Tweaks

Compiled by John Sweeney, Dick Thien and Bruce Murray

By all means, fill your stories with voices, but just as you'd
steer clear of a windbag at a party, spare your readers those bloated quotes that deaden a piece of writing.
-- Chip Scanlan, The Poynter Institute

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no
unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences
short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
-- William Strunk, Jr., "The Elements of Style"

No matter what the story's length, writing requires the same
process of reporting, focusing, organizing, drafting, and rewriting information into lively and clear prose.
-- Chip Scanlan, The Poynter Institute

Is the story about a person or thing? Readers care about people and sometimes they don't care about things. Unemployment statistics? Or Jane Jones out of work? Can you take a thing story -- or an issue story -- and make a people story out of it? Yes, you can. So do it.
-- Clark Stallworth, Birmingham News

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.
-- William Shakespeare

Laugh, brother, for that is all you can do. The worst isn't so bad once it happens.
-- Walter Huston

Tell your story to a real person who speaks plain English. Record it or ask the listener to write down your words, as well as they can.
-- Kate Long

You NEVER hit your peak in this business, you always have to push harder, you have to take one extra, tough self-edit of your copy, you have to keep making extra phone calls, you can't ever be satisfied.
-- Bob Baker

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, author, "The Broken Covenant"

No story is "clear enough."
-- Steve Wilson

We now face the danger which in the past has been the most destructive to nations. Success, plenty, comfort and ever-increasing leisure: no dynamic people have ever survived these dangers.
-- John Steinbeck

Details. Get them all. Not just black shoes. Black shoes with laces and little heels. Not just cigarettes. Lucky Strikes. Details. Details. Individually, they are very important. But taken altogether, they are more important still. They help you convey your characters and your scenes to your readers not just at the level of what can be seen and heard and smelled and tasted, but taken all together they lift your readers up into the story to a level that Henry James called the "felt life."
Source: Rick Meyer, Los Angeles Times

Write with your ears. Listen to how the words sound as they roll off your tongue.
Source: Lil Swanson, project manager for APME's NewsTrain

Journalism's first law is that the more inspiring the inscriptions in the lobby, the worse the paper.
Source: William Blundell, author of "The Art and Craft of Feature Writing"

Will you give this enclosed a revisal, not only as to matter, but diction. Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to in complaisance to the purists of New England. But where by small grammatical negligences the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.
Source: Thomas Jefferson, on editing James Madison's writing

I always want to make somebody about a half-hour late for work. I always want to publish something that people cannot stop reading.
Source: Bob Baker, author of "Newsthinking"

Writing should be like a windowpane, clear and transparent. It shouldn't get in the way. Bad writing is like smudging that window.
John Rains, Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer

In the end, neither editor nor reporter matter. All that matters is the reader.
Source: Bryan Gurley, Wall Street Journal

Some thoughts on Joseph Conrad and detail:
When Conrad described a typhoon he said very little about towering waves, or darkness, or the whistling of the wind in the shrouds. He knew better. Instead, he took the reader down into the hold of the vessel, packed with emigrant coolies, where the rolling and the pitching of the ship had ripped up and scattered their bags and bundles, burst open their boxes and flung their humble belongings into a crazy heap.
Source: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of "The Little Prince"

After you write, ask yourself if the lead paragraph can be thrown away. Often it can, and should be.
Source: Edwin Yoder, Washington Star

Good reporting means paying attention to details, exploring conflict, revealing the human dimensions that make a story accessible. It's best if the reporter leaves the judgment of those facts to the reader or viewer. Above all, stories should be interesting. And newspaper stories will be interesting if the reporter is curious. If there's one single
quality that a reporter needs it's curiosity.
Source: Jim Bellows, author of "The Last Editor"

Go on quote alert. Make sure every quote you use is worth using. Otherwise paraphrase. Go through an article and highlight the quotes. Decide if it's an effective quote. Does it add to the story? Why? Should it be shorter? Should it be longer? Should it be paraphrased?
Source: Nancy Weil, IDG News Service

Show them the forest; introduce them to a tree.
-- William Blundell

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

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
-- Mark Twain

A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way.
-- John Tudor

And people say, "Why are you poking your nose into somebody else's business?" My response is, "It's not somebody else's business. It's your business we're poking into. Aren't you interested in our finding out for you what's going on?"
Source: Arthur Sulzberger Sr., former publisher, New York Times

An idea is like a newborn. When it's new, you just have to nurture it and show it love. Later on, you can teach it and shape it. But in the beginning, you have to treat it carefully to keep it alive.
Source: Greg Ring, The Charlotte Observer

Tone, like style, strongly reflects the writer's individuality and varies in accordance with time, place, occasion, subject, and purpose. The denotation and connotation of the words chosen, their position, and interrelation in the sentence, the length and rhythm of the sentences, the role played by figures of speech - these are the important clues to tone as well as to style.
Source: William W. Watt, "An American Rhetoric"

"It's a story with a great command of the obvious." - perhaps the worst dismissal one could receive from Barney Kilgore, deputy managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.
Source: Jeff Rowe, Orange County Register

It's human nature to love a story and hate a lecture.
Source: Philip Gerard, "Creative Nonfiction"

A writer is a person who knows that whatever one first sets down is a draft, that drafts are palimpsests ready for change the next day and the next day until they can no longer be improved.
Source: Sol Stein, publisher

What a (school) superintendent does is announce that a levy failure threatens all the programs near and dear to the hearts of district boosters. Does the superintendent announce that she will eliminate sociology classes or overhead projectors? Of course not - hardly anybody would care. Instead she threatens to fire teachers, to cut programs with vocal constituencies (like special ed) and (the ace in the hole) to eliminate football. I personally have heard school districts threaten to cut football at least a dozen times over my career. It never - NEVER! - happened.
Source: Jack Hart, Portland Oregonian

If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.
-- Maxwell Perkins

My theory is that the main difference between pedestrian writing and good writing lies in the number of imperceptible stumbles a writer imposes upon his readers. And to pursue the point, the main difference between pedestrian writing and really lousy writing lies in the number of times a writer throws the reader flat on his face.
-- James J. Kilpatrick

Be warned against all "good" advice because "good" advice is necessarily "safe" advice, and though it will undoubtedly follow a sane pattern, it will very likely lead one into total sterility -- one of the crushing problems of our time.
-- Jules Feiffer

You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
-- Ray Bradbury

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

Stories are not jigsaw puzzles. There's more than one way to arrange the quotes and other facts. The relationship among facts and the judgment in deciding which facts to use, and how to use them, are as essential to accurate writing as the accuracy of the individual facts themselves.
Source: Dick Hughes, Salem, Ore., Statesman Journal

Statistics are not magical. Nor are they always true -- or always false. Nor need they be incomprehensible. Adopting a critical approach offers an effective way of responding to the numbers we are sure to encounter. Being critical requires more thought, but failing to adopt a critical mind-set makes us powerless to evaluate what others tell us. When we fail to think critically, the statistics we hear might just as well be magical.
Source: Joel Best, author "Damned Lies and Statistics"

I theorize that Moses was stuck for a lead and just wrote a simple declarative sentence, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Then when he was finished with the story, he went back to work on his lead and discovered that in 10 simple words he had covered the time angle, his main character, a strong verb and the basic conflict. Good lead.
-- Steve Buttry

Mr. Rumsfeld thought the war could showcase his transformation of the military to be leaner and more agile. Paul Wolfowitz thought the war could showcase his transformation of Iraq into a democracy. Dick Cheney thought the war could showcase the transformation of America into a dominatrix superpower. And Mr. Bush thought the war could showcase his
transformation from family black sheep into historic white hat.
-- Maureen Dowd