Pity the Poor Reader

Chapter 10 Facts aren't Meaning

How to organize a story is only limited by a writer's ingenuity. Still, history and firsthand experience has taught writers to rely on a handful of techniques. Some techniques have come to dominate certain types of writing.

Let’s take a look at two of the more popular organizational techniques.

News writing remains the most basic of all nonfictional organizational styles. Its long rise began in the 1840s, when James Gordon Bennett invented the modern newspaper in the form of his New York Herald. The Herald was the first to promote itself through the immediacy and relevance of its content, what today we call breaking news. With that innovation began the ranking of information in order of importance - both within the newspaper and eventually within a story. It’s a style of organization commonly referred to as the inverted pyramid.

While newspapers may be in irreversible decline today, the inverted pyramid lives on. It has been adopted by not only radio and television but the Internet, too. That’s no surprise, given that news has become one of the Web’s most popular features. The popularity of online news has generated media rivalries as fierce as of the penny press at the dawn of the 20th century. MSNBC.com, Yahoo and CNN.com are the New York World, New York Journal and New York Herald of the 21st Century.

Online news media has embraced the inverted pyramid because of its simple but compelling formula to convey information: Facts are presented in a descending order of importance, with an emphasis on immediacy and relevance. Readers are told in no uncertain terms why they should read a story and read it now. A news story about a mayor indicted for embezzlement doesn't open with the details of his new haircut. It opens with a dramatic summary of his indictment. And then it tells the reader the who, what when and where of the story. These are the 5 Ws that every basic news story tries to answer within the first 1-3 paragraphs.

The inverted pyramid also uses a simple but compelling style of writing. Stories are clear, direct and brief. It’s a style that was pioneered by newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer in the late 1800s. He loathed the flowery, bloated language that characterized newspapers at the time.

Instead, Pulitzer commanded his writers at the New York World and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to use words that any eighth grader could understand. His newspapers featured writing with simple, direct sentences that marched from subject to verb to direct object: Dick sees Jane - not Jane is seen by Dick. Strong, active voice verbs, such as “wrangled, ransacked” and “coerced,” drove the sentences of Pulitzer news stories.

Paragraphs were simple, too. Most were no longer than three short sentences. An idea, rather confined to one long paragraph, was conveyed across several smaller ones.

By the turn of the 20th century, every major newspaper in the country had adopted Pulitzer’s style. It continues to dominate every news medium today.

The beauty of the inverted pyramid is twofold: It enables readers to quickly grasp the news of the day, the details of an event. And it lets them skim a story. In short, reading is optional.

No wonder the inverted pyramid has been readily adopted by the rising number of online news outlets. It well suits the youthful audience that favors the Web. They tend to have short attention spans, are easily distracted and pride themselves on their multitasking prowess.

While well-suited for news, the inverted pyramid is a bore when it comes to any other type of writing. There’s none of the dramatic tension nor sense of journey that draw readers through a story.

Plenty of stories about current events aren’t breaking news. These "off news" stories are typically about trends, issues or events. Stories about things such as illegal immigration and identity theft, global warming and economic growth - or the lack thereof; Then there's the profiles of interesting personalities or newsmakers.

Off news stories share a common recipe, first popularized by the Wall Street Journal. Today, this recipe has been embraced by most big newspapers and weekly news magazines, including Rolling Stone, Business Week, the Washington Post, the New York Times Sunday magazine and Newsweek.

Here’s how it works:

A story opens with a compelling fact or anecdote. Next, the writer sums up what's to come in the rest of the story. And last, and most importantly, he sells readers on why they must read this story and read it now. Off news, or feature stories, share breaking news’ sense of urgent relevance.

Why write this way? Because there’s few businesses more competitive than commercial publishing. Readers perceive time as a scarce commodity. Whether that’s really true, given how much time people spend playing Warcraft, prospecting for dates on Craig’s List and fiddling with their profiles on Facebook, is debatable. Might it be that we enjoy believing we’re so busy because it makes us feel important?

One thing is for sure, though. Reading is but one of an endless list of choices - from television to video games to social networking - that people now have in spending their time.

Today, publications can never assume that, if they print it, readers will come. Every story in a newspaper or magazine - or blog, for that matter - must sell itself. The sell starts with the first word of any story and continues to the last. A good publication, and a sophisticated writer, never takes the readers’ attention for granted.

Good publications and writers also change with the times and, for media, the times they are always a changin’. The printing press forced the town crier into retirement. Radio forced newspapers to publish additions throughout the day. Television forced radio to abandon news for talk shows and the Internet has forced local television news to air Webcasts online. In media, it’s adapt or perish.

No media has been more whipsawed by all this change than print, whether newspapers, magazines or books. It’s no longer enough to publish facts or news. Events large and small, whether news about Lindsey Lohan’s latest detoxification or Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, are instantly airborne, available on television, portable computers or wireless phones. Long gone are the days when print media could compete on immediacy. Now people look to writers, whatever the medium, to help them understand events. That’s why it’s never been more important to think when writing, to be well-versed in history, literature and culture.

At its best, news feature writing embodies this new ethos. Facts aren’t dumped on the poor reader. Now they’re parsed and sifted and put into context. In fact, the Wall Street Journal in 2006 decided to remake itself to emphasize such interpretative and analytical journalism. The redesign is “meant to establish the Journal as the first newspaper rethought for now readers increasingly now get their news, often in real time, from many sources, all day long,” publisher L. Gordon Crovitz wrote in a letter to readers.

Today, off news writing includes five or six parts, depending the level of sophistication. Let’s take a close look at each part.

The Set-Up

All feature stories employ an opening technique called the set-up. It’s the single most important part of any story. The set-up’s job is to grab readers’ interest at the outset. Otherwise, a writer has lost them for good.

Effective set-ups open with a dramatic, telling or colorful fact or anecdote. Not just any fact or anecdote, mind you. It should represent the point or theme of your story. Don't open a story about immigration with a ribald joke about a rabbi, priest and Buddhist monk at a bar - no matter how funny. The reader will feel cheated if he doesn’t learn later in the story why this joke was relevant.

Writers often try to open in the middle of the action. They show the protagonist arrested; a hurricane swamping an unprotected town. Later, they set the opening in the context of a larger story.

Here’s a few examples of catchy openings:

“Favoring plaid sports coats and bushy sideburns, Swedish developer G. Lars Gullstedt would seem hard to miss - especially among Atlanta’s largely clean-shaven and pin-stripped development crowd. But miss him they did.”
“If the world were free of calamity, would there be a CNN?”
“In a 135-year-old farmhouse, John Gay stands in muddy cowboy boots hunched over a computer. His weathered fingers race over the keyboard. The computer spits out a plan on how best to irrigate his 4,500 acres of sugar cane.”
“When they heard the screams, no one suspected the rooster.”

See how each of these openings paint an indelible mental picture or grabs you with an interesting question or fact? That’s the secret to a good set-up.

Make no mistake, though. Set-ups are a tricky business. There's a thin line between tease and confusion. You want to give readers just enough information to understand and get hooked, but not give away the story. Did the arrested character get convicted, did the storm-ravaged town survive? Let your audience read on to find out.

At the big publications, set-ups are often more than a single paragraph. In the New York Times, set-ups can lumber on for hundreds of words. It's best, though, to avoid lengthy set-ups, unless you can write like James Joyce or Dave Barry. Remember, the set-up is a tease. Its is job done when the reader is hooked.

The Nut Graph

Once hooked, readers want to know what your story is about. Now is not the time to be coy. In three to five sentences, tell them what's to come and sum it up in sweeping drama. The drama should also convey a sense of urgency, employing such words as “now, increasingly” and “potential.” Such summary writing high up in a story is called the nut graph. Here's an example:

"College students are increasingly using the online social networking services of Facebook and MySpace as a pedestal from which to boast of their drinking and sexual prowess. But such braggadocio is increasingly attracting an unintended audience: Potential employers. They’re now cruising these sites, too, using them to weed out job candidates who post pictures of themselves drunk, naked - or both.”

Notice how this graph does more than summarize the story’s facts; It casts those facts in a dramatic story line that's rich in conflict. This is what lures people to read a story. Facts without contextual drama are like bread without butter: too dry to be appetizing.

The So-What Graph

The nut graph sinks the hook but doesn't set it. To do that, you need to persuade readers that your story is important and relevant. Writers do this through what's called the "so-what graph."

The so-what graph typically follows the nut and is between one to five sentences, shorter in newspapers and longer in news magazines. Together, the nut and so-what graphs comprise what some magazines call "billboarding." It tries to answer the unspoken questions about why readers should read a story and read it now.

A good way to make a story relevant is to cast it as representing a change or a new trend. Use the story to explain how this trend will shape the future. Give your story a forward spin, as writers say.

Take the example of the Facebook and MySpace story above. You might cast employers’ newfound interest in online networking services as a growing cat and mouse game, pitting young potential employees against employers, with each trying to outwit the other.

Better yet, try to pluck some universal chord in the billboarding. Again, let’s fiddle with the Facebook story as an example. You might amp up its cosmic relevance by saying employer background checks are the latest turn in some ageless struggle: between the young and the old, or the old guard and the upstarts, or between freedom of expression and authoritative control. The facts of the story could be cast in a way to make any of these themes. The trick is to make your story appear representative of some universal struggle that many readers can relate to.

The Caveat

A word of caution about billboarding. Life is rarely so clean cut as a good story line. It’s all to easy to sound all knowing about which little may be known - or knowable. That’s why honest writers have adopted an idea from modern scholarship: revealing the limitations of their research or reporting, what it can’t say for sure. A writer, say, may have interviewed a dozen family members or friends speculating about the motives of homicidal loner Cho Seung-Hi. However, nobody knows why Cho decided to massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, and he didn’t explain himself. An intellectually honest writer admits such a limitation.

In the pursuit of good billboarding, it’s also easy to sacrifice nuance, dissent or exceptions for dramatic effect. That’s why honest writers will follow it with a paragraph or two that quickly summarizes any caveats to their theme. The White Knight doesn’t save every damsel he tries to rescue. Here’s an example from the Wall Street Journal, the master of effective billboarding. It’s from a story about Democratic candidates in the 2006 congressional race successfully exploiting the voters’ rising anger about the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. After laying out this theme, the writer adds:

“U.S. electoral history is littered with Democrats who tried to use the inequality issue only to find voters unswayed and Republicans accusing them of "class warfare" or “business-bashing.”

Sophisticated writers concede exceptions to their theme. It conveys an intellectual honesty that builds trust with readers.

Writing effective billboarding requires that you understand your material down to its follicles. You can’t explain the meaning of a set of facts to someone else until you understand them yourself. Again, here’s where it pays off to have developed yourself as a keen observer who is well-versed in history, culture and literature.

If so well-versed, you’ll recognize that, in truth, there’s precious little that’s new. Most of what we consider new is just new to us or our generation, a modern incarnation of ancient behavior. Or, as New Yorkers say, "a new look on an old schnook."

While there’s little new, there are always new ways of seeing old trends. Or, as a conservative writer once put it in the Wall Street Journal, “The obvious needs to be made fresh.” A skillful writer who thinks deeply about life and tries to see the world aslant can make a stale pretzel taste fresh.

The Body

Okay, you’ve grabbed readers’ attention and sold them on your theme. Now you’ve got to deliver the goods. This is the function of the body of the story. It is here that you marshal the evidence to buttress your theme or argument. If you said employers use Facebook to vet potential young employees, then show us. Give examples of employers doing so. Quote participants in Facebook; cite studies and experts. Lash all this supporting evidence to the mast of your theme.

Be ruthlessly selective, including only information that moves your story forward. Don’t introduce new points in mid-story that weren't mentioned in the billboarding. Readers find it disconcerting when confronted with a new issue in mid-story. They begin to wonder if the writer is in control.

It’s okay if you don’t use all your reporting. Writing is not unlike filmmaking. A director might shoot 10 hours of film for every 30 seconds that ends up in the final cut of a commercial. The ratio’s not so stark in writing, but on average a good writer uses only about a third of the information he’s gathered. Save material that you don’t use for another story on the same topic but with a different theme.

The Kicker

There's only one part of a story that's harder to write than the opening and that's the ending. I don't know why writers call it the kicker but the name fits. Figuring out how to end a story can be a real kick in the pants.

The kicker should bring readers full circle; give them a sense of closure or emotional satisfaction. A well-done kicker leaves a lasting impression and plays a big role in making a story memorable.

How to achieve that tall order? It's not unlike learning how to tell a joke. It's all in the timing. You have to develop a sense of how to deliver a punch line, to know just when and where to stop. I'm afraid that comes only with experience and practice, trial and error.

That said, here's some elements to strive for in a good kicker:

End on the factual or emotional theme of the story. That doesn’t mean rehashing what you've already said. Instead, drive home the theme with a final insight, quote or fact.
Riff off the opening, especially if it raised a big question or introduced a mystery. The ending is a good place to solve that mystery or answer the question.
It's okay, too, to keep readers wondering, as long as it's about some big question and not the theme of the story.
Most importantly, keep the ending punchy. The shorter the better.

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Barking Dogwood Press, Atlanta, GA