart

Because we writers work with words, we think we can use words to get us out of every tight spot.
-- Jim Stasiowski

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.
-- Ralph McGill

Everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

When the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once asked by a college student to define 'real news' he answered: "The news you and I need to keep our freedoms.' When journalism throws in with power, that's the first news marched by censors to the guillotine. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state, but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.
-- Bill Moyers

The U.S. media generally treat political figures with the utmost
reverence, no matter how few clothes the emperor in question may be wearing on a given day.
-- Gwynne Dyer

What's the difference?
-- George W. Bush to Diane Sawyer, Dec. 16, 2003

Only the American press can lose this war.
-- Ngo Dinh Diem, according to Richard Nixon

I understand small business growth. I was one.
-- George W. Bush, Feb. 19, 2000

Discipline is the key to all that follows. It is the bedrock of productive writing. Talent is not a rare commodity. Discipline is. It requires determination more than self-confidence, the commitment of your will to the dream.
Source: Kenneth Atchity, "A Writer's Time"

No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have, if he puts it where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism.
-- Ernest Hemingway

You have great facility. Do not be beguiled by it.
-- Frances Keene

I love the flowers of afterthought.
-- Bernard Malamud

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
-- Ernest Hemingway

Just write. Just write. Just write.
-- Natalie Goldberg

The First Amendment reads more like a dream than a law, and no other nation, so far as I know, has been crazy enough to include such a dream among its fundamental legal documents. I defend it because it has been so successful for two centuries in preserving our freedom and increasing our vitality, knowing that all arguments in support of it are certain to sound absurd.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

There is no perfect time to write. There's only now.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

I would advise every young man beginning to compose, to do it as fast as he can, to get in the habit of having his mind to start promptly. It is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy. If a man is accustomed to compose slowly and with difficulty upon all occasions, there is a danger that he may not compose at all, as we do not like to do that which is not done easily.
-- Samuel Johnson

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.
-- Samuel Johnson

It would be wonderfully efficient and clever of us writers to have to learn our lessons only once.
-- Judith Guest

It would be wonderfully efficient and clever of us writers to have to learn our lessons only once.
-- Judith Guest

Most words have more meanings than dictionaries can keep track of. And when we consider further that each of us has different experiences, different memories, different likes and dislikes, it is clear that all words evoke different responses in all of us. We may agree as to what the term "Mississippi River" stands for, but you and I recall different parts of the river; you and I have had different experiences with it; one of us had read more about it than the other; one of us may have happy memories of it, while the other may recall chiefly tragic events connected with it. Hence your "Mississippi River" can never be identical with my "Mississippi River."
Source: S.I. Hayakawa, semanticist

Let the speech be short, comprehending much in few words.
-- Ecclesiastes

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or eve the third time. Remember this as a consolation in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do.
Source: William Zinsser, "On Writing Well"

Fairness means you get the facts, all of them if you can, especially when they surprise you into re-evaluating what you thought the story was going to be about when you began.
-- Nat Hentoff

To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to appear well; it is to possess at once intellect, soul and taste.
-- George de Buffon

Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation.
-- Laurence Sterne

I will be candid and avow to you, that till four-score-and-ten, whenever the humor takes me, I will write, because I like it; and because I like myself better when I do so. If I do not write much, it is because I cannot.
-- Thomas Gray

The things that I have written fastest have always pleased the most.
-- Lord Chesterfield

When we encounter a natural style, we are always astonished and delighted, for we expected to see an author, and found a man.
-- Blaise Pascal

If information is the currency of democracy, then it's a good practice for journalism to be of, by and for the people in the search and reporting of abuses from concentrated power.
-- Ralph Nader,

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change all this in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin where it belongs.
-- George Orwell

There are 100 different special languages out there, and you must translate them into English. Does the reporter write medical Japanese like fractured metatarsal? Or did he translate that into plain English -- broken foot? Legal German like stay the writ, instead of delay the order? Do your cops apprehend a perpetrator or catch a robber? Edit in your language, the words you talk with, not their jargon. Make the reporter translate it while he is getting the story.
-- Clarke Stallworth

When I was on a daily beat, some young guy asked me, "Doesn't this become dull?" And I said, "Only to dull minds."
-- Red Smith

One shortcoming of so many writers today is that they do not take pains; they do not recast their flawed sentences; they do not edit their copy for the sense of it; and they wind up with what I have come to call mangles and dangles.
-- James J. Kilpatrick

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this, and not the external mannerism and detail, is true reality.
-- Aristotle

Every good story has to start with a good idea. Nobody, no matter how
talented, can turn a bad idea into a good story.
-- Phil Kulielski

I know most newspaper readers don't read all the way to the endings. But I tell myself if I do it well enough, they'll read mine.
-- Ken Fuson

"le secret d'ennuyer est de dire tout" ("the knack of being boring is to say everything").

Echo was a beautiful nymph, fond of the woods and hills ... Echo had one failing: She was fond of talking, and whether in chat or argument, would have the last word. One day Hera was seeking her husband, who, she had reason to fear, was amusing himself among the nymphs. Echo by her talk contrived to detain the goddess till the nymphs made their escape. When Hera discovered it, she passed sentence upon Echo in these words: "You shall forfeit the use of that tongue with which you have cheated me, except for that one purpose you are so fond of - reply. You shall still have the last word, but no power to speak first."
-- The myth of Echo, Mythography

I say, therefore, that since it is difficult to recognize these evils when they spring up, this difficulty caused by the deception which things give in the beginning, it is the wiser proceeding to temporize with them when they are recognized than to oppose them. For by temporizing with them, they will either extinguish themselves, or the evil will at least be deferred for a longer time.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli

I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.
-- John Calvin

No one means all he says, and yet very few say al they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
-- Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

Words are the dress of thoughts, which should no more be presented in rags, tatters and dirt than your person should.
-- Lord Chesterfield