There's a famous quote about creative inspiration, attributed on the internet to songwriter Sammy Cahn, who was asked in an interview, “What comes first, the melody or the lyrics?” He answered: “What comes first is the phone call.”

For many artists, and most definitely journalists, it is often the assignment and the deadline — not inspiration — that launches the work. Such was the case when the publisher Little, Brown called and asked if I'd be interested in writing another writing tools book, but this one for high school students who have to write their college admissions essays.

I had not planned on writing another writing book, but there it was — the phone call.

I said yes for several reasons: I have a long history of working with high school writers; I often contribute personal essays to the Tampa Bay Times; and, ten years earlier, I had offered Little, Brown a proposal to write just such a book, a pitch that went nowhere.

Last May, a new book was born to the world, a stylish looking aqua-colored text titled “Writing Tools for the College Admissions Essay: Write Your Way into the School of Your Dreams.” The book includes 100 tips and 25 full essays written by an interesting variety of high school students.

What surprised me most was how much I learned from studying the work of these young people, lessons I have been able to apply to my own writing and teaching. I have argued that, for those who are not professionals, the college admissions essay may turn out to be the most high-stakes piece of writing they will ever have to create.

All of the elements of sophisticated writing are there in the work of these aspiring college students: creative use of a prompt or assignment, a compelling opening, memorable and telling details, elements of storytelling (from scene-setting to dialogue), a credible and appealing voice, evidence of knowledge and curiosity — all in fewer than 600 words.

Of all the essays made available to me by students, one stood out as the most powerful, so I want to share it here, with the writer’s permission.

I used this essay as the final one in my book, a crowning example of how well-crafted, how creative, how moving a story by a high school student can be. I saved it for last, fearing that if I put it first, other students might find it intimidating and get discouraged. At the end, it was meant to celebrate the craft and inspire the spirit. Here is the essay. My analysis follows.

Leap of Faith

By Asher Montgomery (Accepted to Harvard University, 2023)

(645 words)

The sky was pitch black on Cotopaxi at 2 a.m. My headlamp barely lit the ice ahead of me. The snow turned my braided hair to ice, and every few steps I stopped to suck breath, like I was hyperventilating.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I thought.

As if he was reading my mind, the guide shouted down to me.

“Asher, you’re suffering because you are thinking about your pain,” he hollered. “Go to your happy place.”

Then I felt a tug on the rope tied to my waist, telling me to keep walking against the wind, against the sleet, against the snow.

I was too exhausted to cry, or to find a happy place. I could only think, “What am I doing here?”

I only had myself to blame. Climbing the 19,347-foot glacial volcano was my idea.

It was my idea because, the year before, on a hike in Alaska, I happened to look to my right and see Denali’s breathtaking peak and think, “That is where I want to be.” And because a few months later the Internet told me that Cotopaxi was great for beginner mountaineers. And, finally, because my dad found cheap flights to Ecuador for the summer of 2021.

I also thought it was something my brother would have liked to do.

Before Cotopaxi, before Alaska, and before my little brother died by suicide, we loved to go on hikes.

Long hikes.

For months at a time, we would camp and wake as the birds started chirping and walk along the rugged Appalachian Trail. Together we’d count the salamanders by the stream as my dad filtered water. We invented our own language — snails were “snake-cars,” birds were “up-dogs,” fellow hikers were “moving rocks.”

It wasn’t all fun. When I hadn’t showered in nine days and climbed into my sleeping bag like some kind of stink burrito. Or when we had to walk miles in the dark to make it to camp. But my siblings and I always left the trail feeling freer than we ever had, proud of ourselves and closer to each other.

We dragged my sister along on the Ecuador trip, but after three tough hikes to get acclimated to the altitude, she decided to opt out of the last climb: Cotopaxi. I tried to convince her otherwise, but she made the right call, for herself.

And my dad, he wasn’t doing much better than I was. His silence was a sign to me that he was in just as much pain.

He told me later that he only kept going because I refused to turn back.

I wanted more than anything at that moment to make it to the top because it never crossed my mind that we wouldn’t make it, and because I hoped I might be able to feel my little brother at the top.

But as the wind picked up and the air got thinner in the bone-biting cold, our legs grew exhausted and still hadn’t reached the steepest part.

The guide told us there that it was too dangerous to continue.

I finally started crying, tears of relief and disappointment.

We turned around. It was still dark. On the descent, the sun began to rise, lighting the clouds that surrounded the warrior mountain.

We stopped for a moment at the signal of the guide. He began pulling the rope out to give it slack. He told me to wait until the rope pulled to begin walking again. He walked out in front until I couldn’t see him. When it was my turn, I reached a gap in the ice. A crevasse. I knew what to do. I stepped back, ran forward, and put all of the energy I had into a leap.

Soaring over the bottomless crevasse, I understood, somewhere in this struggle, that pain and uncertainty are not an end.

What I see in the story

Of all the essays in my book, this one touches me the deepest. I have known the writer, Asher Montgomery, since she was a child. A multitalented young woman from a creative and adventurous family, Asher has been a musician, an activist, and a strong writer since she was in middle school. When I learned she had applied to Harvard, it did not surprise me, although I knew that many high-achieving students apply to Harvard and find themselves rejected.

When I read this essay, I understood why she was accepted and, in her first year, found a place at the Harvard Crimson, the school’s famous student publication.

As Asher was still in high school, trying to figure out her future, she and her family suffered an unimaginable tragedy, the death of her younger brother. If you have read her essay, you can begin to appreciate how skillfully she handled this traumatic experience as an element in her story.

Instead of describing the tragedy in all its painful detail, Asher makes the powerful decision to understate a devastating event that could easily have dominated her narrative. Understatement is a powerful tool in storytelling. When a story is lighthearted, as several of the essays in my book are, overstatement, even exaggeration, may work the best. But in a case such as Asher’s, less turns out to be so much more.

She encases news of the tragedy in a journey of aspiration and desperation, filled with descriptive language that builds a powerful narrative. Stories need characters, scenes, settings, and chronologies, and this one has all of those. It also is built around a symbol, of sorts, perhaps what we might call an archetype; she uses the act of climbing a mountain as a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving knowledge.

In the myths of ancient literature and religion, Sisyphus repeatedly pushes a rock up a hill, only to see it roll back every time. Moses receives the commandments from the top of Mount Sinai. Jesus delivers a famous sermon from a mount. Mount Olympus was where the Greek gods hung out. Even in our common language we talk about the hills we have to climb, and the glory that comes from reaching the top.

Asher proves the wisdom of my high school teacher who told us that in good writing “a symbol need not be a cymbal.” In other words, no need to force-feed meaning to readers. Instead, the meaning reveals itself in one final moment, when Asher is fully prepared to take a literal leap of faith: a jump across a crevasse that leads to an uncertain but hopeful future.

The story reveals so much about Asher’s character: her intelligence, resilience, physical courage, and sensitivity. This is the kind of person I would want to join my community of teaching and learning.

It was important for me to add in the book that students should not feel intimidated by the unique elements on display in this essay. A young writer may not have experienced such a terrible personal loss. They may not have been born into a family that has the resources to undertake exciting adventures.

But every writer will have their own experiences, and their own stories about loss, hope, family, aspiration, failure, and triumph. You don’t need to write the most dramatic essay in the class to get you where you want to go — only one that is revealing and true.

That is just as true for experienced writers as for students. Wherever you are on your own journey, just remember: you can do it.

A final note for journalists and professional writers 

The readers of Nieman Storyboard and the Poynter Institute website are in a position to make a serious contribution to education and literacy. Students benefit from a writing coach, and some families spend lots of money to procure one. Wouldn’t it be cool for a high school student to find an experienced writer in their communities to coach them? I would much prefer a high school writer to consult a human coach than a robot editor.

You may be thinking: I would not know how to coach someone to write such an essay. I am happy to point you back to my book. It is not only a guide for young writers; it is a guide for those who help young writers, including counselors, teachers, parents, neighbors, and older students. I turn an important part of the book over to Michelle Hiskey, an award-winning writer who has built a business working with students on their essays. She offers more than 20 important strategies that you can use to help students – and, in fact, any writer.

Most of us know families with students of high school age. It will not be difficult for you to express an interest in helping a young writer. You can also contact high schools or school administrators, expressing your volunteer interest.

Believe me when I tell you how gratifying it will feel when a young writer shares with you the news of being accepted to a school of their choice.

***

Roy Peter Clark has taught writing at the Poynter Institute since 1977, coaching students of all ages, from elementary school to Pulitzer Prize-winning professionals. He is the author or editor of 21 books on writing, reading, language, grammar, rhetoric, and journalism. He is a contributing writer to the Tampa Bay Times. Poynter has named a national short writing contest in his honor. 

The post High-impact storytelling in college admissions essays, and what we can learn from it appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is a share from our friends at The Poynter Institute, with gratitude.

All good writers play with words, even when they write about grave matters. The device that makes such word play the most visible is the pun.

My first sentence contains an allusion to a famous poem by Dylan Thomas. In “Do not go gentle into that good night,” he begs his dying father to rebel against his mortality. Along the way, the poet refers to “Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight.”

Given the gravity of the poem, “grave” is not a double-entendre that makes me laugh, or even smile, but it touches me in a hopeful way.

Whoever first said that the pun was the lowest form of humor had never watched the farting scene around the campfire in the Mel Brooks movie “Blazing Saddles.”

I am old enough to remember watching Abbott and Costello on television, the boys reprising comic sketches that could be traced back to burlesque and vaudeville. How sweet the outrage of Lou when Bud tries to explain a sure winner at the racetrack. The horse was a “mudder” who always eats his “fodder.” Lou, of course, hears “mother” and “father,” and sees the whole business as equine cannibalism.

As I type that scene out, I am laughing again.

Low-brow humor or clever creativity?

But let’s climb the cultural ladder to what I feel is the greatest word play of all time. The writer? Shakespeare, of course. (I am happy to serve as his hype man, as if he needed one.)

The word play comes from the lips of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. It is not clear whether the multiple meanings are intended in the context of the action of the play, but they are clearly available to an audience of readers.

Early in the play, Hamlet is visited by the ghost of his father, who shares with his son the unthinkable: That he was murdered by his brother, who now sits on the throne and beds Hamlet’s mother.  Murder, fratricide, regicide, incest; Freud could have a field day with this story – and did.

The key moment occurs in Act I, Scene V. After the ghost’s recitation of the horrible crimes of his brother, his final words to Hamlet are “Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.”

To which Hamlet responds: “Remember thee! / Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat/ In this distracted globe.”

I get chills re-reading that line, a stimulant for the brain as strong as the most sophisticated puzzle. Four words collide with multiple meanings: memory, seat, distracted, globe.

1. The actor may point to his head, the round globe, and the seat of all memories – including his memorized lines. Hamlet is distracted by the experience of so many crimes and his confusion about what he must do next.
2. The Globe is the name of the theater. The groundlings near the stage may be standing, but there are plenty of seats where the audience can be entertained to distraction from the real world.
3. The globe is the entire world.  “All the world’s a stage,” is the first line of a famous soliloquy in “As You Like It,” an invitation to consider the many roles we play as human beings in our lifetime. But, in the medieval tradition of theater, the stage was often constructed to represent all the world and beyond. The higher stage could represent the heavens, the lower stage an entrance to hell, often full of comic devils. In between, where most of the action occurred, was Middle Earth.

A career launched by word play

If I have just described the greatest pun of all time, I am about to reveal the second.  It was written by me and — no kidding — it launched my career.

It was 50 years ago this August when I received my Ph.D. in English from Stony Brook University on Long Island.  I typed out 100 job letters, got four interviews and one offer. It came from a school I had never heard of, AUM, a branch campus of Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama.

It was a bit of a culture shock driving our old Mustang from New York to Alabama, but it allowed me to achieve escape velocity from the parochialism of the city so great they had to name it twice: New York, New York.

As a New York Yankee fan, I was used to hearing the mellifluous voices of those famous game announcers, Mel Allen and Red Barber. Their Southern lyricism made the games more relaxed and more exciting at the same time.

But when I turned on the local television news in Alabama, I was surprised that all the news anchors and reporters sounded as if they were from Middle America. It was OK for the weather men and women and for the sports guys to speak in a Southern dialect, but not the “serious” voices.

I came to look at this trend as a form of language prejudice, a self-loathing that affects folks of all classes and races in the region. It was as if they were saying to the audience: don’t worry, friends, we ain’t gonna make you listen to no rednecks or hillbillies.

I began to study dialect and, with the help of a local newspaper editor, Ray Jenkins, wrote a column. I remember writing it as if it were yesterday. I can see myself sitting on a blue metal chair at a makeshift desk in our little rented apartment. I was almost done but with a strong feeling that I was missing the most important element. In what I now think of as a “conceptual scoop,” I had to give this tendency, this malaise, this syndrome a name.

“It’s like a disease,” I thought. Immediately my mind traveled back to my college days where a particular teacher bore the unfortunate nickname “The Disease.” That’s because his real last name was Jurgalitis.

Now I am staring up into space, my brain clicking a verbal inventory:

Jurgalitis, Appendicitis, Tonsilitis, Bronchitis….It appeared as if written by an unseen hand on the wall above my desk: Cronkitis. The illness of wanting to sound like the great Walter Cronkite.

Before long, the story appeared on the op-ed page of The New York Times, with the title “Infectious Cronkitis.” It was reprinted around the country. It got me an interview on the Today show, after which the great Barbara Walters huffed her disagreement with this kid who wore a leisure suit and flowered shirt more appropriate for a disco.

Layered language

During my three years in Montgomery, I published several newspaper articles, including two more op-ed pieces in the Times.

On a visit back to New York, I stopped at The Times and was greeted by the two opinion editors who had accepted my stuff. Charlotte Curtis was quite interested in my journey, physical and cultural, from North to South, especially at a time when Jimmy Carter was about to be elected president.

Howard Goldberg, an elegant man who would become an influential writer about wine, was focused on my first offering. “It was a good column,” he said, “but a great title. Cronkitis. A pun in two languages!”

A pun in two languages. I was speechless. Fortunately, he turned to Charlotte and explained that the word ‘krankheit’ was the German and Yiddish word for disease. He knew that back in days of vaudeville, the comic doctor would always be a quack introduced as “Dr. Krankheit.”

Doctor Disease.

I learned a lot from that moment. I learned that creativity is its own reward, and that the Muses can deliver more than you asked for. But you still have to ask.

If you are a writer — or any human being — feel free to take credit for things that you did not intend, because — you already know this — you will be blamed countless times for things you did not intend.

That pun got me invited to spend a year at the St. Petersburg Times working as a writing coach, a year that has turned into 47 years, during which I have written or edited 20 books, in which you can find the occasional pun.

But I swear, as long as memory holds a seat in this distracted globe, I will continue to take credit for the second greatest pun in the history of the English language.

Three tips for punsters

1. Avoid the obvious, what I call “first level-creativity.” You know, the headline that says: “This movie is for the birds.” You are better off writing it straight.
2. Keep a file where you save interesting phrases and aphorisms. You don’t need to steal them because you can quote them, as when Oscar Wilde opined that “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”
3. Avoid most cliches (you are allowed one now and then), but you can often get something fresh by tweaking a familiar phrase. Dorothy Parker was especially good at this: “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone”; or “One more drink and I’ll be under the host” (not the table! My mom often quotes her here: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” to which I respond, with respect: “Girls seldom take passes from men who pass gasses.”
   
   * * *Roy Peter Clark teaches writing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and is the author of best-selling books on writing. His latest, now in paperback, is “Tell It Like It Is: A Guide to Clear and Honest Writing,” published by Little, Brown.

The post The power of the pun, from Shakespeare to Walter Cronkite to Roy Peter Clark appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is shared with our friends at The Poynter Institute by request of the author.

* * *

Early last October I received a small package from England, which looked most interesting even before I opened it. The envelope celebrated “Her Majesty the Queen’s PLATINUM JUBILEE.” Five stamps carried the postage, each with a distinctive image: Soldiers from WWII; three lines from my favorite Shelley poem, “To a Skylark”; four members of the Rolling Stones; and a gray cat with its eyes closed.

When I flipped it over, it was sealed with a Mick Jagger stamp and hand-written note: “He also can’t get no satisfaction….”

I was intrigued. Whoever sent this seemed to know something about my interests and sensibilities. The sender was a writer named Paul Khanna. He described himself as a scribe who was, like Jagger, not getting satisfaction from his work; no mention of his acting career. He had written three diet books and had taken a course on screenwriting during the pandemic. He experienced personal setbacks. Both parents suffered serious illnesses and his cat went blind. (I thought of that stamp of a gray cat with its eyes closed.)

What did he want from me? It turns out he had read two of my books and found them helpful. He then caught a notice of my new book, “Tell It Like It Is: A Guide to Clear and Honest Writing,” due out April 11. He wanted a preview copy. “Just like the Apollo 13 which launched on that day,” he wrote, “I’m feeling lost in space and can’t wait to find my way home.”

Along with his letter he sent a tiny notebook he had created, a few pieces of paper stapled together with a request: “With some distance from writing ‘Tell It Like It Is,’ perhaps you could scribble some key thoughts down from it.” He included a self-addressed return envelope and $25, enough for postage, coffee and a “juicy muffin.”

He was asking, in essence, that I write him a mini-book, a personal anthology of my thoughts on writing.

At first, I was put off by the brashness of the request. But then I thought Why the hell not?

I would select my favorite bits of advice, not just from the new book, but from the six that preceded it — the kind of practical strategies that work best in my coaching and teaching. I finished the project in one sitting, writing by hand in the makeshift journal, without reference to any of my books. More and more, it seems to me, what a writer remembers is often the most important.

A lifetime of writing advice

As you read these here, you have to imagine them scribbled across the page in black ink from a green Poynter Institute pen. The numbers correspond to the order in which they were written.

1. A page a day equals a book a year.

2. Good writing is not magic. It’s a process, a set of steps.

3. My process: Find an IDEA, collect STUFF. Find a FOCUS. SELECT your best stuff. Decide on an ORDER. Write a quick DRAFT. REVISE.

4. The antidote to procrastination is REHEARSAL, writing it in your head.

5. The antidote to writer’s block is lowering your standards. You can raise them later.

6. Draft earlier than you think you can. Not even a first draft, but a Zero Draft.

7; You don’t need to tell everything in the first sentence. But it should grab the reader’s attention.

8. Use shorter words, shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity.

9. Shakespeare did not write “The Queen is dead, my lord.” He wrote “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” Place emphatic words at the end. Stick the landing.

10. It helps to have a daily writing habit.

11. If you get stuck, step away. Come back and write — by hand — quickly.

12. Read your work aloud, to yourself, to others.

13. Get a good human voice in your story. Let that person speak early.

14. Reports give readers information:

Who

What

Where

When

Why

15. Stories give readers experience:

Characters

Scenes

Settings

Chronology

Motives

16. Stories need: Details of character. Action in scenes. Dialogue. Points of view. Stories are a form of transportation across time and space.

17. For clarity:

Subjects + verbs together.

Slow the pace of information. Shorten sentences.

Avoid or translate jargon.

Too many numbers can be numbing.

Avoid clutter, especially at the top.

Introduce characters or concepts one at a time.

18. Reward the reader with “gold coins”, especially in the middle. Gold coins = anecdotes, examples, good quotes, interesting facts.

19. Read widely and deeply. Read the kind of thing you want to write.

20. Keep examples of the best passages you are reading. Talk about them with other writers.

21. My favorite writing virtues:

Patience

Confidence

Empathy

Curiosity

Versatility

Coffee!

22. Embrace your identity as a writer. You are a writer because you write.

23. Grammar is really glamour, practical magic.

24. Learn to live inside of words. The sounds, the history, the connotations.

25. If you want to write a book, find an agent. Mine has really helped me.

26. Read “The Uncommon Reader” by Alan Bennett. The Queen is alive — and reading!

27. Read. Write. Talk about reading and writing.

28. Set an earlier deadline than the one you have. If your work is due on January 1, make believe your deadline is November 1.

29. Revision is not just proofreading. You can revise all parts of the process. You can revise your revisions.

30. Write a mission statement for your work.

31. Break a big project into its smallest parts.

32. The bigger, the smaller. Find objects with stories hiding inside of them.

33. Craft is neutral. Connect your craft to a noble purpose.

Rereading these, I can’t help but notice:

• The influence of other writers and teachers, especially writing coach Donald Murray, who shared so many of these with me. Generous writers and editors pass along their best tips to others.
• The important connection between reading and writing, and the need to think and talk about how reading and writing make meaning.
• The way in which confidence and craft bolster each other.
• The idea that each writer must find their own way, even as they try to solve the problems all writers face.
• The most helpful writing books help us both perfect our craft and also lead productive writing lives.

Thanks to Paul Khanna for inspiring these reflections.

Writing with purpose

In a subsequent message, I asked Paul if any of the ideas or strategies resonated.

He answered: “Everything had truth in it, so everything resonated. But one thing grabbed me by the collar: ‘Craft is neutral. Connect your craft to a noble purpose.’ This was the antidote to my feelings, being full of craft with nothing to say. When I read ‘a noble purpose,’ the lightbulb went on.”

In closing, I’d like to add a Number 34 to my list. It comes from British novelist David Lodge, who argued that writers cannot afford to ignore any expression of language, high or low, whether they find it on the back of a box of Frosted Flakes or spray-painted on a subway wall.

I looked at that envelope again. Who would have thought I could find this inspiration on a postage stamp?

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire

“To a Skylark,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The post A whimsical request inspired some essential writing tools appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This tribute is shared with permission from our friends at The Poynter Institute.

[dc]F[/dc]rank Clines arrived at The New York Times in 1958, one year before the death of that most brilliant Times writer Meyer Berger. It was the greatest replenishment of talent the Big Apple had seen since Mickey Mantle replaced Joe DiMaggio in centerfield for the New York Yankees.

Now Clines has died, leaving behind a legacy of sharp and graceful writing, arguably unmatched in its range, energy, and creativity.

In my formative years as a newspaper writing coach, it was the work of Frank Clines that revealed to me the true potential of newspaper writing.  He came to Poynter in the 1980s for one of our earliest writing seminars, sharing wisdom that still echoes in my brain: “I knew that if I could just get out of the office, I could come back with a story.”  And, “Reporters have to tell the morbid truth, no apologies for that.”

In 1988 Clines won the ASNE Distinguished Writing Award for deadline writing. At the time, he was covering the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, a topic of special interest to an Irish-American Catholic. He wrote this lead out of Belfast on March 16, 1988:

Three people were killed and dozens wounded today as an assailant threw grenades into a screaming crowd at a funeral and then fled across the graveyard from enraged mourners.

Or this one three days later:

There was more macabre violence at an Irish Republican Army funeral today as two armed British soldiers in civilian clothes drove their car into a crowd of panicked mourners and were seized, beaten, and finally shot to death.

Their bloody bodies were discovered a short while later in a garbage patch.

Both of those stories were reprinted in the 1989 edition of "Best Newspapr Writing," an annual anthology of ASNE prizewinners. That volume was edited by Poynter writing teacher Don Fry (who died earlier this year).  Fry wrote appreciations of Clines’ stories, and interviewed him at length about his craft and his sense of mission and purpose.

One of the stories they discussed also came out of Belfast with the headline:

In Belfast, Death, Too,

Is Diminished by Death

Here were the lead paragraphs, in which Clines takes two things that should not belong together and juxtaposes them, creating a narrative tension that carries through the story:

Beyond the coffin, out in the churchyard, red-haired Kathleen Quinn was full of fun and flirting shamelessly for all her eight years of life. “Mister, I’m to be on the TV tonight,” she told a stranger, squinting up happy and prim.  Kathleen had taken her brother’s bike and skinned her knee bloody, all while people were praying goodbye inside the church to another rebel body in another coffin.

Soon the cameras were watching the coffin being carried out from the windowless fortress of a church, down the curl of the street in the simple hamlet, and on to the ever-filling graveyard patch devoted to republican rebels.

As it turned out, the television ignored Kathleen and missed a classic Irish truth, a sight for sore eyes.  She climbed back on the bike and heaved off in a blur, oblivious of a piece of nearby graffiti that seemed about all of life’s withering dangers: “I wonder each night what the monster will do to me tomorrow.'

Clines in his own words

The conversation between Fry and Clines extends for 23 book pages. The best I can do here is to mine it for gold coins. Here they are:

On where he learned to tell stories:
“I read a lot when I was a very young kid, things that were forbidden, like Mickey Spillane. Those stories heightened things. There was reality, and then there was a story about the reality.  I’ve always like that.”

On who taught him to be a good reporter:
“An editor…named Sheldon Binn was on the city desk for all my years in the city, and he was just a very smart, very gentle, very curious man.  You would report to him at the end of the day and that really focused what we were doing. You had to tell him a story.

“He would say to you, ‘And then Rockefeller did what?’ He would always stay on the level that I like. And he’d laugh or not, and say, ‘You know, that guy’s unbelievable,’ just like in the street. By the time you wrote the story, you were reinforced in what was amusing or important. He was always human.”

On what it was like to report as an eyewitness, including being 75 feet from a grenade thrown at a funeral:
“I was kinda watching from behind a tombstone. And I took some notes, and it was just a wild scene.  Reporters always want to witness what they write, and when you do witness, then you know that there’s no way the story won’t be interesting. I was wondering whether they had buried bombs and whether the graveside would be nasty. Then I saw the crowd was chasing this guy who did all this, and by standing on top of a tombstone, I could watch as he ran down the hill. He wheeled on them, shot a few of them dead, and they finally caught him on this expressway, and the cops arrested him.  Even then, after that, the funeral of the three IRA people resumed.”

On writing and organizing a story:
“Everything grows out of the lead, and the only problem in this case was that so much happened.  You want everything to be rooted there, and you want to leave yourself options to pop all over the place, just the way the story did.  So naturally you have to get the number of people who were killed, but quickly get beyond that to his notion of people in a graveyard.  Not a ‘cemetery’; you wanted ‘graveyard.’ You start picking words right away: ‘coming in’ and ‘throwing grenades’ and ‘people panicking.’ And that’s quite a circuit of emotion, I thought. So I got all that in the lead. And then once you have the lead to where you’re satisfied, then it’s making sure you hit enough of the different key [elements] quickly enough.”

On using a story structure people at Poynter call an “hourglass,” where you tell the main news in the top few paragraphs but then pivot back to the beginning for a fuller chronological version:
“Sure, it’s perfectly natural. If you talk again with the real people who were at a scene, they begin all over again, and they have to keep telling it.  It’s that compelling. The strategic reason is because you have more information to get in, and there is enough energy left in the story to retell it on a different level. So I just did that naturally.  And it’s a long story, longer than we’re usually writing, so that naturally invites a retelling with other things in it, with more detail and more color."

On using the detail “The gunman ran out from under his tweed cap as he fled out onto the motorway.”
“Every paragraph should have something like that in it, because you’re in this invaluable situation where you’re describing what you have seen.  I love small sentences with just bing, bing, like that. It’s hard to premeditate them. But you’re grateful when they come along.”

On how he chooses how many characters should be in a story:
“It’s a simple matter of space. If you’re not careful, you can let too many people into the story, who will more or less make the same point, and eat up the story, so that you haven’t told the story.  It is, after all, a story first, and not a catalog of comments.  I have to rerun that every time: don’t let a crowd into the story.  I always feel guilty when I interview a lot of people and then don’t use many of them.  But you’re interviewing them for your telling of the story and not for their telling of the story, unless they were in some unique position."

On what Clines means when he talks about writing “naturally”:
“You read, and you know what you like when you read and that rubs off. It’s a give and take, and you’re always self-adjusting. It’s a learning process, but it’s self-taught. I do a lot of revising. I cut a lot of words, and I tighten phrases, a lot of small stuff that’s important to me, that takes out sprawling writing. But I do it quickly as I go along. I don’t write once and then go back over it and over it again and again.  I just know that there’s something in a paragraph I don’t like, and I’ll get back to it in a minute.  I’ll look at it and say, ‘Yeah, well, I shouldn’t have done all of that.’ I can take out this and that, and still save the one word that makes it okay.  I do it quickly though."

On thinking about the reader:
“You’re always imagining whether you’re getting in the way of the reader or not. So you picture yourself staying out of the reader’s way, but also conveying what you thought was the most interesting thing, particularly the most interesting feeling.  You know when you have an honest reaction.  That’s important to get into the story, so the trick is to find an oblique way of doing it. That, to me, is as important as some guy’s name. And that’s the fun of it. That’s the human part of it. That’s the thing that makes it a story. It’s one human being saying, ‘Look at this.’ And that way you’re talking as an individual to another individual.”

Who was Francis X. Clines?

Not many New York Times obituaries read like hagiography of a saint’s life, but this one of Frank Clines by Robert D. McFadden — another Times' great — comes close.

At the time of his Northern Ireland stories in 1988, Clines had already spent three decades at the Times.  He grew up in Brooklyn and finished one year at St. Francis College in New York before a two-year stint in the Army. He talked his way into the Times as a copy boy in 1958. He became a reporter-in-training for six years, covering police and general assignment in all five boroughs. He even wrote copy for the marquee in Times Square, maybe one of the only places where a young reporter could see his own words up in lights.

He worked his way through the following beats: real estate, Eastern Long Island, New York City welfare, and state legislature and the governor.  From 1976 to 1979, he wrote the “About New York” column, which had been launched by Meyer Berger and given over the years only to some of the best writers at the paper.

He covered the presidential campaign of 1980, and was assigned to the Washington bureau from 1980 to 1986. He served as a correspondent in the Philippines before going to London for two years, where he reported the stories out of Northern Ireland.  He then joined the Moscow bureau.

In the final years of his career at the paper, I got to see his byline less often, as he was writing for the editorial pages.

Clines has died the same year as his colleague Jim Dwyer. The Times has lost two of their best — ever. Here’s the good news: new generations of reporters and writers are ready to carry the torch.

***

Roy Peter Clark has taught writing at the Poynter Institute since 1977.  He is the author or editor of 19 books on journalism and the writing craft including the foundational book “Writing Tools.”

The post A tribute to the consummate reporter/writer: Francis X. Clines appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was published in partnership with our friends at the Poynter Institute.As the 20^th anniversary of Sept. 11 looms, I am reminded of one of my favorite anthologies of journalism: “Eyewitness to History,” edited by British scholar John Carey. The book offers historical narratives that extend from ancient chronicles to 20^th century news reports.

The key organizing principle is embedded in the word “eyewitness.” The events described were witnessed — or claimed to have been witnessed — by human beings (from civilians to famous authors) who were on the scene.

The standards for such narratives have evolved over centuries. There are countless cases of fabrication and fictionalization, more discouraged and detectable in the age of digital journalism.  John Hersey, the author of “Hiroshima” and an eyewitness to the aftermath of the atomic bombing, argued that the legend on the license, at least for those who claimed to practice journalism, was that “none of this was made up.”

That means personal accounts of those who lived or witnessed a story — whether memoir, autobiography, or oral history — often require the guiding help of a professional author to ensure necessary accuracy and clear writing. I am thinking of all those celebrities, politicians, and sports figures who turn to “ghost writers” to fact-check and shape their narratives for them. I have always thought “ghost writer” was an impolite name for such a scribe. I prefer the “as told to” explainer, especially when the helping writer is named and the methodology is made transparent.

Of course, much of our more standard narrative journalism relies on accounts from people who were on the scene of newsworthy events. We are, in essence, the transparent ghost-writers of history.

The standards and practices for “as told to” narratives are less fully formed than other kinds of journalism and nonfiction. But the form has expanded with online and self-publishing. Working with eyewitnesses who want to tell their own stories also expands options for journalists in a challenging news economy.

Some of my best lessons came from listening to my cousin Theresa, who was at work in the North Tower of the World Trade Center when it was hit by the first jet on the morning of Sept. 11. Twenty years after first working with Theresa to write “Rosary Beads and Sensible Shoes,” those lessons remain as relevant as ever. I offer them here, followed by the original piece and an epilog from Theresa.

~ ~ ~

It helps to interview the source (eyewitness) when the memory is fresh, but only if that source, traumatized by the event, finds the sharing of her story helpful to recovery.

~ ~ ~

Use a recording device to best capture the words, cadence, syntax, and emotional level of the eyewitness.

~ ~ ~

Some publishing houses, newsrooms and sites ban the sharing of drafts with sources. In this case, the source is more of a collaborator, sacrificing her privacy for a public good. When I write in this form, I share key drafts with the source, at times, reading the draft aloud. My key questions: “Do I have this right?” and “Does it sound like you?”

~ ~ ~

The flavor of speech can be captured without over-dependence upon verbal punctuation, dialect, accent, or needless repetition.

~ ~ ~

When it comes to stories as big as 9/11, I cling to the advice of the late, great Jim Dwyer, who wrote two books about attacks on the World Trade Center. He preached “the bigger, the smaller.” Jim put that into practice by writing focused narratives about objects that had stories hiding inside of them: a squeegee of a window washer used by a group stuck in an elevator to escape; a family photo that fluttered down into the rubble, unscathed; the plastic water cup given to my cousin Theresa during her long walk home. Theresa is mentioned in the book Dwyer wrote with Kevin Flynn: “102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers.”

~ ~ ~

Not all sources will notice or remember the telling detail, but Theresa certainly did, and the reporter must ask. Her sacred objects include her rosary beads, comfortable shoes, Handi Wipes, and a water cup. But there is also the booze offered to her by her father, the delicious chicken cutlet that had been prepared by her mother, and, the one I best remember: the grapefruit rolling back and forth in the cart after the plane hit the tower.

The quest for such details has endured for centuries, as any historical anthology of reportage will reveal. In the introduction to “Eyewitness to History,” Carey writes:

This book is…full of unusual or indecorous or incidental images that imprint themselves scaldingly on the mind’s eye: the ambassador peering down the front of Queen Elizabeth I’s dress and noting the wrinkles; …the Tamil looter at the fall of Kuala Lumpur upending a carton of snowy Slazenger tennis balls; ….Pliny watching people with cushions on their heads against the ash from the volcano; Mary, Queen of Scots, suddenly aged in death, with her pet dog cowering among her skirts and her head held on by one recalcitrant piece of gristle; the starving Irish with their mouths green from their diet of grass.

Carey uses the word “indecorous” to describes those historical details. That should not dismiss the importance of decorum in choosing certain details. Theresa is shocked by the encounter with burn victims being aided by first responders. But I am struck and grateful that journalists and photojournalists shielded us from unthinkably gruesome encounters with what was left of the bodies of the dead.

~ ~ ~

There are always surprises in revisiting an old narrative, whether it is a Shakespeare play, a news story, or a text that you wrote yourself many years ago. If you are old enough and have written enough, I promise there will come a day when you will find a story with your name on it that you have no memory of having written. Each reader brings an autobiography to the reading of any story. But, over 20 years, the text may look the same, but our transaction with that text will change. Since 9/11 we have suffered a paralyzing recession, a president who was impeached twice, not to mention the current pandemic. We should not dismiss narratives from the past as “old news.” Better to think of them as little time machines we now experience with the benefit of new knowledge. Reports may point us there, but it is the story that puts us there.

~ ~ ~

There is an old, misunderstood saying that speaks to the value of “giving voice to the voiceless.” But people don’t need journalists to have their say, especially in the age of social media. That said, I feel a special power when a journalist asks a person to share a story, and supports the source, whether it is in a telling quote or in a more fully developed narrative. My sense is that we need more of this in journalism or other public writing. This does not limit the need for checking, double-checking, fact-checking with reference to other sources of information (such as photos and public records). Over two decades and multiple publications of Theresa’s story, no reader or expert has come forward to contradict it.

~ ~ ~

Finally, there arises with the passage of time “What ever happened to….?” Theresa was 40 on 9/11 and now is 60, fully capable of looking back and reflecting upon what she still remembers and what it has meant to her over time. My friend, St. Petersburg artistic director, Bob Devin-Jones, reflecting upon the collective experiences and losses imposed by the pandemic, put it this way: “There are no periods. There are only commas. It’s all life.” Experienced and remembered.

***

A Story from 9/11

When I learned that a jet had hit one of the twin towers — even before we knew it was the first volley in that morning’s terrorist attack — I thought of my cousin Theresa, who worked on the 57^th Floor of the North Tower. It took some time to learn that she had escaped.

The next day, or it may have been the day after that, I got Theresa on the phone and she told me her story. It was unimaginable that any person — especially my dear younger cousin, my mother’s goddaughter — should experience such a thing. But at least she had escaped, when so many others would be lost.

I shared her story 20 years ago, with her permission. I have done so many times since, and again this year, as we brace for this weekend’s anniversary. My hope is that such a story will help us remember, not just that earth-shattering event, not just the litany of the dead, but also the incredible toll 9/11 continues to take on those who were left behind. ~ Roy Peter Clark

Postscript, 2021

Anniversaries, we know, are tough on survivors. Just about every September since 2001, I’ve checked on my cousin Theresa to see how she was doing. Over the years, living and working in New York City became harder and harder. The day would come when she and her husband Gary would move upstate to Saratoga Springs.

Back in the city a new tower would reach toward the heavens. A memorial would be constructed.

When I messaged Theresa about the possibility of publishing her story once again, she replied quickly.  Her own words will serve here as an epilogue. ~ Roy Peter Clark

***

Roy Peter Clark has taught writing at the Poynter Institute since 1977, and is the author or editor of 19 books on journalism and the writing craft including “Writing Tools” and his most recent “Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser.”

The post A 9/11 survival story: Honoring accuracy and voice in eyewitness accounts appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is one of two posts today analyzing the power of the presidential inaugural poem delivered Jan. 20, 2020, by Amanda Gorman, and reflecting on its place in history. The one below, by Roy Peter Clark, is cross-posted with our friends at The Poynter Institute. In the other, Lisa Grace Lednicer reflects on an inaugural poem that borrows from history and hip-hop.

[dc]Y[/dc]esterday brought America lessons on the relationship between good language and good government. A minute did not pass during the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden as the 46^th President of the United States without some form of poetry being expressed.

It came from the lyrics of sacred songs and anthems, sung in a way that elevated their power.

It came in the call and response rhythm of the oaths. You could hear it in the soulful invocations at the beginning and the end of the civil liturgy, and in the many Bible verses that were quoted. The ghost of Abraham Lincoln presided.

There was a common poetry in the new president’s address, in its language, rhythms and delivery.

And, of course, it was there in the presence, purpose and presentation of 22-year-old Black poet named Amanda Gorman.

I was 12 years old in 1961 when I watched on television the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the United States. I attended a Catholic school at the time. I did not understand much of what JFK said, but I knew soaring rhetoric, elevated language when I heard it. Phrases like “passing the torch to a new generation” and “ask not what your country can do for you” sounded meaningful.

And then came the poet. Robert Frost. He was well-named on that frigid day, as he struggled with reading a new dedication to his poem in the glare of the winter sun. Others tried to help him, including the defeated Richard Nixon, who offered to hold off the glare with his top hat.

Frost was the first poet to read at an inauguration. He was 87.

The arc of inaugural poetry over 60 years, brought us from the ancient Frost to the youthful Gorman, from a black-and-white picture on a small TV screen to a dazzling young Black woman wearing yellow, whose voice and gestures offered a presence of hopeful promise.

A year after the Kennedy inauguration Frost would die in his sleep at the age of 88, four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry under his pillow, leaving a legacy of work that would fill high school and college anthologies for generations. At the age of 22, Gorman may never again mount a stage as big as the one she occupied this morning, but her work shows the promise of a brilliant career and deserves our close attention.

Some notes on language

Before I get to the specific wonders of Gorman's poem, let me offer a technical term of rhetorical study: diction. I do not mean clarity of speech. I mean the collection of word choices made by the author. Phrases like “America first” and “American carnage” presaged the dysphemistic language that would mark most, but not all, of Donald J. Trump’s presidency. His favorite subgenres were off-the-cuff humor, insults, exaggerations, lies, slogans, disinformation and conspiracy theories.

I once heard Norman Mailer tell a Nieman conference that because he was a writer he was inclined to choose his political favorites by whether or not they used language well. That made me think of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama. (Three Republicans, and three Democrats.)

When I think of Biden, I imagine a guy sitting next to me on a barstool, sharing a joke and telling me I’m “full of malarkey.”

In his diction today, Biden rose to the occasion, not with gauzy flights of language, but with a balance between facing the dreadful problems of the day and finding hope in what can seem like unimaginable unity. He tried to neutralize the political poison of the moment with the language of unity, decency, integrity, hard work, democracy and hope.

Biden used language that George Orwell might have called “demotic speech,” the language of the people, marked by his direct address to the crowd and his larger audience as “Folks…” Orwell argued that the British people would not be persuaded to make sacrifices needed for the war against Fascism if they were talked down to by stuffed shirts in the government and the media. They needed someone to speak to them in their own language.

It must be said that Donald Trump has that ability, demonstrated in his many pep rallies and countless tweets. Even his grammatical and spelling mistakes are honored by his followers who, despite his wealth, see him as “one of us.” Not one of them scientists, professors or “experts.”

But no style of language — high-brow or low — can be honored if it remains detached from a noble purpose or public interest. Many tyrants have been mesmerizing orators. Some of them are populists. Most are demagogues — someone who offers promises, gains your support, then leads you down the dark path. Like into the Capitol, armed and dangerous.

The inaugural poem by Amanda Gorman, analyzed

[caption id="attachment_161710" align="aligncenter" width="500"] American poet Amanda Gorman reads a poem during the 59th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021.[/caption]

(Readers: I did not have a definitive transcript of the poem at this writing. I downloaded it in chunky prose-like paragraphs, but have pulled out lines that lent themselves to some analysis and discussion.)

Americans and the world, when day comes, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry at sea we must wade.

We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.

In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice.

I read this aloud several times and now hear the rhythms, word play, and repetitions I recognize from in spoken-word competitions, rap music, even “Hamilton.” The contrast between light and shade may seem too familiar — like belly of the best — until we recognize that “throwing shade” is contemporary slang for harsh public criticism. The entire work is filled with half-rhymes, which work nicely in prose as well:  beast and peace; just is and justice.

And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.

This is a familiar trope (Lincoln born in a log cabin), but it gains wattage spoken by a “skinny black girl.” It echoes a Michelle Obama speech in which she said, “I wake up each morning in a house that was built by slaves.” The White House. I appreciate reference to herself in the third person and in present moment.

And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

The word play is worthy, alliterations that do not sound forced when they are read aloud — seven ‘c’ words in a single sentence. Notice the parallels in “what stands between us” and “what stands before us,” and the rhyme in divide and aside.‚

We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Writers, check this out: That passage comprises 74 words — 62 have only one syllable. Poets since Chaucer have understood the English language is well-suited to their craft because it came down to us from two different language streams: the one-syllable drumbeat of Anglo-Saxon English; and the Latin and French influences that give us longer words such as “victorious” and “division.”

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.

If we’re to live up to her own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare.

It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.

Poems like this are sometimes called “occasional,” that is, they are written for a special occasion. I would like to learn more about when this poet was invited to read, the process she used to write, and what revisions were inspired by recent events such as the attack on the Capitol. It was Ezra Pound who wrote that literature is “news that stays news.”

In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.

This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception.

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.

This was one great theme of the inauguration. That “sacred” places of democracy were attacked, but in the end, survived, with the hope that the country’s steel will be tempered by the struggle.

So while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free.

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation.

Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

She favors sound imagery throughout: blunders and burdens, merge and mercy, might and right and birthright, love and legacy, change and children.

So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with.

Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

“Bronze-pounded chest” is one of the most intriguing images in the poem.  Is it pounded because it is under attack? Is it being forged and strengthened and pounded as by a smithy? Is she pounding her breast as an expression of courage and pride? All three? That’s poetry.

We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South.

This is one of my favorite tropes, the uniting view of the country from the sky. The great American flyover. Woody Guthrie offers it in “This Land Is Your Land,” sung at the inauguration by Jennifer Lopez. At the end of “I Have a Dream,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shows us all the places in America where freedom should ring. There is an echo of that here. But let’s not forget Chuck Berry: “And they’ll be rockin’ in Boston; Pittsburg, PA; deep in the heart of Texas; and out in Frisco, Bay.” Or get your kicks on Route 66.

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful.

 When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.

“To see it” and “to be it.” Six words, 13 letters, deep meaning.

Maybe a big lesson is that all texts created for an inauguration are meant to be read aloud. What might happen if we all wrote that way, all the time?  Reading a draft aloud lets you hear things you cannot see, makes audible your writing voice, and turns you — yourself — into your first reader.

***

Roy Peter Clark has taught writing at the Poynter Institute since 1977. He is the author of 19 books on journalism and writing.

The post Lessons in the purpose of poetic language from a presidential inauguration appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay and analysis on journalistic language was first published by our friends at The Poynter Institute, and is shared with permission.One of my favorite songs by the great Aaron Neville is “Tell It Like It Is.” That could be the anthem of the moment for journalists, along with the lyrics, “Don’t be afraid, let your conscience be your guide.”

The song played in my head as I read a Washington Post story about the attack on the Capitol written by John Woodrow Cox, based on the work of a team of reporters. I have known Cox’s work from his days at the Tampa Bay Times.

In a tweet, Cox shared a four-paragraph lead about what some have called an attempted “coup.” He characterized that lead as “the most astonishing four paragraphs I’ve ever written.”

Here they are:

As President Trump told a sprawling crowd outside the White House that they should never accept defeat, hundreds of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in what amounted to an attempted coup that they hoped would overturn the election he lost. In the chaos, one woman was shot and killed by Capitol Police.

The violent scene — much of it incited by the president’s incendiary language — was like none other in modern American history, bringing to a sudden halt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

With poles bearing blue Trump flags, the mob bashed through Capitol doors and windows, forcing their way past police officers unprepared for the onslaught. Lawmakers were evacuated shortly before an armed standoff at the House doors. The woman who was shot by a police officer was rushed to an ambulance, police said, and later died. Cannisters of tear gas were fired across the rotunda’s white marble floor, and on the steps outside the building, rioters flew Confederate flags.

“USA!” chanted the would-be saboteurs of a 244-year-old democracy.

In linking to that story, Poynter media writer Tom Jones agreed with Cox, calling the lead “among the most astonishing four paragraphs I’ve ever read.”

I think both John and Tom are astonished mostly by the events described, amazed that a president would incite an attack on the Capitol.

I am astonished by the way the lead was written, and by an epiphany: That language that pushes the boundaries of traditional neutrality can be used in a responsible news report. Some may argue that such boundary busting is a bad thing, or at least problematic. We should debate, especially in newsrooms, the language required for telling unvarnished truths, for telling it like it is.

When “plain language” overrides other conventions

I am using the word “neutrality” here rather than “objectivity.” Many of us were raised in a tradition of news writing in which words like “disinterested” (not having a special interest) or “non-partisan” guided our choices.

When someone in power spoke and we wrote “said” rather than “admitted” or “conceded” or “boasted,” we were trying to create a veil of sorts. We wanted to cover the news in a way that the reader could not detect which “side” of the issue the journalist was on. The reporter and editor might share a bias, but both had a discipline of verification to guide them to responsible choices.

Throughout 2020, journalists and critics have debated about whether a new social, political and technological order requires an enlarged set of standards and practices. On CNN’s Reliable Sources, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, argued for a “commitment to plain language” in moving forward from the attack on the Capitol.

He imagined sentences liberated from traditional constraints. “We have to describe things as they are,” he said. What really happened on that terrible day? “The President of the United States incited a mob to sack the Capitol to lynch the Vice President – his Vice President.”

This essay is not meant as an invitation to abandon neutrality, only to make good choices about when and how to find a necessary distance from it.

In his classic book Language in Thought and Action, S.I. Hayakawa wrote about the crucial importance of neutral reporting in the life of a democracy. He argued that such reporting was the antidote to the kind of vicious propaganda promulgated by the Nazis.

In one famous chapter he argues that reporters should avoid “loaded” language, words that express opinions or draw inferences about whether something is good or bad. And he favored a kind of realistic balance in description, where a good character has some flaws, and a bad one some hidden virtues.

When “neutrality” bows to the language of engagement

While “neutrality” is one standard in journalism, it’s always been clear that journalists need not be neutral about everything.  They need not be neutral, for example, about violent attacks upon the institutions that make democracy and self-government possible, a system in which they play a crucial role.

Establishing the best distance from neutrality is a task for journalists and those who respect journalism, especially in the aftermath of an administration that propagated attacks on evidence-based enterprises like science and the news industry.

I am going to argue that the following passage is neither neutral reporting, nor investigative work in which “telling it like it is” is often used to shine a light on gross injustice.  The language of this lead stands somewhere in between, and I believe it needs a name. It is not neutral; it is engaged.

The word “engage” has many meanings, some contradictory. But the constellation of denotations and connotations includes the ideas of promise, debt, betrothal, agreement, encounter, and readiness for work, as when gears mesh moving from neutral to engaged.

There remains in journalism a thousand uses for neutrality. But a neutral frame is often insufficient for the job of revealing the truth in the public interest, for telling it like it is.  That’s what makes this passage so interesting.

Four “astonishing” paragraphs analyzed

Here, then, is my take on these four “astonishing” paragraphs, paying attention to both craft and journalistic standards:

As President Trump told a sprawling crowd outside the White House that they should never accept defeat, hundreds of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in what amounted to an attempted coup that they hoped would overturn the election he lost. In the chaos, one woman was shot and killed by Capitol Police.

The first sentence is long for a conventional lead – 41 words.  But it is followed by a short one of 12 words, a pattern and rhythm of long/short that many writers find effective.

Keeping it together is an almost invisible chronology: the president said something, his followers did something, somebody died.

That order corresponds to key news elements, which the writer must organize for emphasis.  It begins with a subordinate clause, not typical of news writing, but it places Trumps language as less important than the chaos and violence it inspired.  The most important news—the attack — is delivered in the main clause. It may feel heartless to say that the loss of life was not as significant as the attack on democratic institutions. That said, the writer finds a dignified position for news of that loss, at the end of the paragraph, an important point of emphasis.

There have been good arguments inside and outside of journalism on what to call the attack on the Capitol, and what to call the attackers. Even the words attack and attackers will be seen as biased to radicals, especially those who might side with those “patriots and freedom fighters” trying to “liberate the people’s House.”

The verb “storm” has been criticized as romanticizing the action, as in what happens in movies when the heroes storm the castle. But it also contains connotations of the Nazi storm troopers. It seems fair to me.

“Attempted coup” is up for argument, especially among scholars who have studied the different types of actions described by the term “coup d’etat,” literally a “blow against the state.”  Observers and critics have used the word “insurrection,” defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as “The act…of open revolt against civil authority or a constituted government.”  That feels closer to what I think I saw.

The violent scene — much of it incited by the president’s incendiary language — was like none other in modern American history, bringing to a sudden halt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

So much is happening in this second paragraph, a sentence of 32 words.  It contains four elements of news: 1) a violent scene at the Capitol 2) ignited by the President 3) the strangeness of the event 4) the background of the electoral count.

The word “incendiary” is not neutral, but among reasonable people an expression of cause and effect. The word “riot” is not used here, but its ghost is lurking behind the word “incited.”

With poles bearing blue Trump flags, the mob bashed through Capitol doors and windows, forcing their way past police officers unprepared for the onslaught. Lawmakers were evacuated shortly before an armed standoff at the House doors. The woman who was shot by a police officer was rushed to an ambulance, police said, and later died. Cannisters of tear gas were fired across the rotunda’s white marble floor, and on the steps outside the building, rioters flew Confederate flags.

This third paragraph comprises four sentences filled with sustained action.  From a craft perspective, they constitute a kind of narrative, as if the reader were flying over the scene.

Although writers say they prefer verbs in the active voice, this passage proves that the passive can offer its own form of vivid and visual language.  A phrase like “the mob bashed through Capitol doors and windows” is as active as you can get.  So is “rioters flew Confederate flags.”

But look at those places where the subject received the action: lawmakers were evacuated, the woman who was shot was rushed to an ambulance, cannisters of tear gas were fired.  Active verbs can be vivid, but so can passive ones.

“USA!” chanted the would-be saboteurs of a 244-year-old democracy.

This is my favorite sentence in the passage, perhaps because of its brevity. It’s a narrative sentence with the kind of engagement that comes where two things are juxtaposed that don’t really belong together. It may not feel like it, but “USA!” has the same effect as dialogue.  It’s not a quote, but spoken language overheard by the reader, transporting the reader to the spot.

What to call those who attacked the Capitol? They are domestic terrorists, and in particular guises, Trump supporters, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and so on.  The phrase “would-be saboteurs” stands out as distinctive.  It’s been a long time since I encountered the word “sabotage,” with its French etymology related to the word for “shoe.” As I remember it, disgruntled workers might throw shoes into the machinery to gum up the works.

What the writer has to say

That’s my take, which is significantly longer than Mr. Cox’s lead.  He was gracious and helpful enough to submit to some of my questions.

You Tweeted that your lead was the most “astonishing” thing you had ever written. What astonished you?
The language that the moment demanded: “stormed the U.S. Capitol”; “attempted coup”; “violent scene… like none other in modern American history”; “armed standoff at the House chamber’s entrance.” This was a work of nonfiction, but here I was, writing those words. And they astonished me.

I see more than a dozen reporters credited. It seems that you played an old school journalism role – that of “re-write” man or woman. In the old days, reporters would phone in the details and a designated writer would shape it into a story. How did it work in this case?
No one in journalism is better at managing major news events than Mike Semel, the Post’s Metro editor. I’ve seen him do it dozens of times, including week after week this summer as he oversaw coverage of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. With guidance from our protest expert, Marissa Lang, Mike deployed 18 reporters (by my count) into the field and assigned them where to go and when, along with instructions on what we were looking for and how to stay safe.

Our reporters sent in hundreds of feeds that day. Ideally, everyone files to me through Slack and I cherry-pick what I want to use, but because the cell service was so bad that day, we had some backup systems, the mechanics of which are beyond me, that allowed people to file other ways.

Just after the Capitol was breached, my longtime friend and colleague Peter Jamison called me, because he couldn’t get good enough internet service to file a feed. I could hear people screaming in the background. He sounded out of breath.

“Someone’s been shot,” he shouted. Then the line went dead. I’ll never forget that call.

With a firehose of information coming from so many reporters, how did you decide what to use in the lead?
I’d written quite a bit, pre-publication, when it suddenly became clear early in the afternoon that our story needed to focus on the Capitol riot, which meant I had to start from scratch. I’ve anchored maybe three dozen “ledealls,” as we call them, since I came to the Post, and my boss, Lynda Robinson, has edited nearly every one. We’ve developed a great rhythm, often under intense pressure, and we needed it Wednesday. We decided right away that it needed to open with a line that married Trump’s words at the White House with the attack at the Capitol.

Then I took a couple deep breaths and started to sift through the stream of short, frantic feeds coming in. I had a sense of the sweep I wanted to deliver, so what I was looking for were specific, compelling details — the sort that would let me zoom the camera all the way in. Rebecca Tan and Rachel Chason, two of the extraordinary young journalists the Post has hired in recent years, were among the first to report back on the assault. Their dispatches were stunning. I remain in awe of their bravery.

A few minutes later, I got the call from Peter, about the shooting. After that, I messaged him and Rebecca directly and asked them to step away for a moment and send me fuller accounts of what they had seen. They responded within minutes.

I define news judgment as deciding on behalf of the reader what is most interesting and most important. How did you sort out the news elements and how to stack them in your lead?
The structure of the top came to me almost immediately, which I’m thankful for because it often doesn’t go that way. I talked Lynda through my vision for it, and she agreed. I don’t write much of anything (whether it’s 50 words or 5,000) before detailing it for her. This story had to be written with authority. Knowing that an editor you trust implicitly supports your approach gives you the confidence to do that.

I think of endings as destinations, and l like to write toward them, so after we settled on the first paragraph, I focused on the fourth. In this case, “USA” being chanted by a group of violent insurrections ravaging the citadel of American democracy had to be the concluding beat of that opening thought. It wasn’t the nut graph, in the way we traditionally define them, but it was the essence of the story I hoped we would deliver.

The second paragraph needed to tell, not show. We had to put this event into historical context, while tacking on the news that the riot had stopped the election’s certification.

I wanted a robust third paragraph loaded with arresting detail that would set up the absurdity and horror of the fourth. By then, I didn’t have time to go back through the feeds, so I went with what stuck out in my memory. Years ago, when I was a cops reporter at the Tampa Bay Times and on a tight daily deadline for a narrative, an editor told me to put down my notebook (until fact-checking, of course) and write what I remembered. The best material would surface in my mind. It was great advice, and I think the best material surfaced again Wednesday: the bashing through doors, the armed standoff, the woman shot, the tear gas on the Rotunda’s white marble. The words “Confederate flags” had to come last (I still remember your 2-3-1 rule) to create that juxtaposition with the next word: “USA.”

This was an ongoing story, so how did you update it for the website as more information came in?
The first version we posted was probably 700 words and it ran in print at 1,900. We updated it at least a dozen times, with the last coming a bit before 1 a.m. Our reporters just kept breaking news and unearthing astounding detail. Carol Leonnig learned that a Capitol Police officer had shot Ashli Babbitt, the woman who died. Meagan Flynn talked to lawmakers who thought they might never escape. Peter composed (through a text to me, because he still couldn’t get Slack or email to work) a vivid description of Babbitt being rushed to an ambulance.

It feels as if you were blending reported information with some story telling. That third paragraph has lots of narrative action. How do you think about the mix of information and story elements?
I want everything I write to read like a story, not an article. Scene, dialogue, tension, a kicker worth waiting for. I do my best to thread the obligatory information into those elements rather than taking big pauses that could halt the momentum. It helps, of course, when you’re taking feeds from such a talented group of reporters who can spin together textured vignettes under pressure.

Anything else you think other journalists would be interested in?
I wrote this story, sure, but there’s a reason my byline came last — and if we were allowed to add a dozen more bylines, it still would have come last. My colleagues risked their lives to tell the world what was happening. That’s not hyperbole. A member of the maskless mob surrounding them carved “MURDER THE MEDIA” into a door. But they were undeterred. I’ve never been prouder to be a journalist or to work at the Post than I was that day.

***

Roy Peter Clark has taught writing at The Poynter Institute since 1977 and is the author of 19 books on journalism and the writing craft.

The post When writing news requires a distance from neutrality to “tell it like it is” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece is published in partnership with our friends at the Poynter Institute

[dc]I[/dc] was half-way through an essay on how the experience of news — especially in the midst of a pandemic — felt like a kind of ritual. I could not have imagined that on Sunday morning, May 24, a remarkable front page of the New York Times would offer a poignant and exquisite example.

Nothing much on that front page looked like news as we understand it — that is, the transmission of information. Instead, it felt like a graphic representation of the tolling of bells. A litany of the dead.

The page confirmed a theory I was trying to write about, a theory taught to me by the late James W. Carey, one of journalism’s greatest scholars, and a dear friend. Carey argued that a common understanding of news was in the “transmission” of information.

One could say that the Times fulfilled that role in listing the names of 1,000 of the Americans who had died, to date, of the coronavirus. That number, 1,000, was selected at a moment when the country was approaching 100,000 deaths, the kind of number that might elevate news value.

But was the primary purpose of that front page to inform? I believe that Carey would argue no. He would see in the collective experience of those names — each attached to the briefest of obits — a ceremonial purpose, a kind of public ritual of mourning designed to express shared values and move the community to a shared purpose.

Carey argued that these two theories of news — the transmission of information and the consecration of public rituals — were not mutually exclusive. But because the transmission model was so dominant, the ritual model was too often ignored or undervalued.

We will return to the front page of the Times, but let me go back to Sunday morning to tell you what I had been writing about before the perfect example was delivered, virtually, to my doorstep.

Two kinds of “mass” media

On Sunday morning, May 24, my wife and I participated in two familiar rituals. We read the Tampa Bay Times over breakfast. And we attended the 9:30 Mass at St. Paul’s Catholic Church.

That second ritual requires clarification. We did not drive the eight miles from our house to the church. Because of the pandemic, we turned on our computer, found the St. Paul’s Facebook Page, and watched the lived-streamed Mass along with hundreds of others. It was conducted by our two pastors from a small chapel.

Karen and I miss receiving Holy Communion. And we miss the hands-on fellowship of other friends and parishioners, especially the children, especially little Taylor and Cooper, whose antics keep Mass lively during the boring parts.

As humans, we crave ritual and ceremony. We need them to comfort us, reward us, express our shared values, and build a community upon which we can depend. Of all the losses marked by the pandemic, among the greatest are the losses of ceremony. Social distance means that proms, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, concerts, weddings, funerals, public celebrations, athletic events — all have had to wait.

My niece Mary Hope graduated virtually from the University of Notre Dame, where she played the trumpet in the great marching band. Talk about ritual! I saw a photo of her in her New Jersey home, wearing her cap and gown, watching the ceremony from South Bend on a television screen.

Watching your graduation on TV was good, but not the same. Watching a Mass on a computer screen was good, but not the same. And, a more controversial point, reading a virtual newspaper is good, but not the same.

What is it about reading the paper that feels like a ritual, especially to us Baby Boomers who have been doing it for most of our lives? First, the newspaper is a thing, created in our own community, and delivered to our doorstep, or driveway, or lawn, or whatever. If we are lucky, it is there when we wake up. It invites us to pay attention. We pick it up. Bring it inside. Divide it into parts. Distribute the parts to the familiar players. I get sports. She gets local section and puzzles. We are consumers, and we consume it over a meal, shuffling the pages back and forth, calling each other’s attention to whatever looks interesting or important.

Professor Carey argued that reading a newspaper — at least in the days of mass media — was like attending Mass. When you go to Mass, as he did almost every day, you may not learn anything new (except perhaps that raffle tickets are on sale outside the church). For Carey, according to a quote in Wikipedia, “Mass is a situation in which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed.”

We Catholics say we “attend” Mass, but some of us prefer to say that we “participate” in the Mass. In the ritual view of media, the reader is not passive. He or she or they participate in the experience of news. Through the transmission of information, they should learn something new, but that new thing confirms rather than alters the reader’s sense of belonging.

When I write that Karen and I miss receiving communion, it suggests that our level of participation in the Mass is diminished from a distance. Catholics grow up to believe that Mass is a re-creation, not an imitation, of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Being there, in the church, when the words of consecration are pronounced, is to be present in real time at the most holy moment in Christian history.

When we think of the experience of news, it rarely includes the idea of ritual. More of habit, perhaps. To use Carey’s distinction, we are more likely to think of the transmission of information. News experts — call them journalists — go out and find things out and check things out and transmit the most important and interesting stuff to our eyes and ears.

In the interests of self-governance, that act seems essential. But that act of transmission is not likely — this is my opinion — to help people love their community. That feeling of love requires something more. It requires ritual.

Incalculable loss

 On Sunday morning, the New York Times gave its readers something special and memorable, a kind of memorial in print, delivered the day before U.S. Memorial Day. The headline read

U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss.

There is great skill in that headline, beginning with the word “Deaths” and ending with “Loss”; with that number 100,000 in the middle, bumping into “Incalculable” — a number that counts but that you cannot count.

A sub-headline followed:

They were not simply names on a list. They were us.

[caption id="attachment_156387" align="alignright" width="330"] The New York Times front page, May 24, 2020[/caption]

When authors know what is most important, they write it into the shortest possible sentence: “They were us.” The use of the first-person plural denotes an identification, not just between the journalist and the reader, but with the dead as well, deepening the ritual of mourning.

What to make of a front page made up of just text? Just type? Who would argue that the primary purpose of that litany of the dead is the transmission of information? Instead, it has a ceremonial value, like the public reading of the names of those who lost their lives on 9/11, or the more than 50,000 names on the Vietnam War Memorial.

In their creeds, Catholics profess their faith in a “communion of saints” — all the dead who have risen to new life. Communion is an interesting word. If we leave aside the image of the host on the tongue, we are left with a vision of community and a spirit of union that is embodied — I could say incarnate — in that front page.

“News is culture”

James Carey had a favorite saying, which he repeated to his students and colleagues at the University of Illinois and later at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism: “News is culture.” His friends would repeat it back to him like a secret password. What he meant is that news is a created thing, a symbolic representation of reality. It is transmitted for social purposes. But it is also experienced collectively.

I have attended countless workshops in which news leaders were posed this challenge: “In a few words, tell me what business you are in.” Standard answers include “new business,” “advertising business,” “printing business.” Professor Jay Rosen, who knew Carey and admired him, once argued that local news enterprises could say they were in the “identity business.”

Over the years, depending upon where I lived, I thought of my newspaper as the guidebook — the owner’s manual — for membership in my community. As local news is weakened, as newspapers disappear, as the ritual of reading, viewing, and consuming news is diminished, that feeling of community, that love of community is threatened. To our peril.

Through its ritual of mourning, the Times — now a truly national news organization — has chosen to step into a vacuum of leadership. In addition to informing a fragmented citizenry, the leaders at the Times have chosen to form us into a national community of grief, solidarity, and determination.

[caption id="attachment_156388" align="aligncenter" width="640"] One thousand victims of COVID-19 were memorialized on the front page of the New York Times on May 24, 2020[/caption]

The essay by Dan Barry

If anyone doubts that the Times was purposeful in its act of news ritual, one only needs to read the column by Dan Barry that accompanied the “book of the dead.” I have a list of my favorite New York Times writers of all time, and Barry stands high up on it. His language is eulogistic and ceremonial, including the words “ritual” and “communion.” Here are some of the best passages, followed by my commentary.   

One hundred thousand.

Toward the end of May in the year 2020, the number of people in the United States who have died from the corona virus neared 100,000 — almost all of them within a three-month span. An average of more than 1,100 a day.

One hundred thousand.

A number is an imperfect measure when applied to the human condition. A number provides an answer to how many, but can never convey the individual arcs of life, the 100,000 ways of greeting the morning and saying good night.

One hundred thousand.

My take: As a form of rhetoric and prayer, nothing feels more ritualistic than purposeful repetition. Each time we engage with “One hundred thousand,” it feels like the bells ringing out atop a cathedral spire. In journalistic terms, sometimes a number can serve to symbolize the news: 9/11. At this moment in time, it is the death toll, spelled out in words. It never occurred to me, until now, that the “toll” in “death toll” is an allusion to the ringing of bells.

Another passage from Barry’s essay:

She may have died in a jam-packed hospital, with no family member at her bedside to whisper a final thank you, Mom, I love you.

He may have died in a locked down nursing home, his wife peering helplessly through a streaked window as part of her slips away.

They may have died in subdivided city apartments, too sick or too scared to go to a hospital, their closest relatives a half world away.

The highly contagious virus has forced us to suppress our nature as social creatures, for fear that we might infect or be infected. Among the indignities, it has denied us the grace of being present for a loved one’s last moments. Age-old customs that lend meaning to existence have been upended, including the sacred rituals of how we mourn.

My take:  Dan Barry understands the rhetorical power of three, visible here in the texture and structure of the column. Three is the largest number in writing. Three examples mean “this is all you need to know right now.” We find three in the liturgies and scriptures of many religions, from the theology of the Trinity, to the virtues of faith, hope, and love. Here Barry skillfully avoids names, an unusual move in journalism. The anonymity creates a sense of the many rather than of one. And nowhere is the intention of coverage made clearer than in this passage, that the Times is attempting to compensate for the loss of “Age-old customs that lend meaning to existence…including the sacred rituals of how we mourn.”

Before, we came together in halls and bars and places of worship to remember and honor the dead. We recited prayers or raised glasses or retold familiar stories so funny they left us nodding and crying through our laughter.

In these vital moments of communion, it could feel as though the departed were with us one last time, briefly resurrected by the sheer power of our collective love, to share that closing prayer, that parting glass, that final hug.

Even in horrible times of wars and hurricanes and terrorist attacks that seemed to crumble the ground beneath our feet, we at least had the time-tested ways of grieving that helped us take that first hesitant step forward.

Not now.

My take:  Just look at the language and the connotations that vibrate through this passage: places of worship, honor the dead, recited prayers, moments of communion, briefly resurrected, our collective love. When a writer — with a team behind him — knows what he wants to say, that meaning should be reflected in the “diction” of the work, that is, the choice of every word.

And then this:

…In a larger sense, the suspension of our familiar rituals of burial or cremation reflected what life in a pandemic has been like. The absence of any clear end.

Even the dead have to wait.

My take: If I had to choose a single sentence that reflects the collective suffering brought upon the human race in this global pandemic, if might be “Even the dead have to wait.”  Six words.

And finally:

One hundred thousand.

A threshold number. It is the number celebrated when the family’s car odometer ticks once more to reach six digits. It is the number of residents that can make a place feel fully like a city: San Angelo, Texas; Kenosha, Wisconsin; Vacaville, California.

So imagine a city of 100,000 residents that was here for New Year’s Day but has now been wiped from the American map.

One hundred thousand.

Always first on the dance floor. Always ready to party. Always gave back.

Preferred bolo ties and suspenders.

Awarded the Bronze Star.  Served in the Women’s Army Corps. Survived the sinking of the Andrea Doria. Competed in the Special Olympics. Immigrated to achieve the American dream.

Could quote Tennyson from memory.

A number is an imperfect measure when applied to the human condition.

One. Hundred. Thousand.

My take:  If you ring the bell at the beginning, ring it again at the end. But this time more slowly, with a period — a full stop — after each word. The repetition of “one hundred thousand” links the parts together. In service to the litany of the dead, Barry completes a complicated narrative move. Let’s call one the “flyover” in which the reader is asked to identify with a kind of cartography of death, a map of American loss. But then, again without names, the writer makes us pay attention to the individuality or particularity of loss, made manifest in a defining human action: He “Could quote Tennyson from memory.”

One last note from the bell

What, in short do I derive from my personal participation in this journalistic ritual of mourning? Yes, even the dead have to wait, but we don’t. We can do something good. Each one of us. All of us. Before the number hits 200,000.

Roy Peter Clark is a writing coach and scholar who taught writing at the Poynter Institute since 1977.  He is the author or editor of 19 books on journalism and the writing craft including “Writing Tools” and his most recent “Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser.”

The post The news joins the rituals of mourning appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

My wife, Karen, and I happen to have for more than a decade a good Catholic pastor, Msgr. Robert Gibbons. Among his many gifts, he is a news junkie and is endlessly fascinated with language and literature. (He is also a cancer survivor and very encouraging to Karen during her recovery.)

Since we can't gab with him on Sunday mornings during the pandemic, he will send the occasional message, at times with a question.  Like this one about a Hemingway sentence:

I always like to pick up, from time to time, “A Moveable Feast.”

Yesterday the opening sentence of Chapter 2 struck me: “When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely.”

Why do I find that sentence so compelling?  Is it the lack of commas?  Is it that almost all the words are one-syllable?  Is it the fact that he doesn’t just say “clear and cold” but adds “lovely,” which is perhaps unexpected by the reader, especially after “clear and cold.”

What is it about that sentence?

Here was my response:

Thanks for the invitation to X-ray that sentence, Father. "When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely."

You are right that Hemingway’s style is marked by the absence of commas.  I would have written it: "When we came back to Paris, it was clear, cold, and lovely."

It is technically a complex sentence with one subordinate clause followed by an independent clause. In the conventions of regular punctuation, that requires a comma after “Paris,” so sternest schoolmasters would have taken points off. But it is in that small violation that Hemingway’s rhetorical style is revealed.

You are also correct that all but two of his words are of one syllable. That actually forces us to see the two words that stand out: “Paris” and “lovely,” the two most important words. “Paris” is the last word in the first clause; “lovely” the last in the main clause.

Then there is the principle of three. Three examples sends a secret message: “That’s all you need to know.”  Clear and cold and lovely. The number two (2) divides the world, but three (3) encompasses the world.  Think of St. Paul in Corinthians:  faith, hope, and love; or the way I learned it: faith, hope, and charity.

The power comes from parallelism in Paul but also in Hemingway. "Clear" and "cold" are parallel — single syllable words that are alliterative. In a parallel list, the author always has a shot at giving it a tweak at the end. (Think of Frank Sinatra:  "I’ve been a pirate, a pauper, a puppet, a poet, a pawn, and a king.") "Lovely" may sound like a weaker word because it has two syllables, with the emphasis on the first. (Parallel with “Paris.”) But Hemingway knows what all effective writers know:  That the most emphatic word should go at the end.

Thanks again for asking. Look forward to seeing you again. Karen does, too. Roy

Roy Peter Clark has taught writing at the Poynter Institute since 1977.  He is the author or editor of 19 books on journalism and the writing craft including “Writing Tools” and his most recent “Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser.”

The post “When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely.” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece is published in partnership with our friends at the Poynter Institute.

[dc]I[/dc]t’s happening again, as it always happens with disease. Our fear of contagion has turned some among the sick, the potentially sick, and even those who care for the sick into convenient scapegoats.

At a time when health care workers are celebrated as heroes for their sacrifice and sense of duty, some in scattered places around the globe are being attacked. According to NPR, when they show up in a community, they are chased away, under the threat of violence, in fear that they are not healers but carriers.

New Zealand scholar Brian Boyd offers a cogent theory about stories.  He argues in “On the Origin of Stories” that stories are essential to our survival. Fiction and nonfiction both expand our experience and leave us with two enhanced powers: 1) to recognize danger so we can avoid it; 2) to identify the helpers so we can work with them.

It is clear how we might filter the story of the COVID-19 pandemic through Boyd’s theory. We have stories galore telling us how the coronavirus works and the steps needed to protect ourselves and others. (Wash your hands, don’t touch your face, wear a face mask, stay six feet apart.)

And we have countless narratives portraying heroes in action, not just those stepping into direct contact with the ill and dying, but also the store clerks, truck drivers, and mail carriers who, until now, have been under-appreciated.

From this frame we can derive a simple protocol for journalists and other public writers and speakers:  Help us understand the dangers.  Help us understand who can help us, and how we can help.

But Boyd’s compelling ideas do not account for those who use stories and the tools of narratives for bad purposes. Stories that characterize the sick, disabled, and infirm as dangerous to the common good are dangerous in and of themselves. They have a long history in real-life narratives and fiction. Consider the stories the Nazis told to glorify themselves and villainize others; those stories helped lead to what we now call the Holocaust.

We will get back to COVID-19, but let’s spend a little time with zombies.

Living on zombie time

COVID-19 has given us a real-life narrative to help make sense of the countless zombies who, over the last decade, have become sci-fi anti-heroes. Zombie movies are not just of this century. Filmmaker George Romero set the standard in my day (1968) with “Night of the Living Dead.” Since then, the zombies have multiplied exponentially.

In 2010 a comic book inspired TV’s popular “The Walking Dead.” Max Brooks, son of Mel, wrote the novel “World War Z,” which starred Brad Pitt in the movie version. “Game of Thrones,” with its knights and dragons, offered us the White Walkers, as medieval zombies — and frozen ones to boot.

The basic narrative is familiar: Some force, often a virus, has turned the living into the walking dead. They feed on human flesh. If they bite you, you are transformed into a zombie as well.

It is in that trope that zombies become embodied metaphors for disease. They are infected, they multiply, they make their way through communities, they attack, they are contagious. To eliminate them, you must burn them, shoot them in the head, or decapitate them. In most cases, the living can recognize them from a distance, offering a chance for fight or flight. A small advantage.

There are other stories in which even that advantage does not exist. Take the recent HBO Stephen King adaptation called “The Outsider.” This series, based on King’s novel, describes an evil presence in the world that — in human form — feeds on children. The problem is that the evil will inhabit the body of an ordinary person, usually someone who has been scratched or wounded by a carrier. That infected person becomes a doppelgänger for the innocent original source, who is mistaken for the killer.

In simple terms, the premise is that human beings are infected by evil and become monsters.

In some movies — I’m thinking of versions of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” — characters can look at an ordinary person walking down the street and wonder “Is he one of US, or one of THEM?”

We are fighting a war against an invisible enemy, our leaders tell us about the current pandemic. One expert referred to the virus as an “invisible monster.” If that is the case, it makes everyone is potential suspect.

Need for a scapegoat

All these creepy narratives have corresponding versions in actual diseases. Sad to say, a dark part of human nature tempts us to demonize those with illness, especially those thought to be contagious. The infected come to be seen as evil. This is inevitable and infectious in its own way.

Irrational fears of contagion have a long history of side effects: shunning, casting out, scapegoating, panic, xenophobia, racism, intolerance, demonizing, tribal isolation, building barriers, misinformation, conspiracy theories, excommunication, violence, and even murder.

In the case of COVID-19, Let’s start with China.

President Trump and others in his administration have referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.” A very bad joke calls it the “Kung flu.” The source of the contagion has reportedly been traced to live animal “wet markets” in the Wuhan region of China, where the virus was transmitted from animals — in this case bats — to humans. (Of course, it had to be bats.)

Recent reports suggests the virus may have come to America from Europe, not China. Pinning a global pandemic on one country — such as China — defies science and practical policy. By all means, if public health measures, sanitation, or food safety have to be enforced in any country, and if live animal markets anywhere need to be shut down, let’s get to it.

But here is how the contagion of irrationality works. Someone blames it on China. By extension, the blame extends to the Chinese people. In a diverse country like America, blame — by pure ignorance — is extended to Chinese Americans (many who have never been in China); and because the ignorant do not discriminate between the varieties of Asian cultures, blame extends to all Asian Americans. Suddenly people are jumping out of the way of Asian Americans walking down the street, or boycotting restaurants, or bullying children, or yelling racist remarks, or vandalizing homes and businesses.

Such a response is predictable. It has a long history in America and Europe and a name that some many find offensive. It is called the “yellow peril.” It goes back well into the 19^th century when male Chinese workers were recruited to the West Coast of America to help build the railroads.  America is good at this, bringing in cheap labor to do backbreaking work, with the hope that the workers will “go back where they came from” when the job is done. There is always the suspicion that the immigrants carry with them crime and disease.

In the year 1900, an outbreak of the bubonic plague, carried by rats and transmitted to humans by fleas, hit the city of San Francisco. Because the disease was thought to have come to the city via ships from Asia, all of Chinatown was quarantined. No person of Chinese ethnicity could enter or leave. The mayor of the city insisted on the separation of the races, claiming that Chinese Americans were “a constant menace to the public health.”

Historian Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University put it in perspective for me.  In a message, he wrote:

Immigrant families did carry disease: sometimes due to conditions in their home countries, sometimes acquired in transit on squalid, overcrowded ships, sometimes spread in deadly tenements. But the key, negative move, it seems to me, then and now, is to associate immigrants from certain nations with disease regardless of their actual condition (and "real" Americans with healthfulness), and to see disease as something inherent in their bodies or culture, and thus calling for stigma and segregation rather than concerted, universalized public health.

The Chinese were not alone when they were feared for what contagion they might bring into the country. Almost every new ethnic group fell victim to what Richard Hofstadter in 1964 described as the “paranoid style” in American culture and politics. Over time, the diseases were small pox, plague, typhoid, malaria, tuberculosis, or polio. To the white American establishment, blame could be pinned on the Irish, the Jews, the Italians (including my closest relatives), and others.

“Typhoid Mary” was named for Mary Mallon, who came to America in 1883 from Ireland and served as a cook to affluent families. Though she did not have symptoms of typhoid, wherever she worked people became ill, and some died. She became something of a notorious celebrity and spent many years of her life in forced quarantine. Don’t be a Typhoid Mary, proclaimed public service notices of the day. Her notoriety added to the shadow cast on the Catholic Irish, who suffered great persecution at the turn of the 20^th century.

I was born into an Italian American family that settled in the tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City. We lived in a working-class development called Knickerbocker Village. Those apartments, covering a whole city block, were built atop the ruins of slums that were called the Lung Block. Poor immigrant families were packed into close quarters, making them susceptible to diseases like consumption and tuberculosis, the illness that killed my uncle Vincent Marino, who died at the age of 19, about a decade before I was born.

Old dark magic

Throughout history, if you were the Other, you were dirty, diseased, and evil.

This is old dark magic. From the 1500s on, syphilis was known as the French Disease, or Italian, or Spanish, or German, or Polish Disease, depending which country and people were out of favor.

As early as the 14^th century, the bubonic plague, known as the Black Death, was thought to have resulted from God’s vengeance on sinful people. Christian Europe found easy scapegoats in the Jews. There was vicious disinformation back then, too, when Jews were said to have poisoned wells and caused the illness. Whole communities were slaughtered in pogroms.

Perhaps there is no disease more associated with shunning, exile, and quarantine than leprosy.  When signs of the disease appeared, the afflicted were colonized. A famous leper colony in Molokai, Hawaii, became associated with a Catholic priest named Father Damien, who cared for those with the disease, and eventually would die from it. At times, lepers were required to carry a bell when they moved in public so that the healthy could be warned of their proximity and move away.

The word “leper” became a metaphor. A “social leper” was someone who could be shunned from polite society for any reason, a pariah, such as a child molester.

Plagues are an essential part of our Judeo-Christian narrative. I worked on this essay this as we approached Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Passover. We read in scripture of the plagues set upon Egypt because of their enslavement of the Jewish people. The feast of Passover celebrates the survival of the Jews from the worst consequences of those plagues. In the Christian gospels, Jesus is described as being afraid now and then, but not of the sick, infirmed or outcast. To the leper, Christ becomes a miraculous healer.

Who are the zombies now?

I’ve traveled back thousands of years in this essay, but let’s come back to the here and now.  Who are at this moment the despised, the lepers, the walking dead who have shambled out of the pandemic?

• Any outsider.  If we leave disease to the side, for a moment, we can look back to how American fear of terrorism led to suspicion and intolerance, not only of Muslims traveling here from abroad, but also of patriotic Muslim Americans, many who served in the military.
• The crisis of immigration on the southern border was fueled by characterizations of those trying to cross into the country as murderers and rapists. Now add disease to the xenophobia and any person from any “other place” can become a deadly enemy. It’s a little thing, perhaps, but when U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams calls this moment our Pearl Harbor and our 9/11, he is inviting us to equate a disease with evil invaders.
• The old and infirmed, who are the most vulnerable and susceptible. In this pandemic many old people have become unapproachable — even by loved ones — because we fear infecting them, or being infected by them. For the young, especially the more thoughtless among them, the precautions needed to protect seniors feel like an inconvenience. COVID-19 has even been caricatured as the Boomer Flu.
• The young and irresponsible. I live in Florida, where Spring Breakers have frolicked for decades. Suddenly, rather than just a rowdy nuisance, they became potential carriers. The story goes that they invaded Florida from the North, gathered in the sun, boozed on beaches, clustered in motel rooms, then carried whatever they caught back to their homes and colleges, in states like New York and New Jersey.
• Health care workers. Although those who care for the sick are hailed as heroes these days in most countries fighting the disease, there is a twisted logic that can turn them into villains. If they care for the sick, so it goes, they are more likely to be carriers of the virus themselves. We don’t want them bringing contagion into our community.
• Coughers and sneezers. The weather in Florida has been dry and warm. An early spring has driven the pollen count to the top of the chart, with the pollen from oak trees dusting the top of cars yellow. We walk in the park and we cough. Or walk into the drug store and sneeze. The cry of the innocent is often “I have allergies!” But if you show any sign of illness, you are shunned.
• People from other places, especially New York. Stay out of Florida, said our state’s governor, even though he was late in closing beaches and issuing stay-at-home directives. That meant check points at our points of entry and warnings that anyone trying to fly from New York to Florida should self-quarantine for 14 days. Hey, I have lived in Florida since 1977, but I was born in New York City and grew up on the North Shore of Long Island. The epicenter for the pandemic in America was once my home, and I have family there. New Yorkers can be a-holes, but we’re not zombies. (A friend from New York City, who has a home in Massachusetts, told me that family members are living up there to protect themselves from the virus. She says that when the locals see their New York license plates, they yell and curse at them.)

We can all become “the other”

As the pandemic climbs toward an apex, we are all under suspicion.

What I am describing here is a kind of master narrative: One which says that infected people are not just potentially sick, but they are evil. Since I don’t know whether you are an “Outsider” carrying the deadly virus, I will assume the worst.

I am just old enough to remember getting the Salk Vaccine to protect us from polio. About 1955 I got a shot in the school auditorium with the other kids. I didn’t cry.

I also remember sitting at a reception desk in my workplace in about 1986 and having a man walk up to me with lesions on his face, a sign of HIV infection. While I shook the hands of all others who approached me, I pushed back my chair when I saw him, an act of fear and shunning.

I would go on to write a long newspaper series, “Three Little Words,” 10 years later, about a family in which the father died of AIDS. It was still a time when HIV infection felt like a death sentence. To the most benighted, it was God’s wrath against gay men or intravenous drug users. They were to be blamed — and shunned.

Fear, panic, paranoia, hatred unto violence. These are our true demons.

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