Tweaks

Compiled by John Sweeney, Dick Thien and Bruce Murray

You may write the most sublime philosophy, but if nobody reads it, where are you?
-- Joseph Pulitzer

You want to take the reader to the last sentence. That's the whole point of the story.
Source: Joseph Mitchell, legendary New Yorker writer

People reveal themselves constantly. We just have to observe and write.
Source: Maria Karagianis, Boston Globe

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Great clots of numbers dropped into a story with a steamshovel create a wall of abstraction.
-- William Blundell

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that they will also make better soup.
-- H. L. Mencken

We have 600,000 words in our language; we can find one that means exactly what we mean -- not just to some, but to everyone.
-- Paula LaRocque

We've got a great percentage of our population that, to our great shame, either cannot or, equally unfortunate, will not read. Those people are suckers for the demagogue.
-- Walter Cronkite

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
-- H.G. Wells

Would you please tell me which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the cat.
"I don't much care where -- " said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the cat.
-- Lewis Carroll

If we became irrelevant in people's lives, we will not have newspapers to publish.
Source: Gregory E. Favre, The Poynter Institute

The importance of the writer is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe.
-- James Baldwin

Nonwriters think of writing as a matter of tinkering, touching up,
making presentable, but writers know it is central to the act of
discovering.
-- Don Murray

The most important thing in the story is finding the central idea. It's one thing to be given a topic, but you have to find the idea or the concept within that topic. Once you find that idea or thread, all the other anecdotes, illustrations, and quotes are pearls that hang on this thread. The thread may seem very humble, the pearls may seem very flashy, but it's still the thread that makes the necklace.
-- Thomas Boswell

Before it's finished, good writing always involves a sense of
discipline, but good writing begins in a sense of freedom, of elbow room, of space, of a challenge to grope and find the heart of the matter.
-- Saul Pett

Don't overwrite. Choose your words. Make them work. Scratch the idlers. Beware of repetitious phrases. Beware of dialogue that is no more than chatter. Dialogue should forward the story.
-- A.B. Guthrie Jr.

"Why do you play so hard?"
"Because there might be somebody out there who has never seen me play before."
-- Joe DiMaggio to teammate

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
-- Wendell Johnson

There are two pips in a beaut, four beauts in a lulu, eight lulus in a doozy, and sixteen doozies in a humdinger. No one knows how many humdingers there are in a lollapalooza.
-- Geroge Carlin

Your style should never be taller than you are.
Source: Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

Editors need to realize they are pretty much out of the loop. Reporters are in the loop.
-- William Blundell

If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough.
-- Maxwell Perkins

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

Ballet dancers practice technique. Pianists wear down their black and white keys with hours of daily practice. Actors rehearse and rehearse again. Painters perfect still-life perspectives, experiment with color and texture, do sketches in preparation for oil. By practice one learns to use what one has understood. Only writers, it seems, expect to achieve some level of mastery without practice.
Source: Sol Stein, "Stein on Writing"

Simplifying the pace of our language sometimes involves difficult trade-offs, but we need to think about it more. The more complex your subject, the more deliberate you need to be about the length of your sentences and the amount of clauses within each one. To use the baseball metaphor, become the hitter with two strikes who chokes up an inch on the bat and takes a shorter, more controlled swing. Save your longer sentences
for the easier concepts.
-- Bob Baker

To my daughter Leonora without whose never failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been completed in half the time.
-- P.G. Wodehouse

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
-- Thomas Jefferson

Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
-- Mark Twain

We want our reporters to break ideas, if not news scoops.
-- David Shribman

I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It involves Russia.
-- Woody Allen

When you're done writing, edit ruthlessly. Write to length. Don't make the editor cut. Read your stories aloud. If you trip over your words, so will your reader.
Source: Amy Eisman, USA Weekend

Of the many definitions of story, the simplest may be this. It is a piece of writing that makes the reader want to find out what happens next. Good writers, it is often said, have the ability to make you keep on reading them whether you want to or not -- the milk boils over, the subway stop is missed ... But stories also protect us from chaos, and maybe that's what we, unblinkered at the end of the twentieth century, find ourselves craving. Implicit in the extraordinary revival of storytelling is the possibility that we need stories - that they are a fundamental unit of knowledge, the foundation of memory, essential to the way we make sense of our lives: the beginning, middle and end of our personal and collective trajectories. It is possible that narrative is as important to writing as the human body is to representational painting. We have returned to narrative - in many fields of knowledge -because it is impossible to live without them.
Source: Bill Buford, The New Yorker

Scan your environment. Look for stories where there don't appear to be stories. The best way to write compellingly about the lives of the people in your community is to be part of it. Get out of the office and attend a Little League game, stop at the corner pub on your way home and listen to the conversations around you. Read the smaller free newspapers that are tossed in your driveway, read the classified ads in your own paper. Talk to anyone. Narrative is about life. Get a life, get a story!
Source: Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times

The only sin there is is to make the concrete abstract.
-- Jean Paul Sartre

The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like.
So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column -- in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally -- was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth--Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round.
-- Paul Krugman

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.
-- Thurgood Marshall

A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.
-- Federal District Judge Murray Gurfein

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
-- John Milton

If you wish to be a writer, write.
-- Epictetus

If 99 percent of what we write is instantly blown away with the wind, well that is how the world is. I would suggest to you if we write upon the sand, let us write as well as we can upon the sand before the waves come in.
-- James J. Kilpatrick

News is divided into stories that tell you what happened and stories that tell what it means. I face the world with as much confusion as everybody else, but once in a while it's nice to figure out what I think a few things mean.
-- Ellen Goodman

When a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news.
-- John B. Bogart

Something odd happens to a lot of people when they join an editorial board. They stop hearing the music. Instead of the chaotic mix of rock 'n' roll, rap, Bulgarian folk music, and God knows what else most people hear from life, it all becomes the seamless pomposity of a bad German composer thundering for no apparent reason.
Source: Richard Aregood, Newark Star-Ledger

Go to any newspaper today and you'll see herds of editors trying to think up ways to make newspapers more relevant to today's youth culture. This is pretty funny considering most editors are middle-aged Dockers-wearing white guys who cannot recognize any song recorded after "Yellow Submarine."
-- Dave Barry

The quality of our work is more defined by what we leave out than by what we put in.
-- William Blundell

The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's
unfamiliar territory.
-- Paul Fix

Whenever you read a good book, it's like the author is right there, in the room, talking to you, which is why I don't like to read good books.
-- Jack Handey

Think of a plain-spoken person you like. Tell your story to that person. Put up a picture or drawing of that person in your work space, to remind you to write to him or her.
-- Kate Long

Choose concrete over abstract terms. Indicate should be show; thunderstorm activity should be thunderstorms; crisis situation should be crisis; surgical intervention should be surgery.
-- Paula LaRocque

Have no fear of repetition. It is better to repeat a word than to send an orphan antecedent in its place. Do not write horsehide, white pellet or the old apple when you mean baseball. Members of the City Council are not solons; they are members of the City Council. If you must write banana four times, then write banana four times; nothing is gained by three bananas and one elongated yellow fruit.
-- James J. Kilpatrick

Language is like dress. We vary our dress to suit the occasion. We do not appear at a friend's silver wedding anniversary in gardening clothes nor do we go punting on the river in a dinner-jacket. Slang is like light music. The unprejudiced music-lover enjoys light music in its proper setting.
-- Simeon Potter

It is very difficult to persuade the great body of mankind to give up what they have once learned, and are now masters of, for something to be learned anew. Time alone insensibly wears down old habits, and produces small changes at long intervals, and to this process we must all accommodate ourselves, and be content to follow those who will not follow us.
-- Thomas Jefferson

Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point,
making a difference -- with words.
-- Elizabeth Hardwick

If someone calls me up and says her toaster is talking to her, I don't refer her to professional help. I say, "Put the toaster on the phone."
-- Sal Ivone

Tools and technology are important only in reference to their
application. A baboon with a computer is a baboon.
-- Ed Miller

Facts are like fuel: the faster you inject them into your story, the faster it accelerates. Not every story lends itself to compression. You need to avoid overly dense writing in stories that are complicated, heavy with numbers, or bulging with confusing new concepts. But trend stories, profiles, and descriptive efforts, among others, provide an opportunity to serve a full banquet of tastes and flavors.
Source: Carl Sessions Stepp, "The Magic and Craft of Media Writing"

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of things
-- David Byrne, "Cross-eyed and Painless"

As a newspaper journalist, first and foremost, your function is to communicate information clearly. You need a compelling reason to do anything other than a chronological account of almost anything, because that's the natural way to tell things. So generally, I think of almost everything I do in terms of writing a lead to get people into the story, then taking them through the information step by step, and then ending it on a high note.
Source: David Von Drehle, Washington Post

The joy of words lies in the opportunity to use words precisely, even if no one admires the precision.
-- James J. Kilpatrick

If I could think, maybe I wouldn't write.
-- Scott Spencer

When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.
-- Blaise Pascal

If of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, "It might have been,"
More sad are these we daily see:
"It is, but hadn't ought to be."
-- Francis Brett Hart

Often lost and forgotten -- the vagueness and the mud.
I've been thinking and working too hard, but I've got something to show:
Staring at empty pages, centered 'round the same plot.
Staring at empty pages, flowing along in the ages.
-- Jim Capaldi

There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling your talent run down your leg and into your sock.
-- Anne Lamott

Writer's block? Never had one. Lower your standards and keep writing.
-- William Stafford

The nature of words. They are all a writer has to work with --
adjectives, adverbs and verbs, and conjunctions, prepositions and nouns.
They are at once our building materials and our tools. Words are nails. We hammer them into place. Words have ragged edges. We sand them down. Our structures are usually plain and simple, the works of elementary carpentry, but sometimes we try our hand at mortise, tenon and dentil.
-- James J. Kilpatrick

I hate to write; I like to revise. And the amount of revision I do is terrific. I like to get the first draft out of my system. That's the hardest thing for me.
-- Malcom Cowley

We are part of the knowledge industry. We can't be a mere diversion from the realities of the world; we must help people to understand the world. Few of us are presumptuous enough to believe that we are offering the readers the gift of wisdom. But without knowledge, wisdom is impossible.
Source: Pete Hamill

Be goal oriented. If you don't have a goal, here's one: Publish one year from today an imaginary book, "The Best Stories of (your name here)." What are the stories want to see in that book? Will it include the stories that are really important to you? How many years are you willing to wait until it does?
Source: Walt Harrington, author of "Intimate Journalism"

As a consequence of these sobering experiences I concluded that the life of the writer in all its manifestations was held together not by a stout silver cord but by a very fragile golden thread, the kind that held the sword suspended over the head of Damocles, susceptible to breakage at any moment. Since there are enough outside agencies determined to destroy that thread, a writer was out of his or her mind if he or she did anything voluntarily to weaken it, like excessive drinking or drugs. Keeping a writing career alive and functioning was a full time job, one requiring both constant attention and the courage to make difficult decisions.
-- James Michener

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
-- Thomas Carlyle

I believe that one of the things that is ruining our stories is the
presence of way too many people saying way too many banal, stupid and unnecessary things. We're not writing research reports; we're writing stories.
-- William Blundell

If there is miscommunication, blame yourself, not your audience. You are the message.
-- Roger Ailes

If thought is a liquid, writing is a solid and conversation is pure gas.
-- Tad Friend

The point of good writing is knowing when to stop.
-- Lucy Montgomery

Never go to bed in anger, never get up without hope to do better.
-- Kathyrn Collins Quinn

Journalists play an important role in society, which is to take real life, and somehow make it boring.
-- Dave Barry

I never met a good writer who was not in love with words -- sheer words.
The good ones browse the dictionaries as if they sought diamonds, amethysts and pearls, and they hoard these jewels to savor and admire. Now and then they err by wearing these precious baubles to a firemen's picnic, not suitably but ostentatiously, and the value of the gemstones is abused.
James J. Kilpatrick, Universal Press Syndicate

Focus tightly. Think about what the story really is. Choose a slice of it. If you're covering a fire, you'll talk to a dozen people who've been affected. But for your story, pick one person and focus on her. Don't think that you have to quote everybody.
-- Taylor Buckley

Underneath, however, I'm asking myself the Big Questions. The biggest: Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song? What are the recurring elements? Do they entwine and make a theme? I'm asking myself, "What's it all about, Stevie?" in other words, and what I can do to make those underlying concerns ever clearer.
-- Stephen King

There is a tendency to slather everything with adjectives and adverbs, when what you really want to do is strip it.
-- William Blundell

Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech has 1,551 words.
The Declaration of Independence, 300.
The Ten Commandments, 297.
The Gettysburg Address, 276.
The Lord's Prayer, 56.
The First Amendment, 45.
Richard Nixon's resignation letter, 11.
The legal marriage vow, two.
At the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, Gen. McAuliffe made his point in one: "Nuts!"
The European Common Market directive on the export of duck eggs? 26,911.
-- Irish editor

Write as though you get paid by the period.
-- Jack Cappon

I have wondered whether the historians, whose job it's going to be to sift through the refuse we reporters deposit on the pile of history, might not find some articles of value we didn't much notice at the time -- impulses of humaneness and decency and the will for justice.
-- Charles Kuralt

There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle which does not live by secrecy. Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away.
-- Joseph Pulitzer

One learns to write by practice thereof. After seven years'
apprenticeship in journalism I have discovered that an essential element for good writing is a good ear. One must listen to the sound of one's own prose. This, I think, is one of the failures of much American writing. Too many writers do not listen to the sound of their own prose.
-- Barbara Tuchman

The wonder of the newspaper is that knowing the everyday limits to our ambitions doesn't prevent us from trying to exceed them.
-- Daniel Okrent

Accuracy is intimately related to -- but not identical to -- truth, perhaps the primary ethical value. You can have accuracy without truth, but you can never have truth without accuracy. People can speak lies, and you can quote them accurately, without conveying the truth of the situation. But there is no truth you can ever report or describe if the details of it are inaccurate or fake or lies.
Source: William F. Woo
Former editor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Newspapers are the world's mirrors.
-- James Ellis

Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.
Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation.
Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice.
Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.
-- St. Francis

The best writers break through the clichés of vision; they see what they do not expect to see, hear themselves writing what they do not expect to write.
-- Don Murray

Journalism is not a solitary exercise. It requires an audience. The central purpose is the communication of ideas. The gathering of facts, the shaping and editing of a story, all these only amount to half the process. You need readers and viewers to complete the process; and remember, if you bore people they won't hear what you have to say.
Source: Ted Koppel

To be a writer in a newsroom is to have a high calling; the writer reveals the world to those living in it so that they can make sense of their lives. And in doing so, we enjoy the gift of first sight, the glimpse of pattern that explains our world to us. In using language to define our world we practice a craft that should give us many gifts Š the gift of concentration, the gift of making, the gift of play. Few pleasures can compare with finding the right word, the defining phrase, or the clear, running sentence. The cliche that "easy writing makes hard reading'' is not true. Easy writing makes easy reading.''
-- Donald Murray

A good writer is merciless in deciding who gets into his piece. Each person must have a story purpose or be excluded; scores of sources may have been interviewed, but that's the worst reason for putting them into the story. As the number of characters diminishes, those remaining loom larger in the reader's mind. They become more than talking heads and begin to take on identities of their own. The storyteller wants this to happen and works to advance the process.
-- William Blundell

The best way to cover Microsoft is to talk to Intel, IBM and its biggest suppliers and rivals. The best way to cover a federal agency is to talk to the companies it oversees and the congressional folks who oversee it.
Source: Anne Marie Squeo, Wall Street Journal

Why do people like long words with the short ones are there? Perhaps it gives a sense of importance to use in business or in writing for the public reading a form of language which is not used at home or in conversation. We would not, as I said, talk about optimum dietary in our own dining rooms. Nor, I hope, would any normal man say to his wife, "I would like a differential in my nutrition-units for breakfast tomorrow."
Source: Ivor Brown, "Mind Your Language"

I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.
Source: Mark Twain

In one scene from the movie version of Amadeus, Emperor Joseph II stops just short of offering full praise for Mozart's new opera.
"Now and then it seemed to have . . . that's it . . . too many notes,'' the Emperor says.
"There are just as many notes, Majesty, as is required. No more. No less,'' the brash young composer responds.
"Don't be upset,'' the Emperor says. "Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. There are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.''
"Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?'' Mozart inquires with more than a touch of sarcasm.
-- Stuart Warner

They have it because they are born with it. It is not an easy thing to define. At best it is the capacity to put yourself in the place of another person, sense how he or she thinks and feels, and thus come up with questions that anticipate what has happened or what that person really thought. At the core of this is the ability to empathize with another person, to get out of your skin and to enter, however momentarily, that of another human being.
-- David Halberstam

Journalese

In conversation, we talk about money. In Journalese, we talk about funds. In conversation, we say that the police arrested somebody. In Journalese we say that she was taken into custody. In conversation, we say that someone was killed. In Journalese, we write that he was slain. In conversation, somebody breaks into a building. In Journalese, somebody gains entry.
Normal folks say that the police are looking for somebody. We say that somebody is being sought by police.
And only a cop or a journalist would ever think to characterize the member of a street gang as a gang associate. Or, for that matter, would say that someone was lodged at the jail.
You say newspapers have a household penetration crisis, Bunky? Could it be that many of our readers just don't know what we're talking about?
-- Jack Hart

Cunningly similar to English, Journalese is the official language of American reporters and pundits, most of whom achieve fluency in this arcane tongue toward the end of their first full hour in any newsroom. For instance, any celebrity you can't locate within two hours can be described in Journalese as "in seclusion." Later, he or she will "resurface" (return your phone calls). An official who is "closely monitoring" some unfolding drama knows nothing about it, but will get back to you when he does. White House chiefs of staff are not obnoxious, they merely "do not suffer fools gladly."
Like menu descriptions (sun-dried, free-range), Journalese is partial to hyphenated modifiers: "war-torn," "profit-driven"; "high-fashion shopper Ivana Trump"; "bit-part actress Marla Maples." Any military adventure conducted between midnight and 6 a.m. is a pre-dawn raid." In English, people can be described as grim. In Journalese they are "grim-faced."
-- John Leo

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary.
To one without faith, no explanation is possible.
-- St. Thomas Aquinas

I talk to the wind.
My words are all carried away.
I talk to the wind.
The wind does not hear;
The wind cannot hear.
-- Peter Sinfield

It would be as absurd to expect a people long inured to despotism to create a successful republic as for a republican people to tolerate a despotic regime.
-- Robert Bellah, "The Broken Covenant," 1975

We have in a moment of uncertainty been tempted to rely on our overwhelming physical power rather than on our intelligence.
-- Robert Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," 1966

"Alas, the first two-thirds of this book are wrongheaded, tendentious, and bizarre ... Regnery Publishing has here done the reading public a great disservice."
—Matthew J. Franck reviewing Kevin Gutzman's Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution.