Art and Science of Writing Good Articles : For Everyone

How to Write Articles?           

The article focuses on the starting trouble of writers to bring pen to paper, despite serious passion to write. This article helps the fresh writers with useful suggestions on organizing and structuring an article...

First, let’s understand what parts of an article are needed before submitting to article directories. Your article should usually have five sections:

1. Title. Your title should indicate to the reader what the article is about. Try using a catchy title to make the reader curious to find out more about your topic. Look through various article directories and make note of the headlines that capture your attention. Try to model your own headlines after those that you found interesting and made you want to hurry and click to read the article.

2. Introduction. You should dedicate one paragraph for the introduction. Use the introduction to build upon the headline and explain the content of the article without giving it all away. Try to use your introduction as a roadmap through your article so the reader will know what to expect. Also, use the introduction to build rapport with your reader - use it let them know you understand their problem and that you are about to offer them a solution.

3. Main Content. Your main content should breakdown and elaborates upon your introduction. Instead of giving an overview as you did in the introduction, begin developing each of your points. Support your points with examples, anecdotes and resources to create variety for the reader.

4. Conclusion. The conclusion of your article should be one or two paragraphs that sum up information presented in the main content. Learn to create a conclusion that sticks in the mind of the reader. For example, in how-to articles, point out the benefits of following your directions and let them know how to proceed next.

5. Author Resource Box - Always give yourself credit for being the author of the article. Use the author resource box as you business card. Include your name, your expertise and your website address. Double-check that your website address is properly linked and try to keep track of where you post articles so you can update your links if your website address changes.

Finding a Good Feature Article Idea            

This article discusses how to identify feature article material, and how to take right steps to present an idea effectively. While delineating different sources of inspiration for writing the article helps the writer in identifying, developing, tailoring, and testing an idea.

• Do you notice the ordinary and extraordinary things around you?
• When you drive to work or to school, do you make the extra effort to notice   people or places or what is happening during that routine trip?
• Do you take time to look around when you go someplace new?
• What do you see? Is it interesting to you? Would it be interesting to others? 
• Do you ever think of these observations as ideas for your writing? 
• Have you met anyone new today?
• What does that person do for a living?
• Has your regular network of friends and acquaintances brought anything different or unique into your life recently? 
• What did you do out of the ordinary this week? Was it fun? Was it informative? 
• Was it significant? 
• Did you learn anything from the experience? Would anyone else be interested? 
• Any of these questions, if answered in the affirmative, might lead to a very good feature story. 
• Finding feature ideas can be that easy. Some subjects practically announce their potential as a story to an alert writer. Others need the experienced eye and ear of a feature writer to work them into readable and salable articles.

Paying attention to what is going on around her is one of the major ways in which Liz Balmaseda, columnist and feature writer for The Miami Herald, comes up with ideas for her award-winning columns and feature articles for the local section of her newspaper. Balmaseda, who won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, says the entire city is what gives her ideas. "I look around and see what's going on," Balmaseda (1993, personal communication) explained. "I talk to a lot of people and ask them to tell me what's going on where they work and where they live."

Balmaseda says she also depends on people to call her with column and feature article ideas. As a highly visible columnist for one of the nation's major daily newspapers, she gets large numbers of telephone calls and letters. "People will call me and give me ideas," she says. "And I also talk to people in the newsroom. Reporters around the newsroom are crucial teammates for me. With their help, I look for wrongs -- people who have been wronged." Many outdoors-oriented individuals are familiar with Jon Krakauer's chronicles of his climbing experiences ons Mt. Everest, in the United States, and on the edge of Antarctica. He wrote a best-selling book, Into thin air, A personal account of the Mt. Everest disaster (Krakauer, 1997), which sold well through 1997 and 1998 and chronicled his rare experiences. He had originally been assigned to the story by Outside magazine in 1995 to make the 1996 trip. His account of the climb, the unexpected ferocious storm at 28,000 feet, and the deaths of six climbers in September 1996 won a National Magazine Award in 1997. Krakauer, a Seattle resident, is a contributing editor for Outside and had written more than 60 articles for the magazine during the past 15 years. His 1998 cover article about climbing in Antarctica for "National Geographic" chronicled his first climbing expedition since the Mt. Everest disaster. He is also author of Into the Wild. This is how Krakauer's article for Outside began: 

Editor's Note: Everest deals with trespassers harshly: the dead vanish beneath the snows. While the living struggle to explain what happened. And why. A survivor of the mountain's worst disaster examines the business of Mount Everest and the steep price of ambition.

Straddling the top of the world, one foot in Tibet and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently at the vast sweep of earth below. I understood on some dim, detached level that it was a spectacular sight. I'd been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care. It was the afternoon of May 10.1 hadn't slept in 57 hours. The only food I'd been able to force down over the preceding three days was a bowl of Ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&M's. Weeks of violent coughing had left me with two separated ribs, making it excruciatingly painful to breathe. Twenty-nine thousand twenty-eight feet up in the troposphere, there was so little oxygen reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child. Under the circumstances, I was incapable of feeling much of anything except cold and tired.

I'd arrived on the summit a few minutes after Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian guide with an American expedition, and just ahead of Andy Harris, a guide with the New Zealand-based commercial team that I was a part of and someone with whom I'd grown to be friends during the last six weeks. I snapped four quick photos of Harris and Boukreev striking summit poses, and then turned and started down. My watch read 1:17 P.M. All told, I'd spent less than five minutes on the roof of the world.

After a few steps, I paused to take another photo, this one looking down the Southeast Ridge, the route we had ascended. Training my lens on a pair of climbers approaching the summit, I saw something that until that moment had escaped my attention. To the south, where the sky had been perfectly clear just an hour earlier, a blanket of clouds now hid Pumori, Ama Dablam, and the other lesser peaks surrounding Everest.

Days later -- after six bodies had been found, after a search for two others had been abandoned, after surgeons had amputated the gangrenous right hand of my teammate Beck Weathers -- people would ask why, if the weather had begun to deteriorate, had climbers on the upper mountain not heeded the signs? Why did veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, leading a gaggle of amateurs, each of whom had paid as much as $65,000 to be ushered safely up Everest, into an apparent death trap? ( Krakauer, 1996, p. 48)

 Krakauer's National Geographic article about an expedition to climb never-scaled peaks in a corner of Antarctica opens with a similar sense of drama and risk. His highly descriptive beginning, full of imagery for readers, was written this way: Six hundred feet up the cleanly hewn face of a mountain called the Razor, the wind gusting off the polar plateau coated my beard with frost. I paused in mid-ascent, dangling from a half-inch thick rope, and attempted to shake the cramps from my aching forearms. The Antarctic ice cap lapped like a ghostly white sea against the base of the rock face, far below. On the horizon huge, jagged peaks bristled like granite quills from the vast sprawl of ice. Nowhere in all those frozen miles could I detect a sign of life. Never had I laid eyes on such a stark, barren -- or beautiful -- piece of Earth. It seemed like a waking dream. Hypnotized by the immensity and austerity of the landscape, I found it hard to stop goggling at the view and resume climbing.

I was jolted back to the task at hand by a rain of pebbles clattering down from the vertical expanse above. Craning my neck, I watched Alex Lowe ascend into uncertain terrain some 300 feet higher up, spidering gingerly over the lip of a formidable overhang while Conrad Anker payed out rope from below. ( Krakauer, 1998, p.47) 

Exciting to read? Yes. Krakauer had much to write in the two articles. Let's examine the "Outside" article in more detail: The Outside piece ran about 17,000 words -- four or five times the usual length for a magazine feature. His article contains gripping detail and personal observations about events that occurred that spring. He had even more to say because of the deaths of his colleagues and it led him to writing the book. This may not be typical of feature writers, but it demonstrates what can happen when researching and writing a feature article. Writers have to be willing to get out of their ordinary habits and routines to find good feature stories even approaching this adventure of a lifetime described by Krakauer. Krakauer was an experienced outdoorsman, with much climbing experience, but he had never sought to climb Mt. Everest until the assignment came from Outside's editor, Mark Bryant.

Feature writers have to notice details of things around them. You probably will not have such unusual experiences as Mt. Everest or Antarctic expeditions on which to base your articles. But stories can come from the ordinary, or seemingly ordinary. If you drive the same road to work or school every day, try to vary the route. Look at the scenery with an eye for story possibilities. For example, if you drive past the same house every day, look in the driveway. The old cars that the owner of the house is working on might be more than what they seem to be. Is there a chance this person restores valuable older cars? Isn't this a story prospect? Why not stop and ask a few questions?

Professor Margaret Davidson believes being a keen observer is what makes the biggest difference between a good writer and an average one, especially in terms of finding news and story ideas. "A good writer is a good observer -- of people, surroundings, ideas and trends, and the general flotsam and jetsam of the world around," Davidson ( 1990, p. 7) explained. "Some people seem to go through life with blinders on. They are so wrapped up in their own comings and goings they are unaware of the ebb and flow around them. But others observe the world in sharp detail with the vision to see everything in perspective, appreciating its true value." Davidson also says this is especially true of college students. "For some of the students . . . the world seems to be a colorful and fascinating place with an endless supply of worthwhile news stories. But for many others it appears to be very a sterile, boring existence where little that is exciting ever happens."

If you go somewhere new, think even before you leave home about what possibilities for stories and articles exist. If you like the destination, why? Would others like it also? If that new boutique has unusual or new designs, tell others about it -- in a feature story. 

Meeting someone new and different can be exciting, also. However, don't think about the new acquaintance from a personal perspective. Think about him or her from a writer's professional point of view. Is this person worthy of a feature story? What makes him or her interesting to readers? What has this person done that others would like to know? Perhaps the person is in town for just a few days and really lives in a foreign country -- perhaps a relatively unknown small country like Belize in Central America. Wouldn't this be a chance to write about the person, the country, and all the unusual aspects of life in a country that many Americans do not know much about?

Finding story and article ideas, is related to natural curiosity. Often, the best ideas occur when writers think like three- or four-year-olds, always asking "why?" and "how?" And you have to think about what you do each day -- you did something unusual, even something as simple as deciding where to go for spring break or over a long weekend. You could write a story listing your own favorite places. Or compile a list from the information provided by tourism and visitors bureaus. Those might just make a good story.

IDENTIFYING FEATURE ARTICLE MATERIAL

What makes a great feature article idea? An idea that gets published? Just about everything around you is possible feature material. Use your senses. Look around. Absorb. Notice. Listen. Look. Your job is to take these undeveloped ideas and turn them into something interesting for readers.

People make some of the best story ideas. Often a powerful story about a successful person's problems helps readers to see the "real" side of that individual. We learn from how he or she has experienced adversity and overcome it, or made the comeback to succeed a second time, lost a loved one, or survived a brush with death. These stories often make wonderful feature articles. One such example is Krakauer's story about the people and events that took place on Mt. Everest in 1996. His magazine article and his book both detail the individuals involved. We learn about them in depth as people, not just mountaineers. We learn about their strengths and weaknesses as people, not just about the mountain and efforts to reach the summit. The story is clearly about the people who climbed the mountain, not the mountain or mountaineering. 

Williamson says finding a feature story idea should be easy. Those stories seem to jump out and practically scream, "Write me!" Williamson (1975) argued, "A great advantage in being a reporter is that you have a 'license' to find out about all those things you've always been curious about" (p. 70). Here's a sample of that sort of feature, Tacoma, Washington, News Tribune writer Bart Ripp ( 1998) fresh look at a quirky collection of lawn sprinklers:

You miss the syncopated hiss.

There are no rhythmic ribbons of water, no splashing braids, and no spritzing bursts when your lawn sprinklers sit silently on a shelf. The quiet is shrill when you have shelves of sprinklers. Dozens of sprinklers. Hundreds of sprinklers.

More than 600 sprinklers - all different, all functional, all precious to Dick Storms.

Storms' collection of sprinklers, curated to a select 60, sits on a shelf at the Seafirst Gallery in the Columbia Seafirst Center in Seattle. The sprinklers are the silent stars of "Springs Eternal," an exhibit of 41 artists' works on water. 

Most everybody with a house, even if you live out in the woods without a lawn, has owned a sprinkler. It's nearly as essential to housekeeping as a toothbrush.

Storms' quest for one model of each of the 2,500 sprinklers patented in the past century began, like most afflictions, innocently and unexpectedly. Storms, 51, owns Records Archive -- a pair of Rochester, N.Y., stores that sell vintage record albums.

Storms collected chairs. He studied design. He had 12 fine chairs and no more room in his house. Water, grass and gardens were distant objects to Dick Storm when he went to an estate sale eight years ago, looking for chairs. He tumbled into a deep fountain.

"I bought three sprinklers for a buck apiece -- an oscillator, a spinner and another one," Storms said. "They went into bushel baskets in my garage."

Then he bought a few more sprinklers. Then a few more bushel baskets to hold them. . . . (Ripp, 1998, p. G1)

The key is curiosity. Be curious about lawn sprinklers. Well, at least curiosity about people who collect them. Once you notice things, once you meet someone, once you discover something interesting to you, let your journalistic curiosity take over. Satisfy your inquisitiveness by finding out about the subject. How? If you always wanted to learn about sailing, go to interview a local sailor or take lessons at a nearby lake. Or go to a nearby sailing club meeting. Finding the right story idea is also dependent on the publication for which you will write the story. You need to know what sort of material the publication publishes. This is more easily done if you work for the publication, but it can be relatively easy to find out if you take time to research the publication and its market (Bowman, 1997).You also need to know the basic characteristics of feature ideas. What are they? Traditionally, good feature ideas have eight basic elements, according to Schoenfeld and Diegmueller ( 1982). Those elements are:

• Appeal to people. The story has to meet a need of the reader. 
• Facts. A feature that works will contain certain information, or facts, about that subject that will be beneficial to readers in some way. 
• Personalities. Facts are enhanced with personality. A story that can offer some unusual person or personality with facts and appeal will be much stronger. 
• Angle. The right "slant" or theme makes the subject tie together better. 
• Action. Can you make the story come alive? It will if you have some activity in the story. It is relatively simple -- people should do something in your story. 
• Uniqueness and universality. The topic should be different and should have broad appeal at the same time. 
• Significance. Timeliness, proximity, prominence, and relevance create significance in a story.
• Energy increment. The story should stir your readers just as the idea stirred you to write the story. You should show your enthusiasm and sincerity.
• Finally, think about the necessity that all feature ideas remain fresh. Just like bread, a feature idea has a certain shelf life and it is up to you as a writer to make certain the idea is developed and published in story form while it is still fresh. The best idea won't work with editors or with readers if it is stale.

TAKING THE RIGHT STEPS TO IDEA SUCCESS

Nonfiction and fiction writing have a lot of similarities, and many of them are discussed throughout this course. One is the formation of ideas. Successful mystery novelist Elizabeth Peters (1992) says ideas are quite different from the plots she uses in her books. She wrote:

It [the idea] begins with a 'one-liner' -- a single sentence or visual image, characterized by brevity and vividness. Since an idea is not an avocado, you can't simply go out and get one. In fact, the technique of finding a usable idea is more akin to birdwatching than to chasing butterflies: There are ideas all over the place, the trick is to recognize one of the elusive creatures when it flits past. I'm not being whimsical. It is certainly possible to search actively for an idea, but unless you know one when you see one, there is no point in looking. (p. 88)

Freelance writer Lorene Hanley Duquin ( 1987) has a four-step plan of attack for shaping story ideas before actually writing the article. She says these four steps require "simple brainstorming" by asking yourself the questions and writing down the answers. "It's that information that I mold and shape into a proposal that captures an editor's interest and imagination" (p. 38). Her four steps:

• Capture the idea. Build an idea file because writers cannot always use ideas when they come along. You can do this with notebooks, file cards, file folders, shoeboxes, and even your word processor. At times, ideas have to wait until a market prospect presents itself, too. 
• Develop the idea. Do some preliminary research to develop that idea into a proposal. Not all ideas are easy to develop, of course, so be prepared to do some work. Think about the idea. Is it too broad or too narrow? Does it have wide enough appeal to your potential readers? 
• Tailor the idea. Shaping the idea to the readers you wish to reach is very important to a successful feature story. Ask yourself questions: What readers will be interested in your article? What has already been done on the subject? What publication will want to publish the article? 

• Test the idea. Duquin says you should be able to answer these to questions: Do you really want to write the article? Are you capable of doing the article? How much will the article cost you (in money and time)? What else can you do with the material if an editor does not want it? Are there markets for reprints'? Can you do spin-off articles?       
• For another approach to turning an idea into a workable story, Wisconsin writer Marshall Cook (1986) suggested seven steps: 
• Feed the mind. Try new experiences. Relive old ones through journals and diaries. Read extensively. Talk to people. Do stimulating things.
• Nurture the idea. Ideas come with a flash of lightning or with the graduate speed of a sunrise. Be ready for an idea to come to you and give it your attention by examining it from all angles.
• Ignore the idea. After pampering the idea, forget about it for a while. This incubation period helps divert you from pressure of creation on demand. Decide to come back to the idea at an appointed date and time a few days later.
• Welcome the idea back. When you return to the idea at the appointed hour, be fresh and alert. Be at your most productive period of the day. Write in your regular, yet special, writing place. Be comfortable.
• Create! Concentrate on your idea, organize, and get going. Let the ideas flow and worry about style and clarity later. Get something on paper now.
• Sustain the flow. Regular writing momentum makes a big difference. Successfully developing your idea into an article will depend on continuation of the work.
• Revise. This involves polishing the original draft into a final product.

LOOKING AT THE WORLD 

You can do stories on an endless list of topics. Start by thinking about your own personal experiences and lifestyle. Stop reading for a moment! Take a piece of paper from your notebook and make a list of possible story ideas. It can be very general. You can refine it later. Compile your list before you read the next paragraph. Done? Compare your list to the idea categories that follow. If you are a typical college student, it might include such things as cars, music, movies, dancing, clothing styles, housing, food, relationships, dating, classes, grades, fitness and exercise, travel, credit cards and bank accounts, friends, roommates, church, clubs and social groups, part-time jobs, parents-grandparents, and hometowns. Your list probably includes something like those and perhaps more. Your list might be more specific. Not bad for a just few minutes of "brainstorming."

Every one of those categories can be divided into story prospects. You just need to get more specific, that is, give each one a little more focus. You might not realize it, but you are an expert on subjects already and can write about them. If you are interested in fitness and exercise, for instance, do you like to jog? Take an aerobics class? If you do then, you know more about jogging or aerobics than those persons who do not jog nor do aerobics. You've experienced shopping for running and exercise clothes, conditioning, selection of the right foods, and the choice of best places to run, best clubs, and trainers.

Personal expertise can be personal experience also. These can develop into wonderful feature articles for the right publications. How about those categories we called parents/grandparents and hometown? Some writers can turn an ordinary aspect of their lives, such as their family or the home in which they grew up into a marvelous experience for readers. Suddenly an ordinary part of your life, if reinvestigated, becomes a feature idea, a story prospect, and ultimately an article for a magazine.

Your story ideas can come from a lot of different places. Now, think of your experiences beyond the most immediate personal levels of your life. Professional and personal contacts can be useful, too. Do you belong to a club or business group? Or does someone in your family? Sometimes these organizations provide numerous professional and personal contacts that can be used as sources for story ideas or for stories themselves. For example, that neighborhood fitness and exercise club you belong to can become a source spot for stories You can write how-to-do it stories, for example, from what you learn about the aerobics classes and other features of about fitness, good eating habits, exercise clothing, membership plans and costs, and so forth about the clubs in your community.

Freelance writer Patricia L. Fry recommends being prepared for ideas to come at any time. To do this, she is never unprepared to take notes or her observations. "Carry a note pad or tape recorder wherever you go. Start an idea file to keep your notes in, as well as newspaper and magazine clippings. Do this faithfully and you'll always find some fresh ideas to pitch to editors," Fry (1997) explained.

Certainly groups will often host programs with instructional and educational value. Speeches and discussions can produce dozens of potential stories, ranging from childcare to income tax preparation. All you need to do is to look through the listings in your local newspaper or the newsletters of organizations in your community for upcoming events that could lead to interesting stories. Think about the subject, not the event itself. The speech or panel discussion might not become an article through the event itself. A speech or panel discussion about "sexual harassment in the workplace" could lead to a feature article about the unique problems some women face in their offices in your community. And that speaker could become a major source for your story about how women should handle such problems and their courses of legal and internal policy action.

Conventions are still another area that might suggest stories for feature writers. National and regional meetings always attract the most active and authoritative persons who are interested in discussing recent developments in their respective specializations. If you are in a metropolitan area or resort region where conventions are frequently held, this source can be very valuable. To keep up with the schedule of conventions, simply make regular contact with your local convention and visitors’ office or major convention hotels.

Another set of sources is at local libraries. Every community has a public library. A few minutes spent in browsing through periodicals or new books at the library informs you about the latest treatments of subjects that may interest readers. Larger libraries, such as those at universities and colleges, often offer exhibitions and programs with speakers, even the authors, and other experts who provide material for potential stories. Some larger, more active, commercial bookstores have similar programs.

If your community has a museum, the exhibits and specialists assembled may be useful for story ideas. Both permanent and temporary exhibits offer possibilities for stories, of course, even if the stories are limited to just the fact that these events are occurring. Often, you can go beyond the exhibit itself to generate stories about the artist or event being highlighted. Numerous local, regional, and national markets exist for these features. In most areas, local history makes good story material. This can be a subject area to cultivate for stories, especially if you can find a local historian who is also a good storyteller. Many of your readers will be interested in their community's history, especially if you can explain how and why events, buildings or other landmarks, and people wound up as they did. Former Miami News executive editor Howard Kleinberg, now a busy syndicated Cox Newspapers international political affairs columnist, still finds time to develop ideas, research them, and then write a weekly local history column for The Miami Herald. He began the column in 1981 and has written two South Florida history books based on his research for the widely read column.

Because house and home are important to just about everyone, writing about these topics is a natural. Numerous "shelter" magazines such as Better Homes & Gardens and Architectural Digest exist on the subject. Many major newspapers publish home and garden sections on Sundays or in certain seasons of the year.

Just roaming around can generate ideas for stories, too, if you know a good idea when you see it. When was the last time you drove through a neighborhood of your community that you haven't seen for a few months? Or maybe there are parts of your community that you have never visited. The curiosity and inquisitiveness a good feature writer needs should eventually motivate you to take a look at different places and people. In other words, explore and look around.

COLLEGE CAMPUSES AS SOURCES FOR STORY IDEAS 

Where do we get a good feature idea? Everywhere! Well, it seems like it. For starters, people at local colleges or universities can be very good sources. Campuses offer both diversity and expertise. Combine that with relatively easy access and a campus is hard to beat for generating article ideas. If you are a student, think about the story prospects in your own classes. What interesting research is underway in the sciences at your campus? What are your own professors are doing? Have you ever thought to ask? Many are working on serious and important projects that are often worthy of a feature or news story. This is particularly true if your campus has a medical school or other health education programs in which human health and human life may be affected by the work that is being done. Even if you are no longer a student, you will find that schools can be rich with story possibilities. You just have to know where to go to start. Many universities and colleges have public affairs or public relations individuals who can suggest contacts for you on particular subjects. With a telephone call, these persons can suggest story ideas to you based on their knowledge of the current research and service projects on their campus. Some schools publish expert directories that are excellent sources for reporters and writers. Organized by topic, these directories quickly tell you what experts exist in your own backyard. These are free on request and often require only a telephone call to acquire one. Marshall Swanson (1979), a freelance writer based in Columbia, South Carolina, uses the University of South Carolina campus as a base for many of his feature articles. He suggests these five steps in tracking story ideas:

• Get to know how things run on campus. Use the public relations people. Get maps and student -- staff -- faculty telephone directories of large campuses.
• Subscribe to the student newspaper on campus. Often these publications tell you a great deal about campus goings-on. You can extend this suggestion by reading the campus magazines and faculty -- staff publications, also.
• Get to know the director of the student center. There are many campus events that are coordinated through this office.
• Establish contact with various deans and chairpersons of departments. Do this in person if possible.
• Stop off for a visit at the campus research office. Many universities have offices for funded research programs, a campus clearinghouse for funded research. There is often a list produced of this work, or of grants received, that might propose interesting ideas before anyone else gets them.

Swanson also suggests people on campuses are good prospects for profiles. Both faculty and students can become story ideas if you ask around to find out who is doing what. Columnist Dennis Hensley (1979) offered: "Colleges are the homes of the greatest minds we have in this country and the freelance writer who doesn't tap this source of free information is literally missing the buck -- the royalty buck, that is."

 LISTENING TO IDEAS FROM READERS 

Many times, readers suggest story ideas. You know you have become established as a writer when readers contact you to pass along their ideas for stories. Although some ideas will not be worthy of a story, or are just not practical given your resources, others will be workable and you should follow up on the suggestions. Never ignore tips from readers. Although one tip just will not work, the next one might be ideal. You cannot afford to forget about these suggestions. If you cannot follow up on a tip right away, pass it along to someone who can or, if time permits, write it down for later use. But you must take the time to check out each and every tip. Most reader ideas come in the form of casual conversations. Someone finds out you are a feature writer and want to pass along the idea. Or he or she calls. There are times when someone tries to be a public relations person for a friend or relative and write some sort of announcement or article to start you on your way. If you get a call, or a letter, or someone pulls you aside in an office, listen to the idea even if you are busy and cannot do anything about it right away. Write that idea down for action later. Cook (1986) said, "You [should] scramble for paper and pencil to capture this. . . . You know better than to wait. Write it down now or risk remembering later only that you had a great idea but not what that great idea was".

Tips and other ideas for stories from readers need to be checked out. Occasionally, someone presents an idea to you that seems good, but it might be false, exaggerated, or otherwise problematic. You have to take the time, at the outset, to confirm and verify information before you dig in to begin work. The value of tips cannot be overlooked. Some feature writers make their living off them. Oregon's Gary King, a freelance magazine article writer and book author who specializes in serial crime, finds tips to be his bread and butter. He combines tips with other sources, such as the news media and online computer databases. "At first I got all of my leads for article ideas by following the news -- all of it: TV, radio, newspapers, magazines. If I found a particular case that interested me, I would follow up by contacting (either in person, phone, or mail) the primary persons involved," King ( 1993, personal communication) explained. "After a while, however, people began contacting me, particularly those in the law enforcement community whose trust and respect I managed to garner. During the past two to three years, I learned about the power of the computer, and now make scanning the news wires part of my daily routine. Nothing, however, can fully take the place of the in-person interview."

GETTING IDEAS FROM OTHER WRITERS 

There's absolutely nothing wrong with looking at what other writers and publications are using as sources for ideas. An idea that you see in a west coast magazine or newsletter might not work in an east coast market, but then again, it might. You might be able to adapt it for your own purposes. Start by reading all of your local newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. If you live in a metropolitan area, this might be a chore, but you have to know what is happening locally. This keeps you informed about their potential for publishing when you have an idea, but it also gives you ideas that you can market elsewhere. Certainly, you should try to read as many out-of-town newspapers, magazines, and newsletters as you can. This is especially true to help you learn markets where you might sell your work, but also to give you new ideas. If your budget is tight and you cannot always buy subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, and newsletters, then head to your local college or public library, where you will find many major publications that arrive regularly.

Serious staff and freelance feature writers make this a part of their daily work habits. "I find that a writer should read everything in order to get article leads. The Wall Street Journal is quite valuable to me for that reason. I often spend several hours a week at the library going through newspapers," says Kansas freelance feature writer Susanna K. Hutcheson (1993, personal communication). "Often, just a small item can be a major story or, at the least, a human interest piece that can be resold a number of times."

USING SPECIALIZED PUBLICATIONS, PROGRAMS

Specialized publications and programs take this concept one step further. Specialized magazines and journals are excellent sources for feature article ideas. If you write about a particular subject, whether it is gardening, cardiac care, office equipment, or restaurant food, you need to be in touch with the industries about which you write. The best way is to read about the concerns, news and developments, problems, opinions, services, lifestyles, and major issues is in publications designed to be read by professionals, the artists, and these publications can help you understand the language, contemporary issues, and general concerns of these specialists, as well. Foodservice Product News is an industry monthly produced by Young/Conway Publications Inc., in New Jersey. Bill Communications in New York publishes Food Service Director. Both are aimed at individuals working in the business of school, factory, and business food service facilities such as factory or school cafeterias. Readers are most often managers and directors of these locations who are interested in information about new products, services, and promotions by suppliers, special success stories, and even the law. If part of your work as a student writer for your campus newspaper included covering the university or college dining service, publications such as these (and several others like them) would seem to be required reading. In them you could discover what was available, what was happening at other schools, and whether your own campus "measures up." You would also learn a lot about the language of the industry (e.g., "steam tables," "nutrient standard menus," or "ecumenical dining rooms").

Although these sorts of specialized magazines are generally available to members of organizations or employees of companies clearly involved in the industry, nonmembers can often obtain subscriptions or single copies. Or, of course, these can usually be obtained by borrowing them or requesting the discards from members or subscribers you know. But if you are serious about developing story ideas in a specialized area, you have to have access to these publications while they are current. Research journals are also good regular reading for story ideas. One of the most widely read is the Journal of the American Medical Association, which regularly publishes new medical research findings. The journal is a mainstay for health and medicine writers but provides ideas for many general assignment reporters and freelance writers as well. Most journals are published quarterly, but some are monthly and even more frequent. You simply need to familiarize yourself with the existence of these publications by heading to a library or by asking sources you respect for the names of publications they regularly read.

Bulletins and newsletters from organizations are equally valuable. Although these publications often do not offer the depth that a magazine or journal might offer, they still present issues that should suggest stories for you. Regular reading of these topics will make a difference in how you cover your subject. With the uniqueness of some cable television networks, specialized television programs may be a useful source for story ideas also. With cable television systems growing to more than 100 channels in some communities and 24-hour on-air television and radio broadcasting in many other markets, programs of narrow and specialized nature are getting opportunities to be aired. Talk radio, popular on AM stations in many metropolitan markets, can generate odd and unusual ideas simply by your listening to callers respond to the topic of the day. Shows devoted to local issues or specific concerns such as business or the economy are available and often become good sources for development of stories. Furthermore, public access channels of cable systems provide relatively obscure groups with special interests the time to broadcast. The convenience, for example, of tuning to your local school board meeting or local county government meeting on a cable channel saves time and allows you to pick up concerns of the community.

WORKING WITH EDITORS' IDEAS

Editors know their markets well. Regardless of whether they are newspaper, magazine, or newsletter editors, these persons are in contact with their readers and other writers, and they probably have had access to research about their publication's readership and reader demographics. You need to know as much as you can about a given publication if you want to freelance for it, and, of course, you need to know your readers and what they want to read if you are a staff member.

You will have countless opportunities to work with your editor on story ideas. Beginning general assignment staff writers at newspapers often start this way and gradually begin to initiate stories on their own as they gain confidence on the job. Magazine and newsletter staffers expect much the same, but because magazines and newsletters may often depend more on freelance material, editors usually only request articles or pass along ideas for articles to experienced writers whom they already know and trust.

Editors work from idea lists, just as you should do. When something interests an editor, he or she usually puts it in some sort of holding spot until planning for a new edition or issue is underway. These idea lists, when stories are assigned or when they are finished, are often called "budgets." Like your own ideas, editors' article ideas come from an equally wide range of possible sources. Editors read extensively. They talk to people. They get tips.

Your part of the system is to complete the legwork. You research and write. But you should not limit yourself to this role when working with an editor on a story idea. You bring into the situation different perspectives, experiences, and orientations. There will be occasions when you have begun to research an assignment and decide the original article idea was not exactly right. So, you refocus the story after discussing this with the editor who assigned the article. You should always share these concerns with your editor and offer to modify his or her suggestions if you have an angle that will make a good idea a better one. And your editor should be willing to listen. Don't change the story without talking to the editor. The editor needs to know what you are doing because your article is just one part of a larger plan for the department, section, or even the entire magazine.

On occasions, you will find a group brainstorming session can generate workable story ideas. You can do this with your supervising editors, with other writers, and even your friends or roommates. Simple conversation around the office or the apartment or dorm floor during a break or after work might do the trick. For freelancers not working in a regular news media environment, writers' clubs and other similar professional organizations can offer the same support.

AN EDITOR'S IDEA-DEVELOPMENT TRICKS 

Magazine editor Pat Clinton (1988, personal communication), says developing ideas is evolutionary. The process begins with bad ideas:

Don't try to censor yourself. Write them all down: bad ones, incredibly bad ones, baldly stolen ones, and embarrassing ones. Don't stop the flow by trying to judge them -- first go for volume. Build new ideas by doing variations on old ones. Extrapolate. Look for common threads, related topics, parallels in different fields. One writer I know calls it the "Beverly Hillbillies"/"Green Acres" strategy. If you read a story about country folk who come to the city, you look for one about city folk who go to the country. That's what you do with your bad ideas. Say you've read a news story about a particularly bloody divorce, but it's been covered so much you don't think anyone would buy a story on it. What are the variations? You could try to find another bloody divorce. A divorce lawyer; A lot of divorce lawyers; Expert witnesses in divorce cases; New ideas about financial support; Child support cheating; People who track down child-support cheats; Children who live in poverty while their half-siblings are affluent; Alimony for men; For a specific man; Don't stop.

Detectives who do divorce work; Your city's most notorious local detective who does divorce work; Detectives who get in trouble with the law over their divorce work; The multiple ex-spouses of some locally famous divorced person; Ways people have of not getting divorced; People who remarry; Other kinds of partnerships that dissolve: law firms that split, for instance. How about a bitter lawsuit over dissolving a family-held corporation? Or a bloody bankruptcy; Bankruptcy lawyers; and on and on and on...

Most of the ideas will be terrible; many of them will need to be filled out by calls to sources of one sort or another -- experts, associations, participants, and so on. (These sources in turn will be sources of still more ideas.) But at least you're thinking along new lines. Don't stop. Make a list of every category, every story genre you can think of. Subdivide them: don't just put down "profile"; put down "New Yorker profile, Vanity Fair profile, celebrity profile, obit, and oral history" -- draw as many distinctions as you can. Make lists of kinds of people -- old, young, living, dead, black, white, starting out, retired, entertainer, sports figure, politician, teacher, lawyer. Combine your categories and see what you get: retired black entertainers, female lawyers starting out in their careers, very young athletes. Think of some specific story ideas that arise from these kinds of people. Do variations on them. Make some calls. Don't stop.

Look at the ideas on your list. Think of them in terms of real pieces of stories. Mentally sketch a lead, a scene, a headline, a potential interview. Think about what you've sketched: Does it suggest other story ideas? Are you slowing down? Think of some deliberately bad ideas -- clichéd, overdone, boring, stupid. Write them down. Work with them.

By now you should have a fair-sized list. Read it over. Some of the ideas you'll like. Why? What is it that draws you to a story? Personalities? Conflict? Complex processes that need to be explained? New solutions to old problems? Look for themes in what you like and try to turn them into still more ideas. Try to anticipate sources for the kinds of stories you seem to like. One writer I work with discovered that the state licensing office's disciplinary file was filled with stories he liked. He reads it every week now, and he's probably the only journalist in town who does.

Make up your own rules. Remember, if you write down enough ideas, eventually you'll come up with some good ones. Don't stop.

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION CENTERS 

You can generate ideas by exploring the communication networks of your community. Many institutions and organizations today provide local telephone numbers or toll-free long distance telephone numbers to information lines. These lines are regularly updated reports designed either for the public in general or the news media. When you know you have a subject to write, and you know some of the source organizations and institutions you will use, you should find out if these services exist.

Community bulletin boards exist in just about every place where people regularly congregate. Shopping centers, for example, often have community bulletin boards for wide varieties of goods, services, and other items. You will often find these at larger grocery stores, too. Churches, senior citizen centers, park centers, and other community "living rooms" will be good places to find story ideas. In recent years, some community bulletin boards have become interactive WWW sites, chat rooms, newsgroups, or electronic bulletin boards (BBS) on the Internet. These are public computer sites where basically the same posting practices occur. These virtual communities can be geographic in nature or communities of other types -- usually organized by subject interest.

For example, go to the recreation center of a park near you. Dance classes, exercise programs, arts and crafts groups, and other organized activities will be promoted in a variety of ways. And you probably see the article possibilities already. At universities, colleges, and even high schools, campus student centers have a lot going on. Message centers often tell you about lectures, meetings, organizations, programs, and so on. These information centers are not limited to buildings. BBS often find their way into your home on cable television channels. Community-access channels often run listings of activities that can lead to stories.

Personal computers are now a part of the article idea search process, also. A WWW site can list useful information for you if you know the Web address. Some organizations use these sites to distribute information about their activities and they are kept current. The important key is to check these sources of information on a regular basis. Consistent use of the sources eventually pays off with a unique and salable story idea.

IDEA FILES, CALENDARS, AND DATEBOOKS 

Well-organized writers keep an idea file, a calendar, or datebook to plan ahead. Without it, your life as a writer will be filled with scheduling chaos. Idea files can be as simple as scraps of paper with ideas scribbled on them and thrown into a box or file folder. Or they can be more sophisticated and better organized. You can use computer database programs or even work with a word processor to keep a list. Some writers use a card file system for managing their ideas for articles. Others prefer to use calendars or datebooks.

Calendars and datebooks can be quite sophisticated. Perhaps some of the best are called personal information managers. You may already have one. For serious writers, it may be easier to work with two of these. Keep one for personal matters and the other for your writing and professional activities. These can be bound and professionally organized in a notebook format. Also, they can be purchased in fairly inexpensive computer software packages that allow you to put all your appointments, addresses, notes, to-do lists, and other events into an electronic format. The address section is ideal for compiling a source list in an electronic address book (and you can print them out for your binder that comes with it). Or, calendars and datebooks can be quite simple, such as the pocket-size calendars that are often given away each semester at school bookstores. In short, you have many ways to keep track of upcoming events and activities that might lead to article prospects. Office supply houses, bookstores, and even variety stores sell these tools for your work.

Regardless of what form they take and where you get them, calendars and datebooks are one of the basics of the well-organized writer. You might consider a hybrid form of a calendar-idea list. Some writers like to use file folders, one for each month of the year. Others keep desk books and clip ideas into each appropriate day or week. Some professional writers, using their publication's office or their home workspace, use a large wall calendar for a big picture of upcoming article prospects and deadlines. Find a system that works for you. Try different approaches until something that fits your personal style is found. If you are organized, you will be more efficient and productive in your work.

Don't forget the seasonal nature of feature writing. Although this is discussed further later, it is important enough to mention here. For example, Writer's Digest contributing editor Frank Dickson (1980) wrote two articles for his magazine nearly 20 years ago that proposed rather timeless story ideas based on the fall and winter seasons. His point, while listing more than 70 ideas in the articles, is that you must plan ahead as much as 6 months for some stories if you want to sell your work.

FINDING FEATURE IDEAS ON A BEAT 

Staff writers for newspapers, magazines, and newsletters often find themselves on a beat assignment. Although there is considerable freedom being a general assignment staff member who takes any story assignment that comes along, the opportunity to specialize on a beat appeals to many writers. Although a newspaper reporter's beat can be defined as just about any subject -- such as health and medicine, transportation, the public zoo, education and the schools, or parks and recreation -- magazine and newsletter writer beats are often even more specific and specialized because of the narrow scope of the publication.

                       

YOUR BEST SOURCES FOR STORY IDEAS           

• Personal experiences
• Personal and professional contacts
• College and university campuses
• Meetings and conventions
• House and home
• Libraries, museums
• Historians
• Other publications (newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and online publications)
• Television programs
• Readers and sources
• Editors and fellow writers
• Telephone information recordings
• Community bulletin boards and communication centers
• Calendars and date-books
• WWW sites hosted by organizations and institutions
• E-mail distribution lists sponsored by specific interest groups
• Usenet newsgroups devoted to specific subjects or topics

For some newspaper, magazine, newsletter, or online publication beat writers; feature stories can be the exception rather than the rule. Many times, beat reporters are bound by the demands of spot news reporting and find little time for features. However, a good feature article can serve several purposes for beat writers. First, they give you a needed diversion from the daily deadline writing. Second, they can build bridges with sources because these stories, if accurate and fair, seldom ruffle feathers. Third, they offer readers a new perspective on a familiar subject.

Let's think about the police beat as an example. A writer covering the police department on a regular basis will have plenty of breaking spot stories for his or her editors without writing feature articles. Yet, some of the most interesting stories take readers behind the scenes. They profile officers with special achievements, highlight special crime prevention programs, or offer depth and insight to an unusual event, such as a shocking crime that has recently occurred, or a crime trend affecting a segment of the community, such as senior citizens. Looking at a different beat, a writer covering education can produce many feature articles about schools, students, programs, teachers, administrators, parental activities, organizations, and the successes and failures of the school system.

Williamson (1975) said beat reporters generate most newspaper features. "Regardless of the reporting specialty you may inherit, feature stories will present an ever-present opportunity to win news sources, educate and inform your readers, and impress your editors with steady, high production" (p. 75).

Magazines, on the other hand, also depend on beat writers, but these people are not always on staff. As already noted, many magazines depend on freelance writers to be their specialists for articles. Or, if you become a specialist on a magazine staff, remember that either way, it is likely that you will be a specialist for a publication quite narrow in its scope. There are few general interest magazines that remain successful. Unless you work for one on them, it is likely you will be covering a specialized area for readers who have a high level of interest in the subject and, it is also quite likely, a high level of knowledge of the subject, as well.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT ANGLE

All feature articles have a particular approach. It really doesn't matter whether your article is written for a magazine, newspaper, or newsletter. It has to have some sort of angle, some major thrust within

the subject you have selected. It should also limit itself to one angle or it will have too much direction to it. After you have determined the subject for the article, make a list of all the possible angles of the subject. By exploring your list of options, you begin to get the overall picture and available approaches. Then organize the list. Reorder it. Which one is best? Rank the items on the list according to which you feel are the most appealing and unique to readers. This should help you eliminate some of the less desired approaches. With a practical point of view, determine what angles are within your resources. How much time is needed? Are sources available? Is travel involved? Can you afford the approach within your operating budget? What topics interest you the most? Make second, third, and fourth choices for the stories’ focus in case your favorite choice does not work out. Always have a backup angle to the idea.

Here's an example of giving some focus to a general idea:

Let's suppose you want to write an article for your local city/regional magazine about bicycling. The process of finding the best angle is similar to a narrowing-down process. What do you want to write about bicycling? Because it is a city/regional magazine, do you write about urban or suburban bicycling? Touring the countryside? Competitive racing? Bicycling clubs? Buying a bicycle? Other equipment? Clothing? Training? You make these types of decisions many times in conjunction with an editor. As a freelancer, you are on your own. It is a good idea to have this angle set before you pitch the story in a query letter or article proposal.

For this assignment, you decide you want to write about riding bicycles from a consumer or participation angle. Can you narrow this down further? Probably. You think this through and decide one approach might be the public bicycle routes or riding paths built in your metropolitan area in the past few years. However, you still have to go further to determine your final focus. Will you do a user "review" of these trails? Or will you simply do a descriptive piece with maps that tells readers where they can be found? You decide on the descriptive review. This requires you to ride every mile of the trails, taking notes along the way about rest stops, traffic, smoothness of the trail, bicycle shops along the way for emergencies, staging or parking areas, and even how busy the trails get after work and on weekends. Then you stop some fellow riders and interview them. Other sources, such as officers of local bicycle clubs and local government officials who oversee the trails, become part of the story also. The purpose of this example is to illustrate that you must keep things specific and focused in your article. Without it, your article will drift without any real beginning, middle, or end, and, worse, it will not seem to have any point to it. Patterson (1986) called an article angle "a frame that contains all the pertinent material. Material not pertinent to the angle is left out of the piece. The angle is also like a clothesline from which the piece's bits of information are hung." (p. 59). He adds that a feature article's angle helps structure information around a central idea that gives the reader's mind a clear place to rest.

TRYING OUT IDEAS BEFORE WRITING 

To be fair to yourself and to your potential readers, you must try out the idea before you devote time and resources to it. As noted earlier, freelance writer Duquin ( 1987) offered a strategy for polishing your story ideas before you sit down to write. She says the approach requires asking questions and writing down the answers. Here is a much closer look at the questions posed earlier:

• Do you really want to write the article? You have to consider the motivation level. If it is interesting to you and a worthy subject, you should do it. If you cannot seem to get excited about it, how can you expect your article to show that excitement? How can you expect your readers to be stimulated by what you have written?
• Are you capable of doing the article? Some topics are simply beyond a writer's abilities to complete. Because of their technical complexity, the time involved, or the expenses, it might not be workable. Some great article ideas are just out of reach for average writers. Sometimes, a subject requires the sensitivity or personal experience that you might not have. A mature writer recognizes this and holds the idea until later or gives it up completely.
• How much will the article cost you? For both staff writers and freelancers, you have to consider the resources needed to do a story. For staff writers, you might have a news media organization behind you, but its budget has limitations and priorities that may prevent you from traveling, calling, or otherwise gathering the information you need. Furthermore, this is a serious problem when you are not sure if a publication will pay your expenses. As a freelancer, can you afford to take the chance? Some ideas will be worth the risk; others will not be. Finally, there is the consideration of time. If you have the resource backing you need, does this idea merit the time it will require to do it right? Some long magazine pieces require a month or two of full-time research and writing. Others features can be done in a few hours.
• What else can you do with the material? What happens to your idea and its development if a targeted publication does not want it? Do you have other publication options? Can this idea become part of another writing project? If you are a staff member, does your publication permit you to market your work to other outlets?
• Are there markets for reprints? For freelance writers, this is a concern that may not be so important to staff writers. If you write your article from this idea, can you find second and third outlets for the story in the form of reprints? Some magazines regularly reprint major feature articles. Staff writers might not concern themselves with this because they have less control over distribution of their work. However, some newspaper and magazine groups often exchange the best of their editions through news services and syndicates.
• Can you do spin-off articles? For the freelance writer, this is a critical point. To make your work pay off at a level that can sustain you, ideas must generate more than one possible story. Can you take the idea and move into several markets with it? For a staff writer on a regular income, this is a little less important. Yet, from a similar perspective, even a staff writer might consider if the idea would have potential for a series approach or other stories for later issues and editions.

DEVELOPING AN IDEA INTO AN ARTICLE

Two steps in developing your idea into a finished manuscript are:

• Giving the idea an angle. Narrow it down. Cut out unnecessary approaches.
• Testing the idea for its soundness. Does it seem logical? Does it make sense on its face? Would you want to read this article if someone else had written it?
• Once you have satisfied yourself these steps are taken, then the prewriting and editing process continues with your first efforts to gather and organize materials for your article. These additional three steps are:
• List the research sources you will need, but in developing an article idea before the writing stage, you now should consider what research would be necessary. Where do you go?
• Make a rough outline of the idea as you turn it into an article. You should have some idea of the thrust or angle of the story by now and can begin to list major sections of the article on paper. This will help you understand what needs to be done next.
• List possible interviews/sources you will need. What persons will be a part of the article? What areas of expertise will they represent? How will you find them? Are they accessible?

Researching Feature Article Ideas

Research is undergoing a computer-driven metamorphosis. Like Franz Kafka's famed short story in which a man becomes an insect, news research is nothing like it used to be. These days, the serious writer who does his or her own research is becoming a computer whiz, weaving his or her way in and out of electronic libraries in a wide range of forms. Mix this with the already looming size and vastness of traditional library collections, and the research process has taken on new meaning when applied to article writing.

Have you found a good idea that you want to develop into a feature article? Do you need to find some basic information about it? Perhaps dig deeper for all there is on a current subject? That's what you learn how to do in this chapter. Focus is on using traditional library resources and upon employing newer computer-based resources. Brief attention is given to interviewing and observation as significant information gathering tools.

Research is diligent investigation and inquiry into a subject. It is an important step and professional writers take time to do it. Not only would it be rare to write an article without any research, it borders on foolish. It is a common pitfall for beginners who think they know enough to write an opinion feature or some other type of article with little or no background work. Effective research requires a plan. Freelance writer Gary Stern (1993) advised getting organized before beginning any research. "Before you launch your research, plan your strategy.... Do your homework" . Yet, because professional writers must do research for their articles, they often take it for granted. But they take the time and expense to do the research and are always glad they did.

San Diego freelance feature writer Andy Rathbone is a believer. He subscribes to the "research first" approach in his work. Rathbone, author of books, magazine articles, and newspaper stories about such wide-ranging topics as computers, food preparation, dining in restaurants, humor, travel, and electronics, says research is one of his first steps in his work. Not only will he spend time on it, he is not afraid to spend considerable money when it is necessary. "When writing computer books, I've spent $300 at the bookstores to grab all the competing books. It's important to know what's been discussed by the competition," Rathbone ( 1998, personal communication) explained, "It's easier to see what approaches work well -- and what approaches fail -- by seeing it appear on the printed page." Rathbone often writes specialty material for beginners who are being introduced to a new subject or product. "I drop by several on-line services. CompuServe's 'New User'forum, for instance, is a goldmine for finding out the questions that confused computer users are asking. By scanning for some key words, I can trace a subject's history, and perhaps find other angles."

Minneapolis feature writer Steve Perlstein agrees with this approach to research. He finds the writing and reporting-researching processes to be inseparable. Perlstein, who has written as a staff member at major daily newspapers as well as for United Press International, has written two books and numerous national magazine articles. Perlstein (1993, personal communication) commented:

For me, writing and reporting mesh; one begets the other, and one cannot exist without the other. I've always considered myself a natural writer who had to learn reporting. Some are the other way around. When I pull in an assignment, I first write a list of all the possible sources I can think of from all sides of the issue. Unless I can come up with a compelling reason otherwise, I wind up calling everyone on this list. And usually, each of these ell people gives me one or two others to call (I always ask), or a book or article I should read for my research.

I regularly use databases from the library and online services to flesh out my background knowledge before I call anybody -- I've found most sources are exponentially more forthcoming when you indicate you have at least a rudimentary knowledge of what you are asking them. They also are more likely to think you'll know if they are lying, so they don't try it as often.

News researches -- and reporting -- are in a new world of computers and database research, as Perlstein's discussion suggests. If computer-based research is new to you, you might wonder, "Where can I start? What sources can I call on? Where do I go?" Start with, and master, printed sources. There are still the basic categories of interview-based resources. But these days, you need to add computer-based sources to the list. This chapter focuses on all three of these areas -- published sources, people sources, and computer databases -- because you may need to employ all of them in working on a feature article. It may be easiest to start with printed materials in a place with which you are familiar, such as your campus or local public library. Then you can ease into the more challenging specialized, online or other electronic reference materials when you are ready to do so.

Expect to do some serious work and spend some time on it, no matter what research resources you use. Some experts say you should expect to spend as much as 10 hours of research for every 1 hour you spend at your computer when working on a feature article. Generally, there are two categories of written sources for research: those open and available to you and those which are not generally available to the public. Although this chapter focuses on discussing public sources, it also gives you some ideas about how to contend with limitations of restricted information that you might need for a story.

MEDIA LIBRARIES 

Most established news organizations have useful libraries. As companies have seen these grow to potential revenue centers (e.g., some now sell access to their information to the general public), budgets have grown and so have usable resources. A larger newspaper, magazine, or newsletter will have a staff of professional news librarians and sophisticated computer systems to assist you in your work. In fact, some companies insist on librarians conducting computer searches because that controls costs. However, smaller newspapers, magazines, and newsletters, as well as bureaus of larger news organizations, usually are not as well equipped. As a writer for a smaller publication, you may have to pay for such search expenses yourself. This forces you to be more resourceful in finding information on your own.

If you are fortunate enough to have a news library at your office, information is usually filed two ways -- by newsmaker's name and by subject matter -- and there are usually two categories: article clippings and still photographs. All news libraries seem to have a standard set of atlases, abstracts, directories, handbooks, encyclopedias, almanacs, and other general reference books. Libraries should update their holdings as often as new editions are published. Later in this chapter, some titles to consider in starting your own desktop reference library are suggested. Many writers feel you can never have too many reference books within arm's reach of your favorite writing spot. The standard tools for finding information at full-service libraries are card and online catalogs, as well as book and automated indexes. Specialized news libraries are not often that well organized. When it doubt, get someone to help you.

PUBLIC AND OTHER PRIVATE LIBRARIES

Both public and private libraries are your next options in conducting research for your article. If you cannot find what you seek at your own organization's news library, then go to your local public library. In many communities, there are also university and college libraries, but these are sometimes restricted. Many state universities and college libraries are open to the general public, but some private schools limit access to faculty, students, staff, and alumni. If you need to use a private library, contact the director of the library for permission to use it.

Public libraries, such as those supported by city or county funds, often contain excellent sources, particularly for local and regional subjects. If you reside in a metropolitan area, then the wealth of library resources should be great. The only restrictions for public libraries are hours of operation and demand on resources. Some special collections are accessible only by advance arrangement, but the reference materials you need most likely will be available for your use.

Besides your office library, public libraries, and academic facilities, there are three types of special libraries to remember. First, you can often use area historical society libraries. Many communities have these, and in state capitals there may be several that are open to the public. Second, there are museum libraries. Presidential libraries and topical museums are an example of this type of facility. Third, there are company and corporate libraries. Large corporations, such as those on the Fortune 500 list, maintain these for employees but facilities may be available for your use if you request permission. If you are not permitted on site, it is possible that through the public relations or public affairs department of the company you may reach the company's specialists to get assistance.

Most libraries have open stacks. That is, the shelves are open for you to browse and to find your own materials. However, some libraries do not open their stacks because of theft, mis-shelving, and other loss of valuable materials. They are a hardship for you because you must list the books you want and request a clerk to get them for you. Needless to say, this takes time. You might want to talk to the director of the library for permission to use the stacks if your research project is complex and you can establish that you will use the privilege with responsibility. Your ability to take advantage of whatever library you use depends on you and one other person: an experienced professional reference librarian who specializes in the subject about which you are writing. Subject specialists are on staff to assist you, so call on them when you need assistance.

Another service to remember is the networking that libraries use to multiply their resources. Many libraries link together in national, state, or regional networks to loan and exchange materials needed by borrowers. These interlibrary loan services may be fee-based and may take time to use, but they can save you a lot of travel expense to find materials not locally available. Finally, check the facility's hours of operation before you leave home. Hours can change and a telephone call may save you valuable time.

USEFUL REFERENCE BOOKS 

Just about all writers need to check facts or find a little bit of information that is not convenient to locate. For example, do you need to know a quick fact for a travel feature, such as the average daily temperature in Toronto and Mexico City during the summer? Go to a reference book. The answers may surprise you: an average high of 80'F and a low of 58'F in Toronto and only 79°F and 60°F in Mexico City in July, according to The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1998 (Famighetti, 1997). Even a rather common reference book such as this one, available for a few dollars at just about any neighborhood drug store or bookstore, can be a boon when you are researching a quick fact for an article. If you take a step further, you will find your local library's reference section to be one of the most useful sections of any library for any writer. You'll find many types and sources of books and periodicals. A few of the major reference books that are helpful to writers are discussed later.

Although writers need to get their facts straight, many publications employ fact checkers to make sure the information is correct. Staci Bonner (1995), a freelance magazine writer and former research editor for a national entertainment magazine, observed that professional writers would not submit manuscripts with factual errors in them any more than they would submit manuscripts with grammatical or other writing errors. "Publications vary widely in their fact-checking techniques," (p. 37). She points to several areas of information that should concern writers: names, numbers, rumors, job titles, ages, dates and times, punctuation, geography, deaths, brand names, chronologies, and quotations.

To begin checking your own facts such as those listed by Bonner, directories are a place to start. These are specialized books that list wide-ranging content such as membership lists and statistics. One example, of particular interest to you as a writer, is city directories. These can be extremely helpful for finding names, addresses, telephone numbers, and building occupants. Writers for newspapers and newsmagazines find them particularly helpful in locating sources. There are directories for several thousand cities in the United States that are published annually by private companies such as Detroit's R. L. Polk. Each of these books is different, depending on the company which produced it. They contain traditional white pages (alphabetic listings by last name), but also color pages that list (a) address listings in alphanumeric order, (b) telephone listings in numeric order (often called reverse phone listing), and (c) directories of major buildings and occupants. Some even include (d) directories of government officials, addresses, and telephone numbers.

There are also almanacs. As mentioned previously, some of these basic references are inexpensive and easy to buy. These books are published independently by companies or often co-sponsored by news organizations such as the Associated Press or Time. They are published annually and list facts and figures on many contemporary items. There are other types of almanacs, too. Some almanacs are more specialized and focus on subjects such as politics, business, agriculture, or an entire state.

Atlases and gazetteers are useful because they include a great deal more information than just maps and geographic data. For starters, you can learn a great deal by simply studying a map of an area. These books often contain statistics and other listings of value to writers. When geography is the subject you need to study, atlases and gazetteers will likely contain the answers. You can use them to verify locations, distances, spellings, population, trade, industry, available natural resources, economic development politics, and distribution systems.

Encyclopedias and yearbooks should not be overlooked either because these books can often give you an authoritative introduction to a subject. Encyclopedias are often thought of as general sets of books that are updated every 1 to 3 years and have a universal application. However, these books are often much more useful as specialized volumes devoted to limited information on subjects such as world history, physical science and music. Yearbooks are usually supplements that update existing editions of books or series of books such as encyclopedias. One example of a very useful specialized encyclopedia for finding expert sources at the national level for an article is the Encyclopedia of Associations. Simply look up the specialty and find the organization or organizations representing that interest. Call the organization's media relations office and you will probably be given names and telephone numbers of individuals who are willing to be interviewed.

Abstracts are valuable because these books take sets of statistics and other data and condense the data into useful form for the user. Abstracts can also list bibliographic information and offer annotations or summaries of books, articles, theses, or dissertations such as Dissertation Abstracts or Psychological Abstracts.

Chronologies are reference books that list events in chronological order over a period of time. Many of these are limited to certain periods of time, such as a decade or century, or are limited to the duration of an historic event, such as the 1996 presidential campaign, the 1997 death and funeral of Princess Diana, or the Great Depression.

Dictionaries are critical to research and writing. Many general dictionaries are available, of course, some within very low price ranges. Yet there are many more expensive dictionaries within particular disciplines, such as law, medicine, or the physical sciences, that can help you when working with technical subjects that require explanation for your readers. If you want to specialize in a subject as a feature writer, consider obtaining a dictionary for that specialty if one exists, even if it is a considerable investment. It may help you through interviews and, even more importantly, prevent errors. For legal sources, a good source is Black's Law Dictionary.

Biographical dictionaries are extremely helpful in researching well-known persons. There are different types of biographical dictionaries and many are focused on specific disciplines, so you need to know where to go to find information that concerns the person you are researching. Good examples are Current Biography, Contemporary Authors, or Who's Who. There are biographical master indexes to these reference books that are kept in most major libraries. Many of these books are updated regularly.

Books of quotations are another category of reference books that are a valued source to writers. When you need an authoritative quote or a familiar quote to make your point, these books are the source to use. The leading example is Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

USEFUL GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS 

Tens of thousands of federal, state, and local government publications are created each year and these can help you during research for an article. As has been often said about Washington, DC, most of the time the information you need is there, but you just have to know how and where to find it. This applies to government publications. All branches of government produce publications. These are mostly public documents, although some are classified and unavailable to the public. To help find the information you want, there are indexes -- especially at the federal level. General indexes, such as the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications, can help. This contains a subject index of new materials that are issued.

Congressional sources provide us with hearings documents on specialized topics such as pending legislation or ongoing concern about medical care, agriculture, and even the routine daily activities of Congress. These documents are available at local libraries that are designated U.S. Government document depository libraries or from the bookstores of the U.S. Government Printing Office (USGPO). USGPO materials are sold, of course, but often at prices lower than what a commercial publisher might charge.

Executive branch sources cover subjects as broad as the various departments that help the White House carry out the laws of the land. The Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations are both good sources for orders, proclamations, and regulations that are announced by the White House. A writer interested in the words of the president may check the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents.

Want to know how U.S. population trends are changing or how many appliances are in a state or county? Use current census data provided by the federal government's Bureau of the Census in the Department of Commerce. There are both lengthy census reports and shorter, more accessible abstracts of census data. The most popular one is the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which is published annually. However, there are several other statistical abstract publications produced either annually or at other regular intervals, such as the City and County Data Book, produced every 5 years.

For the judicial branch, the Index to Legal Periodicals is a good starting point. For court decisions, the West Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, publishes reports from many federal courts, all state appellate courts, and some state courts in its National Reporter System. This material is also available on-line at most law school libraries. The published version is often found in county and city libraries, law school libraries, and in some law offices.

In law enforcement, you can find reports by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI; such as the Uniform Crime Report, issued annually). For other regulations, reports and books are frequently issued by agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

At the state level, there are many useful publications and documents. Look for handbooks, directories, guidebooks, and other volumes produced by official and private sources. One good example of an official reference book is the Blue Book produced by the state of Wisconsin each year.

Other general reference books include works produced state by state. These books can be excellent regional sources and are published by both public and private sources. These books, such as the Texas Almanac and Florida Almanac, are published annually or biannually. There are also general indexes of state publications. One such book is the Monthly Checklist of State Publications, which is produced by the Library of Congress. Some states, such as Virginia and Kentucky, produce their own similar lists. For most state documents, start with the secretary of state's office. This person is the state's official record keeper.

Local government publications vary in quantity and quality. Most metropolitan areas produce a substantial number of publications and local reference materials. Small cities and towns do not always have the resources to do so. Generally, they cannot afford, nor have the space, to archive much information except that which is required by law. If you cannot find what you want at a city hall, go to the county or parish as your main regional source. Some private sources can be helpful. For example, the International City Management Association produces the Municipal Year Book.

Writing Techniques

Feature writers have to notice details of things around them. You probably will not have such unusual experiences as Mt. Everest or Antarctic expeditions on which to base your articles. But stories can come from the ordinary, or seemingly ordinary. If you drive the same road to work or school every day, try to vary the route. Look at the scenery with an eye for story possibilities

According to Professor Margaret Davidson a good writer is a good observer -- of people, surroundings, ideas and trends, and the general flotsam and jetsam of the world around.

Meeting someone new and different can be exciting, also. However, don't think about the new acquaintance from a personal perspective. Think about him or her from a writer's professional point of view. Is this person worthy of a feature story? What makes him or her interesting to readers? What has this person done that others would like to know?

Finding story and article ideas are related to natural curiosity. Often, the best ideas occur when writers think like three- or four-year-olds, always asking "why?" and "how?" And you have to think about what you do each day -- you did something unusual, even something as simple as deciding where to go for spring break or over a long weekend. You could write a story listing your own favorite places.

Just about everything around you is possible feature material. Use your senses. Look around. Absorb. Notice. Listen. Look. Your job is to take these undeveloped ideas and turn them into something interesting for readers.

Traditionally, good feature ideas have eight basic elements, according to Schoenfeld and Diegmueller (1982). Those elements are: 

1. Appeal to people. The story has to meet a need of the reader.
2. Facts. A feature that works will contain certain information, or facts, about that subject that will be beneficial to readers in some way.
3. Personalities. Facts are enhanced with personality. A story that can offer some unusual person or personality with facts and appeal will be much stronger.
4. Angle. The right "slant" or theme makes the subject tie together better.
5. Action. Can you make the story come alive? It will if you have some activity in the story. It is relatively simple -- people should do something in your story.
6. Uniqueness and universality. The topic should be different and should have broad appeal at the same time.
7. Significance. Timeliness, proximity, prominence, and relevance create significance in a story.
8. Energy increment. The story should stir your readers just as the idea stirred you to write the story. You should show your enthusiasm and sincerity.

 Finally, think about the necessity that all feature ideas remain fresh. Just like bread, a feature idea has a certain shelf life and it is up to you as a writer to make certain the idea is developed and published in story form while it is still fresh. The best idea won't work with editors or with readers if it is stale. 

Mystery novelist Elizabeth Peters (1992) says ideas are quite different from the plots she uses in her books. She wrote: It [the idea] begins with a 'one-liner' -- a single sentence or visual image, characterized by brevity and vividness. Since an idea is not an avocado, you can't simply go out and get one. In fact, the technique of finding a usable idea is more akin to bird watching than to chasing butterflies:

Freelance writer Lorene Hanley Duquin (1987) has a four-step plan of attack for shaping story ideas before actually writing the article. She says these four steps require "simple brainstorming" by asking yourself the questions and writing down the answers. "It's that information that I mold and shape into a proposal that captures an editor's interest and imagination" Her four steps: 

• Capture the idea. Build an idea file because writers cannot always use ideas when they come along. You can do this with notebooks, file cards, file folders, shoeboxes, and even your word processor. At times, ideas have to wait until a market prospect presents itself, too.
• Develop the idea. Do some preliminary research to develop that idea into a proposal. Not all ideas are easy to develop, of course, so be prepared to do some work. Think about the idea. Is it too broad or too narrow? Does it have wide enough appeal to your potential readers?
• Tailor the idea. Shaping the idea to the readers you wish to reach is very important to a successful feature story. Ask yourself questions: What readers will be interested in your article? What has already been done on the subject? What publication will want to publish the article? 
• Test the idea. Duquin says you should be able to answer these to questions: Do you really want to write the article? Are you capable of doing the article? How much will the article cost you (in money and time)? What else can you do with the material if an editor does not want it? Are there markets for reprints'? Can you do spin-off articles?     

For another approach to turning an idea into a workable story, Wisconsin writer Marshall Cook (1986) suggested seven steps:

1. Feed the mind. Try new experiences. Relive old ones through journals and diaries. Read extensively. Talk to people. Do stimulating things.
2. Nurture the idea. Ideas come with a flash of lightning or with the graduate speed of a sunrise. Be ready for an idea to come to you and give it your attention by examining it from all angles.
3. Ignore the idea. After pampering the idea, forget about it for a while. This incubation period helps divert you from pressure of creation on demand. Decide to come back to the idea at an appointed date and time a few days later.
4. Welcome the idea back. When you return to the idea at the appointed hour, be fresh and alert. Be at your most productive period of the day. Write in your regular, yet special, writing place. Be comfortable.
5. Create! Concentrate on your idea, organize, and get going. Let the ideas flow and worry about style and clarity later. Get something on paper now.
6. Sustain the flow. Regular writing momentum makes a big difference. Successfully developing your idea into an article will depend on continuation of the work.
7. Revise. This involves polishing the original draft into a final product.

YOUR BEST SOURCES FOR STORY IDEAS           

Personal experiences

• Personal and professional contacts
• College and university campuses
• Meetings and conventions
• House and home
• Libraries, museums
• Historians
• Other publications (newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and online publications)
• Television programs
• Readers and sources
• Editors and fellow writers
• Telephone information recordings
• Community bulletin boards and communication centers
• Calendars and date-books
• WWW sites hosted by organizations and institutions
• E-mail distribution lists sponsored by specific interest groups
• Usenet newsgroups devoted to specific subjects or topics

The power of observation and language in creative writing

           

Do you smell the richness of damp earth or the aroma of coffee, or are you overwhelmed by the cologne of the man sitting next to you? Use all five senses to take in your surroundings…. This article highlights power of observation In creativity…..

Creativity isn't just about waxing eloquent about the beauty of a woodland stream or rugged seashore. In fact, the most difficult creativity is often the most rewarding: being creative with the everyday aspects of life. That means being observant about everything -- and I mean everything -- around you.

Start with this exercise:

Sit down on in a park, the mall, Starbucks -- wherever there are a lot of sights, smells, sounds. Use all five senses to take in your surroundings. Do you hear the scraping of dry leaves or the hiss of the espresso machine? Do you smell the richness of damp earth or the aroma of coffee, or are you overwhelmed by the cologne of the man sitting next to you? What does the bench or chair or ground feel like under you? Take it all in. Then write!

Search for the best word to describe every single sight, smell, gesture, feeling, sound, and anything else you can think of. If your writing is missing any of the five senses -- sight, smell, sound, touch, and even taste -- go back and rework it.

Creativity through observation is a lot of work, but once you've mastered it, your writing will be all the richer and more rewarding for the addition.

Andrea's writing background includes features, editorials, reviews, profiles, poetry and fiction. She was the winner of the MOTA short story contest in 2002 and received honorable mentions for fiction from Writer’s Journal magazine in 2002 and 2004. Check out her blog at http://creativewithwriting.blogspot.com also see Card at his website

http://writersdigest.com/article/card-interview?r=wdsfbl011111

The power of words: How the right language can make you shine

• It’s been said time and again that “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
• We may know this to be true, but how does it relate to the world of business and job-hunting? 
• Whether you are writing your life story, a piece on art, travel, business these things will help: Stay simple
• If you were telling your friend or neighbor what you’ve done, would you try to confuse and impress or would you go straight to the meat of the matter?  People who want to use the power of words to advantage know that beating readers over the head with confusing, long, multi-syllabic words will get one nowhere. (OK, maybe to a Scrabble tournament, but that’s about it.) 
• Yes, do use forceful, targeted and descriptive action words to explain what you do, for whom, how and to whose benefit, but say it so the rest of us actually understand it the first time.
• Tell it like it is
• Don’t turn your babysitting experiences into a contribution to the worldwide relief of children’s hunger, but remember that everything happens for a reason. Each experience each skill has brought you where you are today. Instead of brushing it off, grab it and use the right words to make it -- and you -- shine. 
• When it comes to telling it like it is, it’s always best to, well, tell it like it is: Be truthful. Be realistic. Never be afraid to toot your horn in a way that illustrates the direct benefit of your efforts to those on the receiving end. Say it once but say it right that one time. And, my favorite: show, don’t tell.
• Once you stop, step back and truly consider your own words, you may be surprised at the sheer power you already possess.

Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing

This article is intended to help you become more comfortable with the uses of and distinctions among quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. This handout compares and contrasts the three terms, gives some pointers, and includes a short excerpt that you can use to practice these skills.

• What are the differences among quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing?
• These three ways of incorporating other writers' work into your own writing differ according to the closeness of your writing to the source writing.
• Quotations must be identical to the original, using a narrow
• Paraphrasing involves putting a passage from source material into your own words. A paraphrase must also be attributed to the original source. Paraphrased material is usually shorter than the original passage, taking a somewhat broader segment of the source and condensing it slightly.
• Summarizing involves putting the main idea(s) into your own words, including only the main point(s). Once again, it is necessary to attribute summarized ideas to the original source. Summaries are significantly shorter than the original and take a broad overview of the source material.

Why use quotations, paraphrases, and summaries?

Quotations, paraphrases, and summaries serve many purposes. You might use them to . . .

• Provide support for claims or add credibility to your writing
• Refer to work that leads up to the work you are now doing
• Give examples of several points of view on a subject
• Call attention to a position that you wish to agree or disagree with
• Highlight a particularly striking phrase, sentence, or passage by quoting the original
• Distance yourself from the original by quoting it in order to cue readers that the words are not your own
• Expand the breadth or depth of your writing

Writers frequently intertwine summaries, paraphrases, and quotations. As part of a summary of an article, a chapter, or a book, a writer might include paraphrases of various key points blended with quotations of striking or suggestive phrases as in the following example:

In his famous and influential work On the Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud argues that dreams are the "royal road to the unconscious" (page #), expressing in coded imagery the dreamer's unfulfilled wishes through a process known as the "dream work" (page #). According to Freud, actual but unacceptable desires are censored internally and subjected to coding through layers of condensation and displacement before emerging in a kind of rebus puzzle in the dream itself.

How to use quotations, paraphrases, and summaries

Practice summarizing the following essay, using paraphrases and quotations as you go. It might be helpful to follow these steps:

• Read the entire text, noting the key points and main ideas.
• Summarize in your own words what the single main idea of the essay is.
• Paraphrase important supporting points that come up in the essay.
• Consider any words, phrases, or brief passages that you believe should be quoted directly.

There are several ways to integrate quotations into your text. Often, a short quotation works well when integrated into a sentence. Longer quotations can stand alone. Remember that quoting should be done only sparingly; be sure that you have a good reason to include a direct quotation when you decide to do so. You'll find guidelines for citing sources and punctuating citations at our documentation guide pages.

Turning Wows into Words

       

The article provides helpful tools to appreciate feelings and how to turn them into words.  Sometimes, though briefly, we catch the lilt of a lullaby dancing with the wind and - life speaks to us………..

Wows    physical senses      emotions     audience       words

It happens - you're hurtling through traffic on a collision course with a speeding deadline, or slouching on the sofa as "reality" parades across the face of a 32-inch-box, or quietly sipping a cup of tea and... lightening strikes. Something, a sound or smell or sight, grabs you by the collar, jolts you from your sensory slumber and leaves you whispering an astonished, "Wow." As writers we live for these moments in life because, when cared for properly, a fleeting insight can be transformed into a full-grown essay, article or story. Consider asking yourself these questions to help fully develop your revelatory moments:

• What, specifically, struck you? Was it something physical - the aforementioned sight or sound or smell? Was it a concept unrelated to the physical senses? A memory that raced through the attic of your mind, sweeping away the years? Identifying the source of your inspiration will help bring focus to your piece.
• Why is it important to you? What emotion is tied to your insight? Were you amazed, awestruck, frightened, angry, puzzled, inspired, enlightened or confused? Once you understand your own emotional response you can start to establish the feel of your piece, from lighthearted or whimsical to judiciously serious.
• How does this apply to others? This answer determines whether your writing resonates with your readers. So, go slowly. Ask each of the first two questions again, now from the perspective of your intended audience: What will strike my readers? Why will it be important to their lives? This is the last big hurdle - once you're comfortable with this part, the tell-a-tale-train picks up speed.
• Is the piece personal, factual or sheer fantasy? This is the nuts and bolts phase of your project. If the piece is personal, or fantasy, here is where you jot down your notes and establish a basic outline. If your piece is nonfiction, here is where you set out the additional steps you will take to establish a sense of substance and authority, including online research and additional self-education.
• Where's my pencil? Ah... Yes, you are now at the point where it is necessary to take up paper and pencil, of the physical or keyboard variety, and begin. Begin. Don't worry about completing the piece at this point, just start. Concentrate on the first sentence and before you know it...

The rush of life often overwhelms. But sometimes, briefly, we catch the lilt of a lullaby dancing with the wind and - life speaks to us. When life next speaks to you in a strong and quiet voice, or smacks you upside the head in an onslaught of insight, share your experience with the rest of us. Take a bit of time to ask yourself the questions above and, with a little nurturing, you'll turn your "Wows" into words.

 About the Author: Tim Anderson is a freelance writer who has a special interest in medical topics. Visit his blog at http://medicalmigrant.blogspot.com/

The Basics of Writing

The Craft of Writing

According to the author, most of the work in an article is centered on technical aspects of writing, i.e. the nuts and bolts of narrative.   Only 10% of writing is talent (maybe less), another 30% is having something interesting to say and the rest is being able to say it well. Talent and content amount to little without skill, and skill is what we learn.

 Having been blessed to enjoy the friendship of many fellow writers, published and unpublished, I've been party to many conversations on the art and craft of writing.    I've also occasionally been asked to critique stories.   So I collected some of the things I've learned over the years into a short essay.   Then (somewhat arrogantly, I admit!) I decided to put it up on my web page in case others might be interested. 

Those who write purely for their own and others' entertainment,  or aren't interested in critical feedback or going pro--bail now.   Please note:  there's nothing wrong with eschewing critical feedback.   Ultimately, to entertain is the goal of ALL writers, even Pulitzer winners. In writing fiction (fanfic or original), the writer attempts to touch the capacity of the heart. Stories which fail to do so are meaningless, no matter how stylistically artistic. Myself, I prefer stories which have heart and are well written. The better written the story; the more effective it is at entertaining readers and conveying any themes or points; the author may wish to convey.

 So studying the craft of writing is not elitist, but very, very pragmatic. 

What follows is commentary on various technical aspects of writing:  the nuts and bolts of narrative. Only 10% of writing is talent (maybe less), another 30% is having something interesting to say. The rest is being able to say it well. Talent and content amount to little without skill, and skill is what we learn.   So yes, Virginia, you can learn to write (more) creatively. 

To be frank, the best way to learn is to find a mentor who will teach and do that tedious--but very necessary- task of detailed critique on a hardcopy manuscript. Writing, like bread-baking, is fundamentally existential: a hands-on experience. But not everyone is lucky enough to find a writing mentor, so general scatter-shot advice does have some value, particularly concerning those things which are frequent technical offenses among beginning and intermediate writers.

So, how can one know if he or she is guilty of ____?   I have found that as soon as a particular problem was pointed out to me, I could recognize it in my work.   I simply hadn't realized it was a problem before that point, and so had failed to 'see' it. If you think you're guilty of ____, you probably are.   (If however, you think you're guilty of everything, you're probably just paranoid!)

Finally, these are rules of thumb, not absolutes. Some of them are matters of debate even among award-winning authors. Ultimately, the only real rule in writing is, "Can you make it work?" If you can make it work, you can get away with it. But some people think they can get away with what they can't, too. "That's just my style" isn't a valid excuse for bad writing. There's a big difference between style and technical proficiency. e. e.  cummings didn't capitalize anything, but when you write poetry like cummings,  you can do whatever the hell you want, too. The people who play fast and loose with the rules are usually those experienced, skilled authors who kept those same rules until they learned their art. Most of us are not Carson McCullers, to pen a classic at the tender age of twenty one.

So, on with the show ...

WRITING BASICS 

DIALOGUE TAGS:  The Dreaded Said-Bookism and other Strained Prose, or, Get Rid of those Damned Adverbs!

At some point in every wannabe writer's career, he or she had someone--in an effort to expunge the overuse of certain common descriptors like 'really good'--say, “Hey! Vary your word choice and go buy a good thesaurus, kid!"

It's generally sound advice based on the theory of choosing the best word, not just any word. But it becomes problematic when taken to the extreme found among some beginning writers, particularly regarding substitutions for 'said.'   In an effort to avoid 'said,' the aspiring author tries a variety of other dialogue tags: quip, growl, express, utter, expound, cry, declare, and observe... etc. ad nauseam, the dreaded said, bookism. In short, the aspiring author has opened that newly-bought thesaurus, looked up 'say' or 'statement' and then started employing all the choices therein. 

Don't do this! It's not artistic. It's annoying, distracting and occasionally outright funny.  Simple fact:  with use, ‘said’ is a transparent word. When a writer employs a substitute, it's loud- i.e. really noticeable. So don't have your characters 'growl' their comments unless they really are growling them and you want to call specific attention to that fact.   And the word 'quipped' should appear perhaps twice in a 1000-page novel, otherwise the guilty author should be taken out and shot.

Dialogue tags can be divided into three basic types: nonexistent, soft, and hard. The best of these is nonexistent, allowing the dialogue to stand free and clear of narrator intervention (which in turn allows the reader to hear the dialogue more purely).   In two-person dialogue, one can sometimes go for half a page or more without the need for any "he said/she said" tag. With multiple-speaker conversation, that’s harder and tags more necessary. Rule of thumb: be unobtrusive. Sometimes action can substitute for he said / she said. Ask yourself, do I really need a tag at all?

Soft dialogue tags include: said, asked, told, replied, answered, (and occasionally) pointed out, and remarked. These are soft because they're transparent to the reader: that is, they carry no visual or audio sense and no connotations- they draw no attention to themselves and are the next best thing to no tags at all.

Hard dialogue tags are basically anything else. That is, words which convey a sense of how the speaker is speaking (cry, growl, snarl, quip, laugh, huff, etc.). They also include uncommon synonyms for said like declare, expound, utter.   These words are like pepper-- best used sparingly. It isn't necessary to describe how the speaker is speaking all the time. One may as well shout all the time: it loses its impact. The overuse of strong tags comes out as awkward--even amusing--not descriptive. Don't be the little writer who cried wolf!

Another frequent fault of beginners is not use of the said-bookism directly, but the overuse of adverbs in conjunction with said, especially-ly adverbs.

Don't do this, either. 

Like hard dialogue tags, adverbs should be used sparingly. If you notice one quarter or more of your dialogue tags include an adverb... that's too damned many!   First, it's not necessary to describe how the speaker is speaking every time (as I said just above).   Second, adverbs distract from the dialogue itself. Remember, transparent is best except in those cases where one wants to draw attention to the how. 

So, you fear you may be guilty of the dreaded said-bookism, what do you do? First, go through your manuscript and convert every dialogue tag to 'said.' (I'm serious--every tag.)   Then go back over your manuscript to see where you can eliminate a tag entirely, or where another word really is necessary.   Sometimes the only change needed is another soft tag, like asked instead of said. Save the hard tags for those places where you need them.

CHARACTER NAMES AND DESCRIPTORS:

 Pick One and Stick With It. Like the word 'said', characters' names become transparent.   And as with said-bookisms, there are always beginning writers who think they need half a dozen synonym-descriptors to substitute for characters' names in order to be artistic.   It's not artistic.   It's confusing.   I've read scenes of dialogue between two characters where it sounded like six people talking!  ... all because the writer kept subbing "the tall boy,” or "the red-haired pilot" or god-knows-what instead of the name.   Unless one needs to use a name three times in the same sentence, never use a substitute just to use the substitute. As I said, character names become transparent.   Like adverbs and hard dialogue tags, the use of a descriptive synonym in place of the name draws attention to it.   So unless you mean to draw attention to it, don’t do it. For instance, in the following case, the use of a descriptive synonym adds punch: 

"Philippos' affairs never last beyond a season," Leonnatos said.

"True--fidelity isn't the king's strong point."

"Maybe it should be," said the king's son, stepping out from behind a hedge of boxwood.

A writer often does need at least one synonym for a character besides the pronoun he or she. So pick one and use it consistently:  don't invent ten. Or even three. Occasionally, one might need a second, but it should be fairly generic: the boy, the man, etc. Too many and it gets confusing as to just who is who! (For some reason, poor Paris in Voyager fanfic is particularly subject to too many descriptors. I've seen- in the same story-"the pilot,"  "the tall man,"  "the blond young man," "the lieutenant,"  "the cocky young lieutenant," etc.  Um... just how many people are we talking about here?)

VIVID LANGUAGE:

 Chose the Best Noun or Verb, or, Get Rid of Those Damned Adverbs, Take II.

When we write, we convey a mental picture to the reader. Thus, and to that end, the more vivid our language, the better! But truly vivid language is not achieved by the use and abuse of adjectives and adverbs. It's achieved by the choice of the precise noun or verb and by the level of detail. 

For instance, "he raced" is always better than "he ran quickly." Attaching adjectives and adverbs weakens the noun or verb:  these are called 'qualifiers,' and they're best avoided.   So for this endeavor, get out that thesaurus and stretch that vocabulary. A writer's most precious tool is not good characterization, good dialogue, good plot--it's a strong, diverse vocabulary. Without the vocabulary, none of the rest is possible. 

I once sat down with John Crowley's Aegypt, to study what he was doing. (Don't know Crowley?   He's arguably the best stylist writing fantasy today.) I did a word count on adverbs and adjectives.   In a ten-line descriptive paragraph, he averaged only three adjectives and one adverb. Yeah, really. Yet these are some of the most vivid descriptions I know of in prose. He achieved it all with the right noun or verb. 

He also achieved it by his attention to detail, and not just any detail but those details which make description live. For instance, in one brief scene where he describes a hot evening in summer, he speaks of a fire hydrant left to gush water into the street. Instead of saying it was full of "garbage" or "flotsam," he picks out three items from that garbage, and unusual items at that (a condom is one).   The reader can, therefore, see it.

Or let's take an example from A.  S.  Byatt's recent collection of modern fairytales (The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye):

"Once upon a time,  when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings,  when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea,  learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins,  when pearly-fleshed and jeweled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and hour is shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides,  when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries,  dates,  guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables,  there was a woman who was largely irrelevant,  and therefore happy."

What a collection of things to characterize the modern world!   It's lovely--and very, very vivid.   (And if that opener doesn't make someone want to read the story, they’re dead to language.) Notice that she doesn't say "fresh fruit," she tells you WHAT fresh fruit.   More, she doesn't pick out just any ol' fresh fruit to name, but chooses those which further the point/picture. If she'd put "apples, grapes and pears,” it would lose a lot, no?

A sub point to this cry; for linguistic vividness concerns descriptions of characters and sex.   I've read stories with great place description but lousy sex scenes or dull characters.   Place description is among the easier things about which to be original.   Sex is perhaps the hardest because it's too easy to fall into clichéd phrases. If I read one more "He devoured her mouth" I'm going to go bay at the moon.   I don't know about y'all, but I have yet to "devour" anybody's mouth--and no, I wouldn't call my sex life dull.   When I read about devouring mouths, I always wanna ask, “Does he like ketchup or mustard with that?" (Okay, so I'm an iconoclast; what can I say?)   Beware not only of cliches, but of unintentionally funny clichés. 

As for characters, it’s too easy for authors to get lazy and fall into what I think of as "driver's license descriptions":  height, eye color, hair color. Some of the best character descriptions I've seen employ none (or only one) of those.   Don't tell us a character's height unless they're unusual in some way:  very short or very tall. Six feet is a tallish man, it’s not a tall man. ow, Jake Sisko is tall; it's worth noting. So is Hercules, so is Xena for a woman, so is Jadzia Dax. But Fox Mulder and Chakotay are not exceptionally so--why mention it? Pick something else. Avoid overstatement. And if inventing one's own characters, please don't make them all tall (or all short). I recall one delightful fanfic story which described a character as not-quite-tall, not-quite-blonde and not-quite-pretty.   What a terrific description! 

The same is true of hair and eye color. Unless it's unusual, don’t bother with it.   Descriptions of people should pick out those features which are distinctive.   A cleft in the chin and no earlobes is better for descriptive purposes than brown hair and eyes.   Mention the interesting things. (Also mention of one will sometimes allow the reader to assume the other: if a character has brown eyes,  more than likely the hair will be some shade of brown, too.  If the hair is blond, more than likely,  the eyes will be some shade of blue or grey; if the eyes are brown or hazel--like Callisto from Xena--then it's worth mentioning.)

SENTENCE LENGTH:  Short Makes the Breath Race 

A general rule of thumb: if one is writing action, go for shorter sentences. Run-on sentences do NOT convey a sense of breathlessness; they convey a sense of confusion for the poor reader who is trying to keep track of what the hell is going on. If one is engaged in introspection, one can get away with longer sentences. Part of the reason for this is that longer sentences require more thought on the part of the reader. Thus, shorter sentences are both more immediate, and have greater emotional impact. (Curtin's Law) 

Now, here we do get into a bit of disagreement about style. Some people write short. I do.   But some write longer, A. S. Byatt, for instance. The quote used above is both a single sentence and the whole damn first paragraph. But Byatt is good.   She can get away with it.   It's not a run-on sentence...  and that's the key. Some writers write run-on sentences and excuse it with "that's just my style." Uh--and just how many "and"s and "but"s have you got in there?

Put simply, the longer the sentence, the better the writer had better be or it becomes confusing and unreadable. Ideally, sentence length and grammar should vary.   If all your sentences are short and all begin with a subject-"He walked to the store and saw a blue car"--it's boring. Try, “Walking to the store, he saw a blue car." Or maybe, “On the way to the local Giant supermarket, he spotted a screaming-blue corvette careening along at speeds that would earn the driver a traffic ticket in triple digits."

Variety is the spice of life (and of good prose).

POINT OF VIEW:  First, Third-Limited and Third-Omniscient, or,  The Point of View Character Can't See Himself!

Understanding the use--and abuse--of point of view is critical to penning readable narrative.   Most writers understand the difference between first and third person.   One uses ‘I,’ the other, ‘he’ and 'she.' But sorting out the two types of third person can be trickier.

First Person is simultaneously the easiest and most difficult point of view to use.   It's the easiest because the writer has no trouble staying in the head of the POV (point of view) character.   But it's the most difficult to use well--with nuances. John Irving is a master of first person, so is James Kirkwood,  and Charolette Brontë. By nuances, I mean can the author convey to the reader the biases of the narrator even while stuck in the narrator's head?

Third Person comes in two flavors:  Third Limited and Third Omniscient. The difference is where the reader is "placed" in the story. With third omniscient, the reader stands beside an impersonal, third-person narrator who plays God and can see into the heads and hearts of all the characters. It's hard to do well. With third limited, the narrator is in the head of one of the characters in the story. It's not as close a point of view as first, but it's far more intimate than third omniscient. It's also the most common point of view employed in fiction, particularly in genre fiction (and fanfic).

All of these POVs have certain advantages and disadvantages. The writer has to make a choice as to which one will best accomplish what the writer wishes to do. Often we make that choice unconsciously: we just sit down and start writing and automatically fall into one.

The problem arises with the two third person POVs, as some writers try to have their cake and eat it, too. That is, they wish the freedom of third omniscient with the intimacy of third limited... and wind up with a mess. Frequently, the writer isn't even aware of what's happening. Even published authors commit this sin. That doesn't make it okay.   It's a problem, plain and simple--in my not-so-humble opinion. Pick third limited or third omniscient and stick with it.

The author must learn to place the camera (if you will) for the reader.   So let's take a look at what each placement permits, and what limitations it imposes:

First:

First person is, obviously, a great choice to allow the reader intimate knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of the main protagonist.   It also permits longish internal monologues, as well as retrospective and forespective comments, such as: "I didn't know then...” or "When I was seven, I... but as an adult..." It does require a strong narrator's voice or it descends into mundanity, like reading the average grunt's diary. Boring!

But it does not allow similar intimacy with other characters.   We only and always see people and events through the narrator, and are subject to all the narrator's biases.   If the author wishes the reader to realize that the narrator doesn't see a particular character fairly or completely, it can be a trick to let the reader in on this.   In other words,  a good first person writer can avoid merging the 'truth' with what the narrator thinks,  allowing the reader enough distance from the narrator to see that truth--even while maintaining the intimacy and empathy of first. Quite a feat, no?

Third Omniscient:

I think of this one as the master's POV because it's so damn hard to do well... and tiring, too.  It's hard because it requires the writer to be able to make profound commentary on the human condition without sounding either pompous or obnoxious. Like first POV, it also requires a strong and distinctive narrative voice. In first, one is a character in the story itself, in third omniscient, one is an external observer... but both are narrating the story and so are therefore free to comment on characters, events, action, etc. What third omniscient permits which none of the others does is free access into the thoughts and motivations of all the characters, and awareness of all events and action.

But it doesn't allow the intimacy of either first or third limited. The unseen, omniscient narrator stands between the reader and the characters, mediating perceptions. It's got a bit of a patronizing tone which some writers (and readers) dislike. After all, the narrator is playing God, telling the reader what he or she ought to think about the characters and action.

This type of POV is particularly valuable for stories which are heavy on characters and theme, those that "say something." One wouldn't ordinarily choose it for a PWP (plot?  What plot?) Romp unless engaged in mannerpunk. (And I'm not sure I'd consign mannerpunk to PWP romps, as it usually has a stylistic goal, if not a thematic goal. So, you ask, what the hell is mannerpunk?   Read Emma Bull and Steven Brust's recent SF collaboration, Teresa Edgerton's Goblin Moon, or anything by Ellen Kushner.)

To make third omniscient work, one has to have something profound to say about the human condition.  Otherwise, it’s trite, pompous or just plain dull. 

Third Limited:

This is a happy medium between the other two POVs, allowing a little of both--but it does carry certain limitations. In third limited, the reader is put in the heads of characters to see events from their points of view. Thus, it has some of the intimacy of first. But because a little more distance is maintained via the use of "s/he" instead of "I," the reader may be permitted into the heads of a couple of characters instead of only one, thus allowing the greater awareness of events that one gets with third omniscient.

BUT in order for it to work and not bleed into (bad) third omniscient, a little more rigidness is required. First, the writer must keep in mind that the POV character (whoever it is) cannot see him or herself.  I can't say how many books and/or stories I've read where we're supposedly in the head of X character only to have the writer drop out of that character's head in order to give a description of what the character looks like: "Her wispy red hair streamed out behind her..." Ouch. How does she know what her hair is doing?  She can only describe herself if she's looking in a mirror or other reflective surface. Yes, there are published authors who do this. I still personally consider it bad, lazy writing. 

Third limited works best if there is only one POV character per scene. The author should avoid hopping heads within scenes. If he or she does, the result is "POV ping pong" which makes the reader dizzy trying to keep track of whose head one's in now. Certainly the writer should avoid doing it within paragraphs. Make it easy on the poor reader--pick a single person's POV and stick with it.

"But I really, really wanna show a scene from both character's points of view!"

This is where the choice comes in, my friend.   The writer must make a decision:  is it third limited he or she wants, or third omniscient? Also consider, does this scene really need to be seen from two points of view, or do you just think it does? Let it be a challenge to write it from only one point of view. It is possible to change heads within a single scene, if handled well, but the privilege shouldn't be abused. Some tips: 

Change only once, or at most, twice. Add a few lines of "break" to alert the reader that a change has been made.

Or settle on a very distant 3rd limited POV.   

This is hard to do, but some manage.   For example, take a look at SF author Kit (Katherine) Kerr's fiction. Most of Kit's work hovers somewhere between third limited and third omniscient. Another example is historical novelist Mary Renault. Renault changes heads a little more often than Kerr does, and for the most part, she manages to pull it off without confusing the reader as to the "he." But even so, I do still occasionally get thrown when reading her work and have to stop, go back and re-read the paragraph to be sure whose head I'm in. You don't want to make your reader have to stop to re-read! 

That's the real reason for picking one head and staying in it for the whole scene.   I'm not trotting out rules for the sake of having rules; there's a point behind them.   It's okay to ask the reader to work a little, but if your writing causes the reader to have to stop and re-read on a regular basis,  at some point the reader will just stop reading, period.

INTERRUPTED DIALOGUES: or, I DON'T WANT TO HEAR EVERY THOUGHT A CHARACTER HAS WHILE TALKING TO SOMEONE ELSE 

How much internal thought/description occurs during dialogue is somewhat a matter of personal preference and style. Some writers do a lot, some do very little. I happen to prefer less...  But too much is too much! What is "interrupted dialogue"? It's dialogue which is interrupted for a few lines or paragraphs of internal observation/thought from a character. But it also includes one-liners meant to work as action dialogue tags:

He raised his hand. "Yada,  yada,  yada..."

"Yada,  yada,  yada."  She thought he looked sad and sighed.

"Yada, yada, yada."  He walked away.

Yeow!   We don't need these interrupting descriptions of mundane (and not very illuminating) actions on the parts of the speakers. So, unless a gesture or action gives meaning to the conversation (showing, say, increasing alarm), or is necessary to facilitate the plot (one needs to get X character over near the window so the sniper in the building across the street can get a bead on her)... eliminate the one-liner deadwood. It isn’t description, its fluff.  Filler.  The reader really doesn't need to know every gesture the characters are making.

(Oh, on that topic--try some different gestures. All writers can be guilty of falling into ruts:  nodding heads, taking a step up, back, turning around, etc. How about putting hands behind the head? Scratching the bridge of a nose? Cracking knuckles? Twitching a foot?   Be... well... creative.)

My reason for warning against interrupted dialogue--whether with lots of one-liners or extended bouts of internal thought-is that it's easy for the reader to lose track of the conversation. This is not a good thing. When using internal thought, I find it best to aid the reader:

A) by alternating sections of dialogue with descriptions.  Have several lines of uninterrupted dialogue, and then intersperse description or internal thought.   Don't do talk-think-talk-think-talk.  That's hard to follow. 

B) By repeating part of the previous statement if a long paragraph (or several paragraphs) of thought or description has intervened.   This is particularly important if the speaker is answering a question. "What do you think, Jim?"   ...  [long extended meditation on what Jim thinks]...  "I think we should..." No, we don't do that in real conversation. But a writer doesn't write 'real' conversation. If we did, it’d be dull, confusing and full of "um, ah, hmmm," and run-on sentences. So cut the reader some slack.

 TALKING HEADS:  The syndrome, not the rock group. While interrupted dialogue makes conversations difficult for a reader to follow, don’t be guilty of the other extreme: "talking heads."  Yes, conversation should stand clear and clean, but it's a story, not a screenplay. Sometimes you will need to insert taglines, action, imagery, or commentary into a conversation in order to give it depth. 

The key here is twofold, as noted above: not to confuse the reader by adding too much and thereby cutting up dialogue so that it becomes difficult to follow; but also not to add unnecessary commentary, images, taglines and actions. How does one know what's unnecessary? Ask oneself a couple of questions: How does this comment/action further the readers' grasp of the conversation dynamics, or the reader's grasp of characterization itself?   If you present a character as habitually pacing when nervous,  or have one who scratches the bridge of his nose when he's feeling shy or uncomfortable,  that's a subtle clue--and it's not unnecessary,  is it?   But don't join every exchange in a conversation with some action on the part of the speaker as a substitute tagline, or under the misguided notion that the reader has to "see" everything the characters are doing.   The reader doesn't.   Keep it balanced.  Or, as Apollo would say, "Moderation in all things."

SHOW, DON’T TELL 

This is a cardinal rule of writing, and what makes creative writing different from most other forms of writing, such as journalism, essays, technical writing, et cetera. Some new authors understand it instinctively, others--particularly those who think linearly, or have been trained in scientific or other forms of logical thinking--don't.

How does this manifest itself in actual fiction writing?   By telling us facts about your characters--what we call 'expository lumps'--rather than showing us these things.   Yes, it takes longer, but the show is what makes fiction interesting. There are two basic ways to show:  either through dialogue, or by creating a scene in which the information is revealed. If you want to convey that your character is impulsive, make a scene in which s/he acts impulsively. Don't just tell us that fact. Why should we believe you?   If you want to pass certain information on to your readers, do it in a conversation if possible, not by just dumping it straight into narrative.

Yes,  there are times when telling is to be preferred to showing,  particularly when a story is already in danger of being too long and the information given is somewhat peripheral to the main plot so that showing it would introduce unnecessary tangents.  But I've seen far too many stories which read more like plot synopses than story.  The author drops in to tell the reader what the characters look like, what their personality is like, and any and all background information the author thinks the reader should know. That's not a story:  it's a profile. One does not need to describe one's characters in detail upon the first meeting. One does not need to inform the reader about the character's childhood and what she had for dinner last night. In short, one does not need to hand out potted characterizations. Show these things. Give me a scene, not a summary.

[Exception:  If one happens to be writing third omniscient, such commentary is the name of the game.   But what makes it work is the vividness (and occasionally the quirkiness) of the narrative voice.   Remember not to confuse what one can get away with in third omniscient with what works in third limited.]

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW 

Write what you know or research like hell because there will be someone reading your story who's an expert on whatever subject you choose to explore.   That pretty much says it all.   If you tackle a subject about which you know nothing--or only enough to get you in trouble--you'll just wind up looking like a fool.

No, this doesn't mean writers can only write semi-autobiography. What it does mean is that if you've never been to Las Vegas, don’t choose it for your story's main setting. If you know nothing about fly fishing, don’t make it your favorite hobby. Or go talk to someone who does know about fly-fishing.   Read a few books.   Do your homework.   Or--hitting closer to home--if you're not an Indian, have never met an Indian and know squat about Indians, don’t pick Chakotay for your main point of view character or dwell on his Indian-ness. If you're writing Scully and are not a medical doctor, nurse, or other medical personnel, or don't work in a hospital,  try to avoid medical jargon because you'll almost certainly get it wrong. 

Finally, if you're going to take on a controversial or emotionally-laden topic, dear god, know what you're talking about. Don't romanticize trauma or use it as a springboard to get character A together with character B. Don't assume people get over rape,  incest and other such traumatic situations overnight or as a result of a couple conversations full of potted psychobabble. And please, please don't fall into the plot cliché of "f--ing her all better." These are not topics to be employed for emotional chain-yanking. That's not only lazy writing; it’s insensitive and irresponsible writing.

In general, know your limits.  Don't be the lazy author who decides to wing it on a prayer and a remembered conversation between your father and an uncle when you were seven. 

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

LESS IS MORE 

This is a point on which not all authors agree, but enough do agree that it's become a maxim.   Don't go for overkill; remember that a point or feeling can be conveyed more powerfully by understatement than by banging the reader over the head with it.   Simplicity is classy.   (Give me a woman in simple black velvet over sparkles and spangles any day.)   Or, as I heard one author put is once:  "'Jesus wept' carries a hell of a lot more punch than 'Jesus threw himself on the ground, kicking and screaming.'"

Related to this is knowing when to enter a scene and when to end it. Frequently, authors enter scenes too early, or let them run too long. As author Joy Anderson once said jokingly, “Write your first book chapter to get you going, then toss it in the trash." That may be overstating the case a little, but she has a point. When editing your work, learn how to cut your material, particularly to excise the unnecessary. Bigger is not necessarily better. Are you over telling? Do your scenes starts too soon, end too late? These are questions to keep in the back of your mind as you edit.

BEGINNINGS SET THE TONE

How and where you begin a book or story will set the tone for the entire thing.   Give it a lot of thought.   You have to catch your readers in that first few sentences or paragraphs.   This is called the "hook." They won't give you more than that, not when there're a ton of other books (or other pieces of fanfic) to choose from. That doesn't mean you have to start with exploding buildings or murder or hints of deep dark secrets in the main character's past. But do think some about how to set your hooks, so you can reel in that reader and keep him or her following you for the rest of the story. Expository lumps are not the way to open your narrative. Consider the opening lines of these award winning authors/novels: 

"124 was spiteful.   Full of baby venom."

Toni Morrison, Beloved (novel/mystery/horror)

"I've watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you, he’s the one.   Or at least, as close as we're going to get."

Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (SF)

"The child was wakened by the knotting of the snake's coil about his waist."

Mary Renault, Fire From Heaven (historical) a

"'I will arise and go to my father,  and will say unto him,  Father I have sinned against heaven and before thee,  and am no more worthy to be called thy son.'   These were not perhaps the actual words which Edward Baltram uttered to himself on the occasion of his momentous and mysterious summons,  yet their echo was not absent even then,  and later he repeated them often."

Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice (novel) 

"At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father,  the gangster,  who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business."

Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburg (novel) 

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."

Donna Tartt,  The Secret History (murder mystery)

FORESHADOW, FORESHADOW!,
or, How Do You Get There from Here? When plotting a story, be sure to avoid unexpected, and illogical, plot twists. This means that one has to give a modicum of thought to one's story arc. If you plan to make a revelation in your story, or take it in an unexpected direction, foreshadow. Good foreshadowing is an art. (Ever read Asimov's Foundation Trilogy? Brilliant foreshadowing.) Avoid the Big Neon Hint--the sort any fool can spot a mile off. Sometimes this type of foreshadowing is fine, but not if one is aiming for surprise. (Much depends on a writer's goal.) Of course, the opposite extreme is no better: the sudden abrupt plot shift which is so unexpected that it rudely tosses the reader out of the story world onto his ass. The best foreshadowing is the kind that, when the truth is finally revealed, causes the reader to say, “Ah, of course... but I never saw it coming!"

This goes not just for events, but for character traits as well. Don't have your characters respond to situations in unpredictable ways which don't mesh with anything we've seen from them before--or anything we might expect from what we have previously seen. If they're original characters, yes of course they're yours to do with as you please...  but that doesn't mean anything goes. Keep your characters consistent. In fact, you must keep characters more consistent than people are in real life because there is less room for complexity in stories. I'm all for complex characters, but it is possible to make them so complex that you lose your readers. As for borrowed characters, I think it goes without saying that you can't take them too far from how they've been shown on the screen or you've simply created your own character and wrapped an actor's looks around him/her.   (See below under "Comments Specific to Fanfic.")

Finally, a related point: if you plan to hint at deep dark secrets in the pasts of your characters, be sure they're not clichés. If I read One More Incest Story,  I may hurl.   As a former counselor, I firmly believe that this is a matter which should be spoken about openly and brought to public attention. But as a writer, I recognize that it's become a plot cliché. Twenty years ago--even ten years ago--it was shocking. Now, it's blasé because it's been done to death. (See above under "Write What You Know" for warnings against emotional chain-yanking, too.)  To avoid writing a cliché requires both extraordinary realism and extraordinary empathy, not to mention a unique angle. But really--there are other interesting things to write about.

DON'T USE DIALECT, or, O. Henry You Ain't Very, very, very few writers can pull off dialect. It's better to assume you aren't one of them. Don't give Scotty a brogue, or Chekov a Russian accent, by deliberate misspellings and unfamiliar contractions. It's not convincing, it is difficult to read, and frankly, it strikes as ridiculous. Instead convey distinctive speaking styles by grammar. This means developing a really good ear for language. For an example of an author who does this particularly well, take a gander at the writing of Clyde Edgerton (Walking Across Egypt, Rainey). He conveys a perfect western North Carolina accent without misspelling much of anything--all by the grammar the characters use.  And by grammar, I don't necessarily mean bad grammar. For instance, the combination "might should" is something you rarely hear in New York City, but you're very likely to hear it in Macon, Georgia. Likewise with "gotten," and "drug" (the 'past tense' of drag, not a pharmaceutical item). These are southernisms. Likewise, you won't hear many Americans say "we're getting up a party," or "I'm great for you,” but you're likely to hear an Irish woman say that. So listen for distinctive speech patterns and use these to convey dialect--don't use lots of contractions (goin' instead of going) or bad grammar to denote rural or linguistically unsophisticated characters, and don't, please, please don't use misspellings to convey dialect. It's unreadable.

[A few exceptions which are commonly seen enough to use:  ain't,  gonna,  wanna,  y'all,  'tis,  'cept,  ol' and a few more.   But use these with care.]

AVOID DEUS EX MACHINA, or, Euripides You Ain't, either what is deus ex machina?  In Latin, it means "the god from the machine" and relates to ancient Greek theater, but what it really means in modern usage is to take the easy way out at the end.   That is, such quick-fixes as "it was all a dream" (or a holodeck adventure) which results in automatic rewind, or inserting a "miracle rescue" or "miracle medicine moment."   Yes, TV shows are guilty of deus ex machina all the time. That's not an excuse; that’s bad plotting.   Be brave and permit actions to have consequences. Euripides used deus ex machina in order to make fun of the Greek tendency to anthropomorphize their gods.   But lazy writers use it to get themselves out of a plot pickle, to make a story end the way they want it to--not the way the course of action demands,  or because they're too lazy to think out a more complex solution.

Another kind of deux ex machina, or at least unbelievable manipulation on the part of the author, is the illogical situation or conversation--especially when its sole function is to drive apart (or drive together) the hero and heroine (or hero and hero,  as the case may be). Please. Assume that your readers have some common sense--and that your characters do as well. People may say and do stupid things, but they often recognize they're stupid even while doing them, or recognize it shortly thereafter.  And there are limits. (Stories aimed at romantic entanglements are by far the worse offenders in this category.) Don't allow yourself to be swept up in your own emotional tidalwave. Think about what your characters are doing, or saying. Is it improbable enough to make a James Bond movie look like real life?

COMMENTS SPECIFIC TO FANFIC: 

1)  Please don't open a fanfic story with the full name and title of a series regular. This is one way fanfic is not like original fiction. Ain't likely to be anybody reading your Voyager story who doesn't already know that Paris is Lieutenant Thomas Eugene Paris, pilot for Voyager.  Or, if you're into the X-files, don't start your first (or even second) sentence with "Special Agent Dana Katherine Scully..." We know her name and title, thank you. For fan fiction to introduce characters in such a fashion is both unnecessary and annoying.

A writer of fanfic can assume a certain level of knowledge on the part of readers which a writer of original fiction can't; take advantage of it. Assume in your readership the same basic familiarity with facts that the show's script writers assume for their episodes. They don't introduce every DS9 episode with a Sisko's full name and rank!   Same goes for semi-regulars like Dukat or Nog, or (for the X-Files) Skinner or Margaret Scully. The exception, of course, is if one brings back a guest star from one or two episodes. Then one might remind the readers who this person is:  _____, Worf’s adopted father. (See, I can't even remember his name!)

I'm not against incorporating the information somewhere in the story, but please:  not in the first paragraph.   And try to find a creative way to do it.   Instead of beginning "James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise was walking along the corridor,” Try: "Captain!"   It was Spock's voice.   Kirk stopped his progress down the hall outside sickbay and turned.

• [Exception:  if posting a crossover, you might need to include more information, depending on where you're publishing it. Should you write a Star Trek-Avengers crossover and post it to alt.startrek. creative, you should include more information about the Avengers characters since there may be people reading the piece who are unfamiliar with the Avengers.  If you're writing an X-Files-Homicide crossover and posting it to alt.tv.x-files.creative, you will need to give more information about the Homicide characters. If it's a generic list with all sorts of fanfiction, you should include more information period. Where you're posting, then, governs the amount of information included.]

• Don't exaggerate aspects of a series regular's appearance. Janeway's hair is not red or strawberry blond. It's dishwater brown with red highlights. Scully's eyes are light grey blue,  not baby blue, and Kirk's are hazel,  or maybe swampwater green, not gold, gold-flecked,  or honey-colored or any of a half-dozen other exaggerations. Chakotay is not a big man (nor does he have big hands). Kevin Sorbo is big, Arnold Schwartzenager is big; Robert Beltran is on the bulky side of average. Try for accuracy, not purple prose. I know what these people look like; I see them every week.

• Just as aspects of a series regular's appearance shouldn't be exaggerated, neither should aspects of his or her personality.   For example, two characters who are subjected to the worst offenses...  Yes, both Tom Paris and Fox Mulder are troubled individuals, but they are also 30-something adults with a measure of social savvy and some life experience. They are not truly dysfunctional. (I know dysfunctional; I counseled dysfunctional.) Making them act and react like fifteen-year-olds with a terminal case of angst, or like men who should be committed, is not engaging; it's silly.

• If writing original ships or characters, don't put a long list of what neat-o-cool-techno-geek things the ship can do, or include the cast of characters at the beginning of your story. If a reader can't keep up with the story without all that stuff, the writer is being lazy--and most readers won't bother. It’s boring, folks. If you want to include story backmatter like casts of characters, technical information, pronunciation charts, then put it at the back.

(On a side-note, I never personally read stories in screenplay format.   Other readers don't mind, perhaps, but I want my fiction in narrative form, thank you.)

If you found the above essay to be of use and wish to set pointers to this page, please feel free.   Also feel free to distribute the above in the public domain but, of course, keep my name attached.   I'd like to thank Mary Ellen Curtin, anne in chicago, and Laura Taylor for suggestions and comments which became additions or revisions to this essay.   I'd also like to thank the folks on alt.startrek, Creative for a lively discussion of this essay which allowed me to further refine it.

Importance of drafting and note taking in writing

Best Practices for Research and Drafting sentences           

The article discusses how to interview, how to paraphrase, how to write quotes, how to add emphasis and other such important tips for sentence construction. The article also discusses how to develop a strong out line and how to develop a strong thesis statement. The article elaborates the basic sentence varieties and strategies for variation…

Reading and Note-Taking

• In your notes, always mark someone else's words with a big Q, for quote, or use big quotation marks
• Indicate in your notes which ideas are taken from sources with a big S, and which are your own insights (ME)
• When information comes from sources, record relevant documentation in your notes (book and article titles; URLs on the Web)
• Interviewing and Conversing
• Take lots of thorough notes; if you have any of your own thoughts as you're interviewing, mark them clearly
• If your subject will allow you to record the conversation or interview (and you have proper clearance to do so through an Institutional Review Board, or IRB), place your recording device in an optimal location between you and the speaker so you can hear clearly when you review the recordings. Test your equipment, and bring plenty of backup batteries and media.
• If you're interviewing via email, retain copies of the interview subject's emails as well as the ones you send in reply
• Make any additional, clarifying notes immediately after the interview has concluded.

Writing Paraphrases or Summaries

• Use a statement that credits the source somewhere in the paraphrase or summary, e.g., According to Jonathan Kozol, ....
• If you're having trouble summarizing, try writing your paraphrase or summary of a text without looking at the original, relying only on your memory and notes
• Check your paraphrase or summary against the original text; correct any errors in content accuracy, and be sure to use quotation marks to set off any exact phrases from the original text
• Check your paraphrase or summary against sentence and paragraph structure, as copying those is also considered plagiarism.
• Put quotation marks around any unique words or phrases that you cannot or do not want to change, e.g., "savage inequalities" exist throughout our educational system (Kozol).

Writing Direct Quotations

• Keep the source author's name in the same sentence as the quote
• Mark the quote with quotation marks, or set it off from your text in its own block, per the style guide your paper follows
• Quote no more material than is necessary; if a short phrase from a source will suffice, don't quote an entire paragraph
• To shorten quotes by removing extra information, use ellipsis points (...) to indicate omitted text, keeping in mind that:
• MLA style requires ellipsis points to appear in brackets, e.g., [...].
• three ellipsis points indicates an in-sentence ellipsis, and four points for an ellipsis between two sentences
• To give context to a quote or otherwise add wording to it, place added words in brackets, []; be careful not to editorialize or make any additions that skew the original meaning of the quote—do that in your main text, e.g.,
• OK: Kozol claims there are "savage inequalities" in our educational system, which is obvious.
• WRONG: Kozol claims there are "[obvious] savage inequalities" in our       educational system.
• Use quotes that will have the most rhetorical, argumentative impact in your paper; too many direct quotes from sources may weaken your credibility, as though you have nothing to say yourself, and will certainly interfere with your style.

 Writing About Another's Ideas

• Note the name of the idea's originator in the sentence or throughout a paragraph about the idea
• Use parenthetical citations, footnotes, or endnotes to refer readers to additional sources about the idea, as necessary
• Be sure to use quotation marks around key phrases or words that the idea's originator used to describe the idea
• Maintaining Drafts of Your Paper

 Sometimes innocent, hard-working students are accused of plagiarism because a dishonest student steals their work. This can happen in all kinds of ways, from a roommate copying files off of your computer, to someone finding files on a disk or pen drive left in a computer lab. Here are some practices to keep your own intellectual property safe:

• Do not save your paper in the same file over and over again; use a numbering system and the Save As... function. E.g., you might have research_paper001.doc, research_paper002.doc, research_paper003.doc as you progress.
• Do the same thing for any HTML files you're writing for the Web. Having multiple draft versions may help prove that the work is yours (assuming you are being ethical in how you cite ideas in your work!).
• Maintain copies of your drafts in numerous media, and different secure locations when possible; don't just rely on your hard drive or pen drive.
• Password-protect your computer; if you have to leave a computer lab for a quick bathroom break, hold down the Windows key and L to lock your computer without logging out.
• Password-protect your files; this is possible in all sorts of programs, from Adobe Acrobat to Microsoft word (just be sure not to forget the password!)

Revising, Proofreading, and Finalizing Your Paper

• Proofread and cross-check with your notes and sources to make sure that anything coming from an outside source is acknowledged in some combination of the following ways:
• In-text citation, otherwise known as parenthetical citation
• Footnotes or endnotes
• Bibliography, References, or Works Cited pages
• Quotation marks around short quotes; longer quotes set off by themselves, as prescribed by a research and citation style guide
• Indirect quotations: citing a source that cites another source
• If you have any questions about citation, ask your instructor well in advance of your paper's due date, so if you have to make any adjustments to your citations, you have the time to do them well

Adding Emphasis in Writing

 Visual-Textual Devices for Achieving Emphasis

In the days before computerized word processing and desktop publishing, the publishing process began with a manuscript and/or a typescript that was sent to a print shop where it would be prepared for publication and printed. In order to show emphasis, to highlight the title of a book, to refer to a word itself as a word, or to indicate a foreign word or phrase, the writer would use underlining in the typescript, which would signal the typesetter at the print shop to use italic font for those words.

• Even today, perhaps the simplest way to call attention to an otherwise nemphatic word or phrase is to underline or italicize it.
• Flaherty is the new committee chair, not Buckley.
• This mission is extremely important for our future: we must not fail!

Because writers using computers today have access to a wide variety of fonts and textual effects, they are no longer limited to underlining to show emphasis. Still, especially for academic writing, italics or underlining is the preferred way to emphasize words or phrases when necessary. Writers usually choose one or the other method and use it consistently throughout an individual essay.

In the final, published version of an article or book, italics are usually used. Writers in academic discourses and students learning to write academic papers are expected to express emphasis primarily through words themselves; overuse of various emphatic devices like changes of font face and size, boldface, all-capitals, and so on in the text of an essay creates the impression of a writer relying on flashy effects instead of clear and precise writing to make a point.

Boldface is also used, especially outside of academia, to show emphasis as well as to highlight items in a list, as in the following examples.

The picture that television commercials portray of the American home is far from realistic.

The following three topics will be covered:

1: brief description of topic 1

2: brief description of topic 2

3: brief description of topic 3

Some writers use ALL-CAPITAL letters for emphasis, but they are usually unnecessary and can cause writing to appear cluttered and loud. In email correspondence, the use of all-caps throughout a message can create the unintended impression of shouting and is therefore discouraged.

Conciseness

The goal of concise writing is to use the most effective words. Concise writing does not always have the fewest words, but it always uses the strongest ones. Writers often fill sentences with weak or unnecessary words that can be deleted or replaced. Words and phrases should be deliberately chosen for the work they are doing. Like bad employees, words that don't accomplish enough should be fired. When only the most effective words remain, writing will be far more concise and readable.

This resource contains general conciseness tips followed by very specific strategies for pruning sentences.

1. Replace several vague words with more powerful and specific words. 

Often, writers use several small and ambiguous words to express a concept, wasting energy expressing ideas better relayed through fewer specific words. As a general rule, more specific words lead to more concise writing. Because of the variety of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, most things have a closely corresponding description. Brainstorming or searching a thesaurus can lead to the word best suited for a specific instance. Notice that the examples below actually convey more as they drop in word count.

• Wordy: The politician talked about several of the merits of after-school programs in his speech (14 words)
• Concise: The politician touted after-school programs in his speech. (8 words)
• Wordy: Suzie believed but could not confirm that Billy had feelings of affection for her. (14 words)
• Concise: Suzie assumed that Billy adored her. (6 words)
• Wordy: Our website has made available many of the things you can use for making a decision on the best dentist. (20 words)
• Concise: Our website presents criteria for determining the best dentist. (9 words)
• Wordy: Working as a pupil under a someone who develops photos was an experience that really helped me learn a lot. (20 words)
• Concise: Working as a photo technician's apprentice was an educational experience. (10 words)

2. Interrogate every word in a sentence

Check every word to make sure that it is providing something important and unique to a sentence. If words are dead weight, they can be deleted or replaced. Other sections in this handout cover this concept more specifically, but there are some general examples below containing sentences with words that could be cut.

Wordy: The teacher demonstrated some of the various ways and methods for cutting words from my essay that I had written for class. (22 words)

Concise: The teacher demonstrated methods for cutting words from my essay. (10 words)

Wordy: Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood formed a new band of musicians together in 1969, giving it the ironic name of Blind Faith because early speculation that was spreading everywhere about the band suggested that the new musical group would be good enough to rival the earlier bands that both men had been in, Cream and Traffic, which people had really liked and had been very popular. (66 words)

Concise: Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood formed a new band in 1969, ironically naming it Blind Faith because speculation suggested that the group would rival the musicians’ previous popular bands, Cream and Traffic. (32 words)

Wordy: Many have made the wise observation that when a stone is in motion rolling down a hill or incline that that moving stone is not as likely to be covered all over with the kind of thick green moss that grows on stationary unmoving things and becomes a nuisance and suggests that those things haven’t moved in a long time and probably won’t move any time soon. (67 words)

Concise: A rolling stone gathers no moss. (6 words)

3. Combine Sentences

Some information does not require a full sentence, and can easily be inserted into another sentence without losing any of its value. To get more strategies for sentence combining, see the handout on Sentence Variety.

Wordy: Ludwig's castles are an astounding marriage of beauty and madness. By his death, he had commissioned three castles. (18 words)

Concise: Ludwig's three castles are an astounding marriage of beauty and madness. (11 words)

Wordy: The supposed crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico aroused interest in extraterrestrial life. This crash is rumored to have occurred in 1947. (24 words)

Concise: The supposed 1947 crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico aroused interest in extraterrestrial life.

Developing an Outline

Four Main Components for Effective Outlines

Ideally, you should follow these 4 suggestions to create an effective outline. The examples are taken from the Sample Outline handout.

Parallelism - How do I accomplish this?

Each heading and subheading should preserve parallel structure. If the first heading is a noun, the second heading should be a noun. Example:

1.         Choose Desired Colleges

2.         Prepare Application

("Choose" and "Prepare" are both verbs.)

Coordination - How do I accomplish this?

All the information contained in Heading 1 should have the same significance as the information contained in Heading 2. The same goes for the subheadings (which should be less significant than the headings). Example: 

1.         Visit and evaluate college campuses

2.         Visit and evaluate college websites

Note important statistics

Look for interesting classes

(Campus and websites visits are equally significant, as are statistics and classes found on college websites.)

Subordination - How do I accomplish this?

The information in the headings should be more general, while the information in the subheadings should be more specific. Example:

Describe an influential person in your life

1. Favorite high school teacher
2. Grandparent

(A favorite teacher and grandparent are specific examples of influential people.)

Division - How do I accomplish this?

Each heading should be divided into 2 or more parts. Example:

1.         Compile resume

1.         List relevant coursework

2.         List work experience

3.         List volunteer experience

(The heading "Compile resume" is divided into 3 parts.)

Developing Strong Thesis Statements: The Thesis statement or main claim must be debatable

An argumentative or persuasive piece of writing must begin with a debatable thesis or claim. In other words, the thesis must be something that people could reasonably have differing opinions on. If your thesis is something that is generally agreed upon or accepted as fact then there is no reason to try to persuade people.

Example of a non-debatable thesis statement: Pollution is bad for the environment.

This thesis statement is not debatable. First, the word pollution means that something is bad or negative in some way. Further, all studies agree that pollution is a problem, they simply disagree on the impact it will have or the scope of the problem. No one could reasonably argue that pollution is good.

Example of a debatable thesis statement:

At least twenty-five percent of the federal budget should be spent on limiting pollution.

This is an example of a debatable thesis because reasonable people could disagree with it. Some people might think that this is how we should spend the nation's money. Others might feel that we should be spending more money on education. Still others could argue that corporations, not the government, should be paying to limit pollution.

Another example of a debatable thesis statement:

America's anti-pollution efforts should focus on privately owned cars.

In this example there is also room for disagreement between rational individuals. Some citizens might think focusing on recycling programs rather than private automobiles is the most effective strategy.

The thesis needs to be narrow:

Although the scope of your paper might seem overwhelming at the start, generally the narrower the thesis the more effective your argument will be. Your thesis or claim must be supported by evidence. The broader your claim is, the more evidence you will need to convince readers that your position is right.

Example of a thesis that is too broad: Drug use is detrimental to society.

There are several reasons this statement is too broad to argue. First, what is included in the category "drugs"? Is the author talking about illegal drug use, recreational drug use (which might include alcohol and cigarettes), or all uses of medication in general? Second, in what ways are drugs detrimental? Is drug use causing deaths (and is the author equating deaths from overdoses and deaths from drug related violence)? Is drug use changing the moral climate or causing the economy to decline? Finally, what does the author mean by "society"? Is the author referring only to America or to the global population? Does the author make any distinction between the effects on children and adults? There are just too many questions that the claim leaves open. The author could not cover all of the topics listed above, yet the generality of the claim leaves all of these possibilities open to debate.

Example of a narrow or focused thesis:

• Illegal drug use is detrimental because it encourages gang violence.
• In this example the the topic of drugs has been narrowed down to illegal drugs and the detriment has been narrowed down to gang violence. This is a much more manageable topic.
• We could narrow each debatable thesis from the previous examples in the following way:

Narrowed debatable thesis 1:

At least twenty-five percent of the federal budget should be spent on helping upgrade business to clean technologies, researching renewable energy sources, and planting more trees in order to control or eliminate pollution.

This thesis narrows the scope of the argument by specifying not just the amount of money used but also how the money could actually help to control pollution.

Narrowed debatable thesis 2:

America's anti-pollution efforts should focus on privately owned cars because it would allow most citizens to contribute to national efforts and care about the outcome.

This thesis narrows the scope of the argument by specifying not just what the focus of a national anti-pollution campaign should be but also why this is the appropriate focus.

Qualifiers such as "typically," "generally," "usually," or "on average" also help to limit the scope of your claim by allowing for the almost inevitable exception to the rule.

Types of Claims

Claims typically fall into one of four categories. Thinking about how you want to approach your topic, in other words what type of claim you want to make, is one way to focus your thesis on one particular aspect of you broader topic.

Claims of fact or definition: These claims argue about what the definition of something is or whether something is a settled fact. Example:

What some people refer to as global warming is actually nothing more than normal, long-term cycles of climate change.

Claims of cause and effect: These claims argue that one person, thing, or event caused another thing or event to occur. Example:

The popularity of SUV's in America has caused pollution to increase.

Claims about value: These are claims made about what something is worth, whether we value it or not, how we would rate or categorize something. Example:

Global warming is the most pressing challenge facing the world today.

Claims about solutions or policies: These are claims that argue for or against a certain solution or policy approach to a problem. Example:

Instead of drilling for oil in Alaska we should be focusing on ways to reduce oil consumption, such as researching renewable energy sources.

Which type of claim is right for your argument? Which type of thesis or claim you use for your argument will depend on your position and knowledge on the topic, your audience, and the context of your paper. You might want to think about where you imagine your audience to be on this topic and pinpoint where you think the biggest difference in viewpoints might be. Even if you start with one type of claim you probably will be using several within the paper. Regardless of the type of claim you choose to utilize it is key to identify the controversy or debate you are addressing and to define your position early on in the paper!

Strategies for Variation

Adding sentence variety to prose can give it life and rhythm. Too many sentences with the same structure and length can grow monotonous for readers. Varying sentence style and structure can also reduce repetition and add emphasis. Long sentences work well for incorporating a lot of information, and short sentences can often maximize crucial points. These general tips may help add variety to similar sentences.

Vary the rhythm by alternating short and long sentences.

Several sentences of the same length can make for bland writing. To enliven paragraphs, write sentences of different lengths. This will also allow for effective emphasis.

Example: The Winslow family visited Canada and Alaska last summer to find some native American art. In Anchorage stores they found some excellent examples of soapstone carvings. But they couldn't find a dealer selling any of the woven wall hangings they wanted. They were very disappointed when they left Anchorage empty-handed.

Revision: The Winslow family visited Canada and Alaska last summer to find some native American art, such as soapstone carvings and wall hangings. Anchorage stores had many soapstone items available. Still, they were disappointed to learn that wall hangings, which they had especially wanted, were difficult to find. Sadly, they left empty-handed.

Example: Many really good blues guitarists have all had the last name King. They have been named Freddie King and Albert King and B.B. King. The name King must make a bluesman a really good bluesman. The bluesmen named King have all been very talented and good guitar players. The claim that a name can make a guitarist good may not be that far fetched.

Revision: What makes a good bluesman? Maybe, just maybe, it's all in a stately name. B.B. King. Freddie King. Albert King. It's no coincidence that they're the royalty of their genre. When their fingers dance like court jesters, their guitars gleam like scepters, and their voices bellow like regal trumpets, they seem almost like nobility. Hearing their music is like walking into the throne room. They really are kings.

2. Vary sentence openings.  

If too many sentences start with the same word, especially "The," "It," "This," or "I," prose can grow tedious for readers, so changing opening words and phrases can be refreshing. Below are alternative openings for a fairly standard sentence. Notice that different beginnings can alter not only the structure but also the emphasis of the sentence. They may also require rephrasing in sentences before or after this one, meaning that one change could lead to an abundance of sentence variety.

Example: The biggest coincidence that day happened when David and I ended up sitting next to each other at the Super Bowl.

Possible Revisions:

Coincidentally, David and I ended up sitting right next to each other at the Super Bowl.

In an amazing coincidence, David and I ended up sitting next to each other at the Super Bowl.

Sitting next to David at the Super Bowl was a tremendous coincidence.

But the biggest coincidence that day happened when David and I ended up sitting next to each other at the Super Bowl.

When I sat down at the Super Bowl, I realized that, by sheer coincidence, I was directly next to David.

By sheer coincidence, I ended up sitting directly next to David at the Super Bowl.

With over 50,000 fans at the Super Bowl, it took an incredible coincidence for me to end up sitting right next to David.

What are the odds that I would have ended up sitting right next to David at the Super Bowl?

David and I, without any prior planning, ended up sitting right next to each other at the Super Bowl.

Without any prior planning, David and I ended up sitting right next to each other at the Super Bowl.

At the crowded Super Bowl, packed with 50,000 screaming fans, David and I ended up sitting right next to each other by sheer coincidence.

Though I hadn't made any advance arrangements with David, we ended up sitting right next to each other at the Super Bowl.

Many amazing coincidences occurred that day, but nothing topped sitting right next to David at the Super Bowl.

Unbelievable, I know, but David and I ended up sitting right next to each other at the Super Bowl.

Guided by some bizarre coincidence, David and I ended up sitting right next to each other at the Super Bowl.

The Rhetorical Situation

Invention: Starting the Writing Process

Writing takes time

Find out when is the assignment due and devise a plan of action. This may seem obvious and irrelevant to the writing process, but it's not. Writing is a process, not merely a product. Even the best professional writers don't just sit down at a computer, write, and call it a day. The quality of your writing will reflect the time and forethought you put into the assignment. Plan ahead for the assignment by doing pre-writing: this will allow you to be more productive and organized when you sit down to write. Also, schedule several blocks of time to devote to your writing; then, you can walk away from it for a while and come back later to make changes and revisions with a fresh mind.

Use the rhetorical elements as a guide to think through your writing

Thinking about your assignment in terms of the rhetorical situation can help guide you in the beginning of the writing process. Topic, audience, genre, style, opportunity, research, the writer, and purpose are just a few elements that make up the rhetorical situation.

Topic and audience are often very intertwined and work to inform each other. Start with a broad view of your topic such as skateboarding, pollution, or the novel Jane Eyre and then try to focus or refine your topic into a concise thesis statement by thinking about your audience. Here are some questions you can ask yourself about audience:

• Who is the audience for your writing?
• Do you think your audience is interested in the topic? Why or why not?
• Why should your audience be interested in this topic?
• What does your audience already know about this topic?
• What does your audience need to know about this topic?
• What experiences has your audience had that would influence them on this topic?
• What do you hope the audience will gain from your text?

For example, imagine that your broad topic is dorm food. Who is your audience? You could be writing to current students, prospective students, parents of students, university administrators, or nutrition experts among others. Each of these groups would have different experiences with and interests in the topic of dorm food. While students might be more concerned with the taste of the food or the hours food is available parents might be more concerned with the price.

You can also think about opportunity as a way to refine or focus your topic by asking yourself what current events make your topic relevant at this moment. For example, you could connect the nutritional value of dorm food to the current debate about the obesity epidemic or you could connect the price value of dorm food to the rising cost of a college education overall.

Keep in mind the purpose of the writing assignment.

• Writing can have many different purposes. Here are just a few examples:
• Summarizing: Presenting the main points or essence of another text in a condensed form
• Arguing/Persuading: Expressing a viewpoint on an issue or topic in an effort to convince others that your viewpoint is correct
• Narrating: Telling a story or giving an account of events
• Evaluating: Examining something in order to determine its value or worth based on a set of criteria.
• Analyzing: Breaking a topic down into its component parts in order to examine the relationships between the parts.
• Responding: Writing that is in a direct dialogue with another text.
• Examining/Investigating: Systematically questioning a topic to discover or uncover facts that are not widely known or accepted, in a way that strives to be as neutral and objective as possible.
• Observing: Helping the reader see and understand a person, place, object, image or event that you have directly watched or experienced through detailed sensory descriptions. You could be observing your dorm cafeteria to see what types of food students are actually eating, you could be evaluating the quality of the food based on freshness and quantity, or you could be narrating a story about how you gained fifteen pounds your first year at college.

You may need to use several of these writing strategies within your paper.

For example you could summarize federal nutrition guidelines, evaluate whether the food being served at the dorm fits those guidelines, and then argue that changes should be made in the menus to better fit those guidelines.

Pre-writing strategies

Once you have thesis statement just start writing! Don't feel constrained by format issues. Don't worry about spelling, grammar, or writing in complete sentences. Brainstorm and write down everything you can think of that might relate to the thesis and then reread and evaluate the ideas you generated. It's easier to cut out bad ideas than to only think of good ones. Once you have a handful of useful ways to approach thesis you can use a basic outline structure to begin to think about organization. Remember to be flexible; this is just a way to get you writing. If better ideas occur to you as you're writing, don't be afraid to refine your original ideas.

Transitions and Transitional Devices

Writing Transitions

Good transitions can connect paragraphs and turn disconnected writing into a unified whole. Instead of treating paragraphs as separate ideas, transitions can help readers understand how paragraphs work together, reference one another, and build to a larger point. The key to producing good transitions is highlighting connections between corresponding paragraphs. By referencing in one paragraph the relevant material from previous ones, writers can develop important points for their readers.

It is a good idea to continue one paragraph where another leaves off (instances where this is especially challenging may suggest that the paragraphs don't belong together at all.) Picking up key phrases from the previous paragraph and highlighting them in the next can create an obvious progression for readers. Many times, it only takes a few words to draw these connections. Instead of writing transitions that could connect any paragraph to any other paragraph, write a transition that could only connect one specific paragraph to another specific paragraph.

Example: Overall, Management Systems International has logged increased sales in every sector, leading to a significant rise in third-quarter profits.

Another important thing to note is that the corporation had expanded its international influence.

Revision: Overall, Management Systems International has logged increased sales in every sector, leading to a significant rise in third-quarter profits.

These impressive profits are largely due to the corporation's expanded international influence.

Example: Fearing for the loss of Danish lands, Christian IV signed the Treaty of Lubeck, effectively ending the Danish phase of the 30 Years War.

But then something else significant happened. The Swedish intervention began.

Revision: Fearing for the loss of more Danish lands, Christian IV signed the Treaty of Lubeck, effectively ending the Danish phase of the 30 Years War.

Shortly after Danish forces withdrew, the Swedish intervention began.

Example: Amy Tan became a famous author after her novel, The Joy Luck Club, skyrocketed up the bestseller list.

There are other things to note about Tan as well. Amy Tan also participates in the satirical garage band the Rock Bottom Remainders with Stephen King and Dave Barry.

Revision: Amy Tan became a famous author after her novel, The Joy Luck Club, skyrocketed up the bestseller list.

Though her fiction is well known, her work with the satirical garage band the Rock Bottom Remainders receives far less publicity.

Writing Numbers

Although usage varies, most people spell out numbers that can be expressed in one or two words and use figures for other numbers:

Words

over two pounds

six million dollars

after thirty-one years

eighty-three people

Figures

after 126 days

only $31.50

6,381 bushels

4.78 liters

Here are some examples of specific situations.

Days and Years

December 12, 1965 or 12 December 1965

A.D. 1066

in 1900

in 1971-72 or in 1971-1972

the eighties, the twentieth century

the 1980's or the 1980s

Time of Day

8:00 A.M. (or) a.m. (or) eight o'clock in the morning

4:30 P.M. (or) p.m. (or) half-past four in the afternoon

Addresses

16 Tenth Street

350 West 114 Street

Identification Numbers

Room 8

Channel 18

Interstate 65

Henry VIII

Page and Division of Books and Plays

page 30

chapter 6

in act 3, scene 2 (or) in Act III, Scene ii

Decimals and Percentages

a 2.7 average

13 1/4 percent

.037 metric ton

Large Round Numbers

four billion dollars (or) $4 billion

16,500,000 (or) 16.5 million

Notes on Usage

Repeat numbers in legal or commercial writing.

The bill will not exceed one hundred (100) dollars.

Numbers in series and statistics should be consistent.

two apples, six oranges, and three bananas

NOT: two apples, 6 oranges, and 3 bananas

115 feet by 90 feet (or) 115' x 90'

scores of 25-6 (or) scores of 25 to 6

The vote was 9 in favor and 5 opposed

Write out numbers beginning sentences.

Six percent of the group failed.

NOT: 6% of the group failed.

Use a combination of figures and words for numbers when such a combination will keep your writing clear.

Unclear: The club celebrated the birthdays of 6 90-year-olds who were born in the city. (may cause the reader to read '690' as one number.)

Clearer: The club celebrated the birthdays of six 90-year-olds who were born in the city.

5. How to write paragraphs

This article discusses how to conceive and develop paragraphs that are building blocks of any article. The article outlines the significance of coherence, unity, logic and continuity that are intrinsic to any feature article. The article helps the writer in starting a Para, and when to end it. The article features researching methods and tips to bring conciseness and emphasis of subject.

 Paragraph      Coherence          Unity       Conciseness      emphasis

 Interrogate            Variation

 What is a paragraph?

A paragraph is a collection of related sentences dealing with a single topic. Learning to write good paragraphs will help you as a writer stay on track during your drafting and revision stages. Good paragraphing also greatly assists your readers in following a piece of writing. You can have fantastic ideas, but if those ideas aren't presented in an organized fashion, you will lose your readers (and fail to achieve your goals in writing).

The Basic Rule: Keep One Idea to One Paragraph

The basic rule of thumb with paragraphing is to keep one idea to one paragraph. If you begin to transition into a new idea, it belongs in a new paragraph. There are some simple ways to tell if you are on the same topic or a new one. You can have one idea and several bits of supporting evidence within a single paragraph. You can also have several points in a single paragraph as long as they relate to the overall topic of the paragraph. If the single points start to get long, then perhaps elaborating on each of them and placing them in their own paragraphs is the route to go.

Elements of a Paragraph

To be as effective as possible, a paragraph should contain each of the following: Unity, Coherence, A Topic Sentence, and Adequate Development. As you will see, all of these traits overlap. Using and adapting them to your individual purposes will help you construct effective paragraphs.

Unity

The entire paragraph should concern itself with a single focus. If it begins with a one focus or major point of discussion, it should not end with another or wander within different ideas.

Coherence

Coherence is the trait that makes the paragraph easily understandable to a reader. You can help create coherence in your paragraphs by creating logical bridges and verbal bridges.

Logical bridges

• The same idea of a topic is carried over from sentence to sentence
• Successive sentences can be constructed in parallel form Verbal bridges
• Key words can be repeated in several sentences
• Synonymous words can be repeated in several sentences
• Pronouns can refer to nouns in previous sentences
• Transition words can be used to link ideas from different sentences

A topic sentence

A topic sentence is a sentence that indicates in a general way what idea or thesis the paragraph is going to deal with. Although not all paragraphs have clear-cut topic sentences, and despite the fact that topic sentences can occur anywhere in the paragraph (as the first sentence, the last sentence, or somewhere in the middle), an easy way to make sure your reader understands the topic of the paragraph is to put your topic sentence near the beginning of the paragraph. (This is a good general rule for less experienced writers, although it is not the only way to do it). Regardless of whether you include an explicit topic sentence or not, you should be able to easily summarize what the paragraph is about.

Adequate development

The topic (which is introduced by the topic sentence) should be discussed fully and adequately. Again, this varies from paragraph to paragraph, depending on the author's purpose, but writers should beware of paragraphs that only have two or three sentences. It's a pretty good bet that the paragraph is not fully developed if it is that short.

Some methods to make sure your paragraph is well-developed:

• Use examples and illustrations
• Cite data (facts, statistics, evidence, details, and others)
• Examine testimony (what other people say such as quotes and paraphrases)
• Use an anecdote or story
• Define terms in the paragraph
• Compare and contrast
• Evaluate causes and reasons
• Examine effects and consequences
• Analyze the topic
• Describe the topic
• Offer a chronology of an event (time segments)
• How do I know when to start a new paragraph?

You should start a new paragraph when:

• When you begin a new idea or point. New ideas should always start in new paragraphs. If you have an extended idea that spans multiple paragraphs, each new point within that idea should have its own paragraph.
• To contrast information or ideas. Separate paragraphs can serve to contrast sides in a debate, different points in an argument, or any other difference.
• When your readers need a pause. Breaks in paragraphs function as a short "break" for your readers—adding these in will help your writing more readable. You would create a break if the paragraph becomes too long or the material is complex.  
• When you are ending your introduction or starting your conclusion. Your introductory and concluding material should always be in a new paragraph. Many introductions and conclusions have multiple paragraphs depending on their content, length, and the writer's purpose.

Transitions and Signposts
 

Two very important elements of paragraphing are signposts and transitions. Signposts are internal aids to assist readers; they usually consist of several sentences or a paragraph outlining what the article has covered and where the article will be going.

Transitions are usually one or several sentences that "transition" from one idea to the next. Transitions can be used at the end of most paragraphs to help the paragraphs flow one into the next.

Overview and Contradictions 

Research-based writing in American institutions, both educational and corporate, is filled with rules that writers, particularly beginners, aren't aware of or don't know how to follow. Many of these rules have to do with research and proper citation. Gaining a familiarity of these rules, however, is critically important, as inadvertent mistakes can lead to charges of plagiarism, which is the uncredited use (both intentional and unintentional) of somebody else's words or ideas.

While some cultures may not insist so heavily on documenting sources of words, ideas, images, sounds, etc., American culture does. A charge of plagiarism can have severe consequences, including expulsion from a university or loss of a job, not to mention a writer's loss of credibility and professional standing.

 What is a paragraph?

 A paragraph is a collection of related sentences dealing with a single topic.

The Basic Rule: Keep One Idea to One Paragraph

The basic rule of thumb with paragraphing is to keep one idea to one paragraph. If you begin to transition into a new idea, it belongs in a new paragraph.

If the single points start to get long, then perhaps elaborating on each of them and placing them in their own paragraphs is the route to go.

Elements of a Paragraph 

To be as effective as possible, a paragraph should contain each of the following: Unity, Coherence, A Topic Sentence, and Adequate Development.

Logical bridges 

• The same idea of a topic is carried over from sentence to sentence
• Successive sentences can be constructed in parallel form Verbal bridges
• Key words can be repeated in several sentences
• Synonymous words can be repeated in several sentences
• Pronouns can refer to nouns in previous sentences
• Transition words can be used to link ideas from different sentences

 Here are some methods to make sure your paragraph is well-developed:

• Use examples and illustrations
• Cite data (facts, statistics, evidence, details, and others)
• Examine testimony (what other people say such as quotes and paraphrases)
• Use an anecdote or story
• Define terms in the paragraph
• Compare and contrast
• Evaluate causes and reasons
• Examine effects and consequences
• Analyze the topic
• Describe the topic
• Offer a chronology of an event (time segments)

How do I know when to start a new paragraph? 

You should start a new paragraph when:

• When you begin a new idea or point. 
• To contrast information or ideas
• When your readers need a pause
• When you are ending your introduction or starting your conclusion

Two very important elements of paragraphing are signposts and transitions.

Attack of the Zombie Copy              

The article provides insights in to present day content writing , the way meaningless sentences  and paras and phraseology being used in content writing in internet and refers them as Zombie,  lifeless sentences without personality,  without memory, not even the ability to speak. Walking dead.

You’ve seen them around the web, these zombie sentences. They’re not hard to recognize: syntax slack and drooling, clauses empty of everything but a terrible hunger for human brains:

Leveraging world class infrastructure strengths, mature quality processes and industry benchmarked people management practices…

Findings are recorded in a carefully architected summary that crystallizes the intent of the nation to increase its innovation capacity in a variety of modern economic scenarios…

Indigenous and proven career management tools coupled with a comprehensive series of integrated initiatives have been evolved, to ensure that employees continue to sustain a high performance culture, while recruitment and selection is based on necessary competencies…It’s a partnering-with-partners strategy…

Taken from life

These reports, incredible as they may seem, are not the results of mass hysteria. Every one of the preceding examples was taken from a live, public website. Tragically, the corruption has spread even beyond the vasty deep of the internet: the back of the milk carton in my refrigerator reads: “Few beverages can beat milk in terms of a total nutrition package.”

As you can see, the scourge is upon us, and we must, every one of us, be prepared to fight. Prominent undead expert Dr. Herbert West, of Miskatonic University, suggests the following course of action if you’re attacked by zombie content:

• Kill the modifiers. This is machete work, so wrap a bandanna around your face and grab some shop goggles. No reader is going to believe that your process is innovative or your product is world-class just because you say so, so kill those adjectives. Don’t feel sorry for them. They have no feelings.
• Determine what manner of monster you’re dealing with. Once you’ve cleared the modifiers away, you’ll be able to get a better idea of the real shape of what’s underneath. If you can paraphrase the revealed sentence in a simpler way, the paraphrase can guide you to a new, clearer version.
• Hit ’em in the head, right between the eyes. Once the sentences’ underlying form has been revealed, you’ll be able to start looking at the overall health of paragraphs and pages. You may find that whacking the modifiers and simplifying the sentences will reveal a mushy glop of circular logic and nonsense; if so, it’s time to deliver a merciful death. If, on the other hand, your copy is only mostly dead, you can revive it by excising meaningless or redundant passages and then patching up the remainder with transitions and clarifications.

Let’s apply this process to Patient #226, currently strapped to a gurney in the hall and snapping at the nurses. (Anonymity shall of course be preserved to maintain patient confidentiality. Even zombies have rights.)

Incorporating our corporate culture into our business processes and customer needs, we continue to leverage our exceptional and effective work practices, improve operational effectiveness to meet business objectives and create win-win situations for our employees and shareholders.

Clear the airways
 

First, time to strip out those modifiers to see what we’re trying to say. When we can’t eliminate them, we’ll flip them around to clarify meaning. Thus, “operational effectiveness” becomes, “the effectiveness of our operations.” We can also replace the worst buzzwords with meaningful terms.

Incorporating the culture of our business into our processes and the needs of our customers, we continue to use our effective work practices, improve the effectiveness of our operations to meet objectives and create mutually satisfying situations for our employees and shareholders.

Expose the brain

And now it’s time for the heavy work—paraphrasing in conversational English, one idea at a time. Note: the company behind this copy isn’t a consultancy, so we can assume they’re speaking only of their own practices, culture, etc.

Our culture influences our business processes. (Vague, but intelligible.)

Our culture influences the needs of our customers. (Bizarre and nonsensical.)

We work in effective ways. (So vague as to be useless.)

We get better at what we do in order to meet our goals. (Inane.)

We create mutually satisfying situations for our employees and shareholders. (So euphemistic it sounds like a massage parlor ad.)

And there you have it. Don’t expect it to tango; it has a broken back. Time to destroy it and start over.

Oh my God! They’re using adverbs!

Let’s try again with a more docile patient—also, unfortunately, drawn from an actual website.

Every executive knows that constantly delivering superior customer value is an imperative to veritably creating shareholder value.

Veritably!

In this sad case, we find prolapsed adverbs, suppurating adjectives, and a nasty case of the fluff. This one’s short, so we can do the trim and paraphrase in one pass, but our job is made trickier by the fact that this example uses the extremely vague term “value” not once, but twice. We don’t have time for niceties—there’s a strange shuffling sound coming from the hall—so we’ll make do with our best guess about what they mean.

If you want to make lots of money, you have to please your customers more than the other guy does.

Well land sakes; I do believe there’s a real idea under all that dirt. Send this one off to the recovery room; it’s not particularly original, but it might yet pull through.

There, pretty as a picture

Even good writers can produce zombie copy under the pressure of impossible deadlines—and sometimes you arrive in a town only after it’s been taken over by the living dead. In other cases, the zombification progresses so gradually that you don’t realize it’s happening until your “About Us” page begins to smell bad and tries to bite your face.

Nevertheless, prevention is always easier than cure, especially when the cure involves a hand grenade. You can keep copy from turning zombie by starting with a clear idea of exactly what you want to say. It’s tempting to just start writing, but this approach can leave your pages vulnerable to zombification, because it’s easier to sound like you’re making sense than to actually make sense. Outlines can serve as an effective vaccine against living death.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go deal with my zombie milk.

Why Grammar is Important in Writing

Vocabulary and grammar: Critical content for Critical thinking             

This article proposes and argues a different perspective and stresses the need for grammar and language skills and underlines it as a prerequisite to the fulfillment of mastering superior goals in language arts. The article also discusses the elements of creative writing such as brevity, precision, plain talk, tone, meter and poetics. 

Note: This article has been included to highlight different perspectives in creative writing.

The status of direct instruction in grammar and vocabulary has fallen into decline during an era of whole-language philosophy that rejects teaching "skills in isolation." Grammar has been misunderstood and stereotyped as tedious, remedial, unteachable, and useless. These areas of knowledge must be restored to their necessary place in language arts programs for gifted children, who need educated vocabularies and grammar competence of exceptional quality. 

Although the direct instruction of vocabulary and grammar is sometimes missing in programs for gifted children, these rigorous content areas are prerequisite to the highest fulfillment of curricular goals in language arts. The dictum that "skills should not be taught in isolation" should be modified when the result is that critical knowledge, such as a strong foundation in Latin etymology, will not be taught at all. If gifted secondary students are to think clearly about language or in the medium of language, high-level intellectual components must be in place. 

These components include an array of operations sometimes referred to as critical thinking or higher order thinking. These thinking skills, however, fail unless they deploy a necessary system of right word use and right grammar, which are also high forms of mental process. In fact, once internalized, the precise intellectual implementation of vocabulary and grammar is of such complexity that it might be more accurate to say that the other thinking skills depend from, rather than rest on, mastery of vocabulary and grammar.

Van Tassel-Baska (1988) has written that gifted students need an understanding of syntactic structure, vocabulary development, analogies and etymology; and an appreciation of semantics, linguistics, and language history. According to VanTassel-Baska, "A sound verbal arts program for the gifted needs to include a strong language study element that allows students to understand the English language from a variety of perspectives". Gifted programs typically emphasize higher order operations, but when these operations are conducted with wrong words or grammar, the result is not sound. Reasoning operations using wrong words misdirect thought to wrong phenomena indicated by the wrong words, and incondite grammar structures create false logical relationships that misrepresent the relationships intended.

It could be said that complete higher order thinking is a collection of interacting systems: a diction system, a grammar system, a system of logic, a system of cognitive operations, and others beyond the scope of this article. (Mental operations in the affective domain, for example, are possibly stereotyped as nonintellectual, but appropriate affective reactions to other intellectual phenomena are fundamental indications of deep comprehension.)

Vocabulary  

High-level word use of the kind necessary in critical thinking or creative writing involves more than the common task of finding a usable word that has approximately the right meaning. Certainly, this is part of what is involved, but a closer look at the behavior of words in thought reveals much more subtle and complex roles for words.

Reading as Word Use 

One form of word use that may escape notice is the way the intelligence uses words during reading. Many discussions of word use center on the generation of words by our internal thought, but, in fact, the encounter with individual words that takes place during reading is also a form of word use, and an interesting one.

In our encounter with printed words, we respond in several ways. One response is word recognition, ranging from the subconscious recognition of a well-known word, to the appreciation of a well-known word freshly used ("Shut up, he explained"), to the appreciative recognition of a word understood, but rarely encountered. A second response is non recognition, ranging from a barely perceptible awareness of an unknown word we skip over, to the full curiosity stop we make when we focus on the unknown word, work out its pronunciation, examine it for elements of familiarity or kinship with known words, or even pursue the word into the dictionary, to the study of its meanings and etymology. At the extreme, this can extend to looking up the word in the lengthy detail of the Oxford English Dictionary, which contains an example of each word's use from every century of English language history.

These latter responses to words known and unknown are clearly of a high order. Educators can effectively model the curiosity stops and the extended acquainting that advanced lovers of words enjoy, teaching gifted students to proceed past the superficial level of word use when reading.

Elements and Factors Involved in Word Choice  

Advanced word choice can employ many criteria, from accuracy, to tone, to aesthetics. These options are, in turn, rendered moot in the face of a thin, poorly understood mental word bank. Among the decisive reasons for selecting one word over another are:

1. Precision. Azure over the less specific blue.

2. Eliminating modification. A preference for writing with nouns and verbs, rather than resorting to modifiers to enhance weak nouns or verbs. Colossus over giant statue.

3. Plain talk. Strunk and White's (1999) preference in their classic style manual, The Elements of Style, for a good, ordinary word over an erudite one. Abundance over plethora, cowlike over bovine.

4. Tone. Agreement in tone between word and content. Academic diction in journals, slang in story dialogue.

4. Brevity. Fewer syllables for impact. Fast over lightening quick.

5. Meter. Choosing a word that supports the rhythm of the sentence. Ending a sentence with a syllable that is stressed.

6. Poetics. Word sound that enhances meaning. Abraham Lincoln's o's and u's in "Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent..." 

Instructing Vocabulary 

In order to make choices among words, students must internalize a bank of words that provides choices; students must be, in the primary meaning, instructed. The acquisition of such a vocabulary base can (and must) occur through reading, especially in the classics that have strong vocabularies, through a deliberate vocabulary program of well-selected words, through the study of the Latin and Greek foundation of English, and through the study of foreign languages that have strong English cognate connections, such as Latin and Spanish (Thompson & Thompson, 1996,).

The popular strategy of building vocabulary exclusively through reading literature contains pitfalls, including the weak vocabulary of some of the most emphasized titles in American education, including John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

The entire advanced vocabulary in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, one of the most frequently taught titles in American schools, consists only of juncture, recumbent, morose, imperious, dejection, grizzled, mollify, pugnacious, plaintive, apprehension, profound, complacent, derision, subside, reprehensible, bemused, wry, aloof avert, crestfallen, writhe, and retort. 

The vocabulary of The Catcher in the Rye, a feature curriculum title, is even weaker: ostracize, incognito, nonchalance, atheist, bourgeois, putrid, inane, pedagogue, harrowing, stenographer, reciprocates, and affect. 

The Old Man and the Sea, a prominent Hemingway title, also fails to build student vocabularies; its contributions are benevolence, thwart, bodega, oakum, phosphorescence, congregate, fathom, plummet, effectual, iridescent, gelatinous, filament, carapace, myriad, annul, tentative, pectoral, gunwale, skiff, coagulate, rigor mortis, undulate, cumulus, cirrus, rapier, burnish, sustenance, placid, malignant, juncture, and perceptible.

Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, has a vocabulary base of nearly 300 advanced word uses. Pride and Prejudice has over 270. Uncle Tom's Cabin has over 700, and even The Wind in the Willows has nearly 200 strong word uses (Thompson, 2000).

From a vocabulary standpoint, all classics are not equal. School systems that focus student reading on colloquial American titles should not expect to increase students' vocabulary banks, It is clear that reading literature will not increase student vocabulary unless the selected literature contains words unknown to the students when they begin. There must, in other words, be a degree of vocabulary discomfort for students. This challenge is particularly necessary for gifted children whose vocabularies may be years above what the class is reading. Clark (1988) has noted that: 

Often gifted children will come to school reading significantly beyond their age peers. Care must be taken... that the scope of material presented is difficult enough to tap the extent of this growth. "Top" reading groups may still be far below the gifted reader's capability. (p. 337)

Classic Words

An examination of the vocabulary of classic American and British literature discloses a core of vocabulary that is consistently found in English language literature. Thompson (1998) has identified over 100 words that are found frequently in the classics, including countenance, profound, serene, manifest, languor, acute, prodigious, grotesque, sublime, allude, exquisite, condescend, clamor, singular, placid, incredulous, tremulous, odious, visage, venerate, amiable, vivid, sagacity, vulgar, melancholy, abate, undulate, traverse, repose, wistful, palpable, pallor, and superfluous. 

As an example of the prevalence of such words, the adjective odious can be found in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Henry James' The American, George Eliot's Silas Marner, Frederick Douglass' The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, William Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, John Milton's Paradise Lost, William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, A Midsummer N ight's Dream, and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (Thompson, 2000). The publication dates of these works range from 1594 to 1977, a span of 383 years, and they are, of course, only a small fraction of the important books that use the word odious.

One clear strategy for building an effective vocabulary bank is to concentrate on words that have high profiles in strong literature. This direct word study will have the concomitant effect of making it easier for students to read strong literature, which will then continue to reinforce and supplement the vocabulary the students have learned.

The Latin and Greek Base  

As Parker (1989), Van Tassel-Baska (1988), and Thompson (1990) have noted, a second direct strategy for building an advanced vocabulary bank is to learn the Latin and Greek heritage that underlies English diction. Students who have learned several hundred of the most common Latin and Greek stems in English will have an inestimable advantage. Advantages include:

1. Efficiency. Each stem students learn will be found in dozens or even hundreds of words. To know that pre means before is to know, in an almost effortless way, part of the meaning of previous, preordained, precedent, precognition, and dozens of other words. The inter-combinations of stems within words magnifies the learning effect; learning several hundred stems allows students to understand the meanings of thousands of words. Parker noted that, "One of the most efficient ways in which students can be taught to build broad and effective vocabularies is through the study of etymology--or the origins of words" (Parker, p. 198).  
3. A sense of history. Students who perceive the ancient origins of their own words enjoy an enhanced appreciation of cultural history that changes their sense of themselves and their society. 
4. Comfort with big words. Students who know the meanings of dozens or hundreds of stems have a different experience when they encounter a word like infralapsarianism or supererogatory. The consternation or bafflement they might have felt is ameliorated by the recognition of familiar elements such as infra, lapse, super, rogat, and when the student learns that supererogatory is an adjective referring to someone doing more than what is asked of him, the word makes sense because super means over, and rogat means ask.  
5. An enhanced awareness of the world. To a surprising degree, there are words for things we have never noticed. Once, for example, someone learns the word invidious, the striking frequency of invidious praise becomes obvious. Since the Latinate diction of higher learning contains a great number of extraordinary words that we do not often encounter, even in classic novels, it is also effective in calling our attention to things we never saw until we learned the words for them. 
6. Scientific and technical language. The vocabularies of science,         mathematics, technology, and numerous professions such as law are constructed from Latin and Greek elements. Students who have a solid base of Latin and Greek stems will feel comfortable in the familiar linguistic environment of these contexts.
7. Spelling. For thousands of words, the simple secret to their spelling is that they are simple combinations of two or three stems in a row. If we insert a slash to indicate separation of stems, we see that words such as circum/vent, omni/potent, meso/morph, pyro/phobia, acro/nym, xeno/phobia, osteo/cyte, circum/spect, mega/lith, equi/nox, matri/cide, pseudo/pod, ortho/dox, sacro/sanct, and biblio/phile are simply two stems in a row--easy spelling for any student familiar with the stems
8. The inner poetry of words. A primary element in the appreciation of words is the inner life of words, something that is not visible in dictionary definitions. For thousands of words, the Latin or Greek etymology reveals surprising imagery that can make even familiar words more meaningful. The word respect, for example, contains the stems re (again) and spect (look). To respect others often involves a moment when we are looking again at them, seeing something in them that we never suspected was there. To be circumspect is to be cautious, but the internal imagery shows the cautious person looking (spect) around (circum).
9. Test preparation. Many achievement tests contain vocabulary sections that contain Latin-based words at their higher levels of challenge. The vocabulary questions of the SAT, for example, are organized by degree of difficulty, with the last, most difficult questions showing a concentration of Latin-based words such as supercilious.
10. Clearly, there are numerous convincing reasons for including a rigorous vocabulary-building program based on Latin and Greek stems. As Parker (1989) has noted:       

Today's gifted students may not have the command of English that they need, but their repertories can be greatly increased through the study of etymology. This then, should be one of the major focuses of the language program for gifted students. (p. 198)

Foreign Language  

The study of selected foreign languages pays strong benefits to English vocabulary. According to VanTassel-Baska (1998); "The programs of study for the English language will be augmented immensely by a concurrent foreign language study program" (p. 457).

Thompson and Thompson (1996) have written that:

One of the most obvious benefits of studying the traditional foreign languages ... is the presence of cognates that strengthen the student's vocabulary in the native language. ... Frequently a word learned in the foreign language, such as the Spanish word for tear, lagrima, will have a cognate in English that is erudite or unfamiliar to the student: lachrymose. (p. 179)

Students will develop an ordinary repertoire of words through the activities of ordinary life, but these experiences will not expand vocabulary beyond the ordinary language limits encountered in television and popular culture. In order to build the large word bank they need for higher order thinking about language, students need direct vocabulary strengthening through the study of Romance languages, systematic immersion in the language of classic literature, and a grounding in the Latin and Greek origins of English diction. With these components in place, students can think intelligently about whether one word is more appropriate than another, more specific than another, more consonant than another with the rhythm and orchestration of the sentence, or more resonant in meaning than another. They can bring an array of criteria--cognitive, affective, and aesthetic-to critical thinking about word choice.

Grammar: Critical Thinking about Thinking  

Grammar has been stereotyped as tedious, un-teachable, and remedial, unfit for emphasis in language arts programs for gifted children. In fact, grammar instruction is sometimes (needlessly) tedious, and Gallagher (1975) has urged educators to go beyond the "sterile presentation of grammar and syntax" (p. 198). Grammar, however, is sometimes successfully taught, has symmetries and mysteries enough to fascinate the dullest mind, and is an introspective and meta-cognitive way of thinking about our own ideas--perfect for the higher level ruminations advocated for gifted children. Like direct instruction in vocabulary, direct instruction in grammar has been deplored by whole-language dicta that forbid anything being taught in isolation.

Again, the injunction not to teach anything in isolation must be weighed against the probability that essential knowledge will not be taught at all. Many things, such as mathematics and Latin, are effectively taught in isolation, and it is difficult to grasp why crucial intellectual components such as grammar, with its system of interlocking subsystems, are harmed by focus.

This article is not the place for a detailed description of grammar. It is appropriate here, however, to highlight some of the factors that illustrate the high order and complexity of grammar and that integrate it with other reflections that we term critical thinking. This can be done with a few observations:

1. Sentences do not occur in nature. Sentences are cerebral in their genesis. In illuminating the simultaneous language systems (parts of speech, parts of sentence, phrases, clauses) that operate and interact in sentences, grammar constitutes thought in reflection on itself. This meta-cognitive purity gives grammar a supreme intellectuality matched by few forms of academic endeavor.
2. Grammar is elegant. Like many systems that appeal to gifted individuals, grammar is elegant. It seems unlikely that English grammar, with only eight kinds of words, two sides of a sentence, several phrases and a handful of clauses and sentence purposes, could support such vast constructions as the Holy Bible, or the plays of Shakespeare, or the novels of Jane Austen, or the Narrative of Frederick Douglass. And yet, eight kinds of words are enough: a little noun system (noun, pronoun, adjective), a little verb system (verb, adverb), some connections (conjunction, preposition), and an interjection. Using only eight parts to build both a subject and a predicate in each idea, English grammar produces the English language. 
3. The inner theme of grammar is simplicity, even unity. This is the subtext of the rules: Let all in the sentence be one, let it be clear and agree that the center of the sentence be seen. The works of the sentence must move in harmony, like the wheels of a clock. The subject and the verb must be in agreement, the pronoun and its antecedent must be in agreement, the tenses of the verbs in the sentences must be in agreement with each other. Everything being in order, the sentence can depict a truth. 
4. There are classically pure philosophical ideas in grammar, such as the difference between the one and the many. Is the sentence about one thing, or is it about many things? If it is about something that is one, then the subject must be singular and the verb must also be singular, and then both sides of the sentence will agree with each other and with the truth. If the sentence is about something that is many, then the subject must be plural, and the verb must be plural, and both sides will be in agreement with each other and with the truth. Perhaps this distinction sounds like logic chopping, but consider the difficulty that communication would face if our grammar did not have this divide, if every subject and verb pair were not forced into a perfect agreement about the number of the idea. 
5. Grammar provides the paradigm of human binary thinking and allows us to understand the meaning of clarity. Each English clause has two sides: the subject side and the predicate side. These two sides are present in every English sentence, by every person, in every country, from the time of Chaucer to the present. The reason that they are always present, like the nucleus of every cell, is that there is no choice. The structure of the sentence is foretold by the structure of its source: the mind. Each sentence, which is the same as saying each idea, has two sides: one side to specify the topic and the other side to assert something about that topic.
6. This binary structure of topic/assertion about-topic, which we call subject/predicate, must be there because it is how the intelligence processes communications. For this reason, the basic sentence structure of subject-side and predicate-side is also the paradigm for clarity itself: Notice that, in a sentence, we need these two sides, in a paragraph of sentences we need these two sides, and in an essay of paragraphs we still need these two sides. No matter what level of organization, we still need to know first what are we talking about and second what are we saying about it.
7. Grammar is a function of thought; the best structures of grammar are the natural structures of thought at their clearest. Thompson (1995) has noted that "through grammar we can view the delicate relationships which give form and pattern to the phenomena of the mind" (Thompson, p. i).
8. Punctuation, in turn, is a function of grammar. Oscar Wilde was once asked what he had done that day; he replied that he had spent the whole morning putting in a comma, and the whole afternoon taking it out. Students who learn to think critically and who want to convert their educations and skills into inspiring careers will need to punctuate what they write for their audiences; and, in order to do this, they will need to perceive clauses and phrases and complex sentences and appositives because it is these phenomena that are punctuated. Any attempt to learn tricks to punctuate without understanding grammar will misfire because it is specifically the grammar structures that are set off by punctuation.
9. A strong knowledge of grammar is also an essential factor in the highest level of interpretation of literature. Like poets changing meter, great prose writers are adept at shifting grammar structures to make them consonant with the phenomena of the plot. In Shakespeare's King Lear, Cornwall is stabbed and staggers into death as his wife Regan looks on indifferently:

I have received a hurt. Follow me, lady. Turn out that eyeless villain; throw this slave upon the dunghill. Regan, I bleed apace. Untimely comes this hurt; give me your arm. (act III, scene vii) The grammar of the passage is a masterpiece. In just 31 words, there are 7 clauses, which is barely 4 words per clause for 7 clauses in a row. Outside of children's literature, it is difficult to think of any comparable passage in literature. A student who does not know what a clause is has little chance to see the beauty of this tragic grammar that uses clause structure to heighten the gasping words of a dying man. Only students who have the options of grammar available to their minds will see and appreciate the full artistic control of the great writers.

Prescriptive grammar instruction is correct. There are, in fact, language standards in the professional world that students will be expected to observe, and it is no disservice to these students to prepare them to meet such standards. VanTassel-Baska (1988) has noted that, "In a language program for the gifted, clearly it is necessary to adopt a diagnostic-prescriptive approach to teaching grammar and usage..." (p. 167). Gallagher (1975) listed as one of the objectives in language arts, "To apply the conventions of general American-English usage, put to use whatever function or variety of language is appropriate to the occasion" (p. 177).

Conclusion

If a language art for gifted children is to be an area of high accomplishment, then it must be predicated upon the highest quality knowledge. We cannot adopt a position that relegates advanced vocabulary or grammatical precision to the category of things not to do. Such an approach leaves too much to chance and erroneously interprets the high academic nature of these topics. A challenging program for gifted students should reach exceptional levels of accomplishment in vocabulary, grammar, writing, the amount and quality of literature, and the experience of critical thinking about these different aspects of language and how they interact. This will, moreover, involve the detailed learning of specific content, an honorable and deeply human process that has been denigrated as "rote memorization," but is one of humanity's highest faculties in the authentic acquisition of high-level knowledge.

Michael Thompson is the editor of Our Gifted Children magazine and the author of various articles and textbooks for gifted children, including The Word Within the Word, The Magic Lens, Caesar's English, Classics in the Classroom, and The Heart of the Mind. A frequent presenter at conferences and school systems, he has been president of the Indiana Association for the Gifted, has helped develop language arts curricula for gifted classes in the state of North Carolina, and is on the editorial review board of The Journal of Secondary Gifted Education. In addition, he serves on the NAGC board of directors. 

Correspondence to Michael Thompson, Condominio Pisos de Don Juan, Calle San Fransisco #405, Piso 6-A, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00901

References

Clark, B. (1988). Growing up gifted (3rd ed.). Columbus, OH: Merrill.

Gallagher, J. J. (1975). Teaching the gifted child. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Parker, J. P. (1989). Instructional strategies for teaching the gifted. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Strunk, W., & E. B. White. (1999). The elements of style (4th ed.). New York: Longman.

Thompson, M. (1990). The word within the word. Monroe, NY: Trillium Press.

Thompson, M. (1995). The magic lens. Unionville, NY: Royal Fireworks Press.

Thompson, M. (1996). Formal language study for gifted students. In J. VanTassel-Baska, D. Johnson, & L. N. Boyce, (Eds.) Developing verbal talent (pp. 149-173). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Thompson, M. (1998). Classic words. Unionville, NY: Royal Fireworks Press.

Thompson, M. (2000). Classic words. [computer software]. Indianapolis, IN: Thompson & Thompson.

Thompson, M., & Thompson, M. (1996). Reflections on foreign language study for highly able learners. In J. VanTassel-Baska, D. Johnson, & L. N. Boyce (Eds.), Developing verbal talent (pp. 174-189). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

VanTassel-Baska, J. (1988). Comprehensive curriculum for gifted learners. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

VanTassel-Baska, J. (1998). Excellence in educating gifted & talented learners (3rd ed). Denver: Love.

Article summary: Grammar has been misunderstood and stereotyped as tedious, remedial, untouchable, and useless. These areas of knowledge must be restored to their necessary place in language arts programs for gifted children, who need educated vocabularies and grammar competence of exceptional quality.

Vocabulary  

High-level word use of the kind necessary in critical thinking or creative writing involves more than the common task of finding a usable word that has approximately the right meaning.

Elements and Factors Involved in Word Choice 

1. Precision. Azure over the less specific blue.

2. Eliminating modification. A preference for writing with nouns and verbs, rather than resorting to modifiers to enhance weak nouns or verbs. Colossus over giant statue.

3. Plain talk. Strunk and White's (1999) preference in their classic style manual, The Elements of Style, for a good, ordinary word over an erudite one. Abundance over plethora, cowlike over bovine.

4. Tone. Agreement in tone between word and content. Academic diction in journals, slang in story dialogue.

4. Brevity. Fewer syllables for impact. Fast over lightening quick.

5. Meter. Choosing a word that supports the rhythm of the sentence. Ending a sentence with a syllable that is stressed.

6. Poetics. Word sound that enhances meaning. Abraham Lincoln's o's and u's in "Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent..."

Why grammar is important?

This article is not the place for a detailed description of grammar. It is appropriate here, however, to highlight some of the factors that illustrate the high order and complexity of grammar and that integrate it with other reflections that we term critical thinking. Let us see what does it mean.

• Sentences do not occur in nature. Sentences are cerebral in their genesis
• Grammar is elegant. Like many systems that appeal to gifted individuals, grammar is elegant. It seems unlikely that English grammar, with only eight kinds of words, two sides of a sentence, several phrases and a handful of clauses and sentence purposes, could support such vast constructions as the Holy Bible, or the plays of Shakespeare, or the novels of Jane Austen, or the Narrative of Frederick Douglass.
• The inner theme of grammar is simplicity, even unity. This is the subtext of the rules: Let all in the sentence be one, let it be clear and agree that the center of the sentence be seen. The works of the sentence must move in harmony, like the wheels of a clock.
• There are classically pure philosophical ideas in grammar, such as the difference between the one and the many. Is the sentence about one thing, or is it about many things.
• Grammar provides the paradigm of human binary thinking and allows us to understand the meaning of clarity.
• Punctuation, in turn, is a function of grammar. Oscar Wilde was once asked what he had done that day; he replied that he had spent the whole morning putting in a comma, and the whole afternoon taking it out.
• A strong knowledge of grammar is also an essential factor in the highest level of interpretation of literature. Like poets changing meter, great prose writers are adept at shifting grammar structures to make them consonant with the phenomena of the plot. In Shakespeare's King Lear, Cornwall is stabbed and staggers into death as his wife Regan looks on indifferently:

Writing and Editing Process

This article presents the basics of article writing such as -writing style and organization. It offers time-tested suggestions for editing your own manuscript to get it ready fo rediting.  In this artcle the reader is able to understand the art and craft of article writing with the help of experts observations and experiences.

Good writing has a certain foundation on which it is built and a certain polish or finish on which it is sold to the buyer. The late E. B. White (Strunk & White, 1979) made an observation in the writer's little bible, The Elements of Style, that is worth noting. His Cornell professor, William Strunk, once said, "The best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules" (p. xvi).

Increasingly, feature writers are using the strengths of literary nonfiction. In fact, some experts have noted that a majority of feature-writing Pulitzer Prizes in the past decade have been won by individuals writing stories cast as literary nonfiction (Hart, 1995). They do this by identifying classic story elements in daily life. You can do it also. The elements are relatively simple to list: characters, use of dialogue, use of conflict and tension, and strong organization using scene construction. 

Good writing such as those articles winning Pulitzers for feature writing is truly difficult to achieve, but with the right desire and right tools, you may be able to do it. Good ideas put on paper (or a computer screen) still need good massaging -- good polish, that is -- to make them presentable to readers. 

This article presents the basics of effective article-writing style and organization. It offers time-tested suggestions for editing your own manuscript to get it ready for an editor. You investigate the art and craft of article writing. You learn how experts manage their writing and how varied the approaches might be to achieve the same goal of publication. You have to sell your idea and yourself.

Some news media critics feel that writing has deteriorated in recent years. Professor Neil Postman (1985) blamed it on television and a video-oriented society. He laments about "the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over has, dramatically and irreversibly, shifted the content and meaning of public discourse. Since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas" (p. 8). Cultural historian Jacques Barzun (1992) agrees, especially about the decline of writing skills within the news media. "The unhappy truth is that the prose of the press and of broadcast news as well, has fallen below the level of competence that once obtained [sic] and that can reasonably be expected. It is not uniformly bad, but the faults are frequent and of many kinds . . . blurred meanings; pretentiousness; and irrelevant fiction-style" (p. 3).

THE ELEMENTS OF GOOD WRITING  

Much work goes into good writing. William Zinsser (1980), who has written for newspapers and magazines and authored numerous books, considers good writing a disciplined, rigorous effort that comes from practice. It takes rewriting, what he calls "the essence of writing" (p. 4). It takes the same regular, daily schedule that a craftsman might use in making furniture or artwork. Zinsser also explains that writing is a solitary effort of people who do not mind being alone. Yet he also believes writing can be easy and fun. 

Lawyers, for example, often write with clutter and complexity in their search for precision necessary in legal documents. Good writers keep it simple while retaining meaning. Zinsser (1980) called clutter the "disease of American writing" (p. 7). He is right. This is especially true for writers for mass audience publications. Because there is no reason for feature articles to be complex or difficult, keep your writing simple. This means you have to translate complicated material, such as medical or other scientific terms, for your readers. "We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon," Zinsser believes (p.7).

Barzun (1992) was deeply concerned about false meaning in news media writing. He points to vogue words and malapropism. Vogue words reduce precision in meaning by giving slangy new meanings to words, keeping better-fitting words out of use. Malapropism is the misuse of often similar but incorrect words. These sorts of writing mistakes, he argues, come from laziness and from ignorance of the language. 

Great feature articles include seven basic elements, says Michael Bugeja, magazine writing professor and Writer's Digest contributing editor. His seven essential elements are topic, theme, title, viewpoint, voice, moment, and endings. "If you heed these seven basic elements of non-fiction writing, you will make your articles better and you will sell more," Bugeja (1996, p. 22) argued.

There are ways to be successful and avoid such pitfalls in writing. Minneapolis freelance feature writer Steve Perlstein (1993, personal communication) believes in simplicity for success: 

Writing style is surely important, but so is keeping your prose simple and straightforward. The great writers never waste words, and their stories are never one word longer than they need to be. Superfluous words-whether they are to pad the word I count or to make the piece sound more important -- are invariably cut in the editing process anyway. If you write too many words about the same thing over and over again, or just more words than you need, your work winds up looking overblown and tedious, or just plain too long. See what I mean?

A good newspaper, magazine, newsletter, or online publication writer keeps thoughts easy to understand. This is done several ways. First, it is done through word selection. Use the right words, but do not use too many of the right words. Be concise. Be precise in meaning. Use basic subject-verb-object sentence structure. Even if you can find a way to write a sentence with a verb then the subject, it is likely to be hard to understand and you have wasted your reader's time. If you do that often enough, you lose the reader permanently. A third way to help the reader understand what you are writing is to use correct grammar. Usages do help the communication process. People are accustomed to seeing certain forms of grammar, such as subject-verb agreement and consistent use of tense. Still another way to write in simple English is to keep an eye on sentence length. The longer the sentence, the harder it is to follow. You do not want your reader going through your article and wondering, "What did that mean? Am I crazy? Why can't I figure out what this means?" 

Style is another consideration when you think about good writing. Every writer has a style. Every publication has a style manual. Writing style is much like one's personal appearance. Your appearance reflects your own way of dressing, your mannerisms, and your physical uniqueness. Writing does much of the same thing, but it reveals a bit about our minds, our thinking, our logic, and our expression of those processes. Most experienced writers and writing teachers will tell.

Eight Ways of Writing with the same words

WORD USAGE AND CHANGES IN MEANING

Professor Ernest Brennecke (Wardlow, 1985, p. 24) created the following eight sentences and eight different meanings by changing the location of one word. Read the sentences or say them out loud. Notice how the meaning of each sentence changes as the location of the word only changes. Here's a lesson -- one you should not forget -- about saying precisely what you mean in a sentence.                       

1. Only I hit him in the eye yesterday.
2. I only hit him in the eye yesterday.
3. I hit only him in the eye yesterday.
4. I hit him only in the eye yesterday.
5. I hit him in only the eye yesterday.
6. I hit him in the only eye yesterday.
7. I hit him in the eye only yesterday.
8. I hit him in the eye yesterday only.

you that to teach writing, you have to start with basics, no matter whether it is sixth grade theme writing or freshman composition at a Big Ten university. As Zinsser (1980) said, "You have to strip down your writing before you can build it back up" (p. 19). 

Oregon freelance nonfiction writer Gary King (1993, personal communication) believes in sticking to the fundamentals when he writes his specialty, crime features. King, who has written three books and numerous articles about major crimes, emphasizes that writing success is found in the basics:

In writing for the crime magazines, the writer must use good, standard English. Don't use shortcuts, but don't be stiff and too formal, either. Avoid long "travelogue" descriptions of the locale where the crime took place (a mistake that many first-timers make) in the introductory, and get right to the story, usually the discovery of a body. Try to tell the story in chronological order, and emphasize the detective work that leads to the solution of the case. In other words, milk the investigative process for everything you can. Don't pinpoint the guilty person too early in the story, and use active writing constructions wherever possible. There's no reason that nonfiction writing has to be dull. Novices should decide which publication(s) they want to write for, read several copies of the publication, and by all means send off for the magazine's writers' guidelines.

Style

After mastering cumbersome language, complex sentence structure, and the like, you can begin to build your own style. The late novelist Paul Darcy Boles ( 1985) called style a "way of saying" and a "way of seeing." He said it is somewhat born into the owner, but it is also borrowed. Many writers become the products of other writers they admire. The process of stealing technique is a rather accepted one in the business of writing -- we become a mixture of the styles of writers we read and enjoy the most while we are learning to write. 

You do not have to work too hard to develop a style. It is not such a conscious matter of writing as an unconscious matter of writing. It evolves and comes through your writing whether you want it to or not. Everyone has a writing style. On the other hand, the business of a style manual is another issue altogether. You will find most, if not all, publications have their own style manuals or have adapted the manuals of other organizations. Magazines such as U.S. News & World Report have their own manuals. Newspapers such as The New York Times and Chicago Tribune have their own. Wire services such as the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) have widely used manuals for writers and editors. The AP stylebook has been used in college journalism classes for several decades. In fact, you will find some of these stylebooks are for sale to the public as well. These books are reference books containing the rules of usage for local and not-so-local matters that are used commonly. The range covers basics such as numbers and names but also more complicated matters such as religious titles, foreign geographic names, and even medical terms. So, even if you are an independent writer, you need to know the style of the publication when you prepare a manuscript for its editor.

Audience

Another element of good writing focuses on the audience, or, in the language of communication theorists, the receiver of your message. In communication, there has to be an area of common, or shared, experience. In writing for a newspaper, magazine, newsletter, or online publication, the area of shared experience is reduced because a writer must have a shared experience with thousands of individuals. "The chances soar that a message will go awry when you start factoring more receivers into the equation," said Hart (1990b, p. 3), an editor and writing coach for The Oregonian in Portland. You need to consider: Who is going to read your article? Do you know? Have you thought about it? How can you find out? There is a high degree of seriousness in those questions. If you do not know the answers, can you honestly write well for that audience? No. For some publications, it is easy to know who reads each edition. For others, it is difficult to tell without research. A specialized publication, such as an industry magazine or a legal newspaper, has a well-defined audience. But the general circulation daily or weekly newspaper and some consumer magazines must be researched before you know anything certain about the audience. You want to be careful to write at the level of the audience. If you write too far below it, you will turn off readers. If you write too far above it, you will lose readers as well. In fact, if you miss estimating the audience too much, you will not even get past first base with your editor and will never reach any readers. You have to have a sense of timing with readers and audiences, too. The right mood, writing style, and sensitivity make an article work. Make the wrong choices and the article works against you. Thus, you have to know when to use humor, when to be serious, when to be gentle, when to be emotional. Knowing your audience helps you chart the course through these dangerous waters.

Spelling, syntax and punctuation 

Some general points about writing mechanics have already been made. You have read about the value of grammar. In reality, not enough can be said to beginning feature writers about spelling, syntax, and punctuation. In fact, former Hartford Courant editor and publisher Bob Eddy (1979) called spelling the curse of the working journalist. For writers, each of these skills is important. If you cannot handle the basic skills such as spelling, you will eventually lose your job. Often writing students dismiss spelling or punctuation as unimportant at the moment because, they say, "It is the idea that matters. I'll learn the rules of spelling later." If a carpenter were to say that about building a house, it would come crashing down. The same goes for your writing. It will cause your plan to fail unless you use the right tools and materials: language, words, spelling, and punctuation. Correct use of words can be helped by regular use of a dictionary, a thesaurus, and other word reference books available at most bookstores. Your shelves should be stocked with at least one dictionary, a thesaurus, and a handful of stylebooks -- at least one, but several if you work for a number of publications or use different writing styles. Several good reference books were suggested in the previous chapter. Each of the following points about good writing requires your attention and time. If you learn to manage them, you should find great improvement in your ability to communicate to the world.

Unity is like an anchor for good writing, Zinsser says. Some might call this concept a matter of consistency in your writing. Whatever you wind up calling it, remember it is a critical element of good writing. 

 Tense 

Tense, pronoun point of view, and mood are all indicators of unity in your writing. It is best to maintain a level of consistency in each. Do not mix tenses. Past and present tenses in the same sentence only confuses your reader. Articles that jump around from first to second to third person are equally disconcerting for readers. Mixture of mood can cause perhaps the most serious confusion for a reader who does not know whether to laugh, cry, be sad or happy, or otherwise respond to your message.

Tone  

Tone is also important in feature writing. Writers establish the mood or texture of their features with use of language. This is the tone of the article. Diction, or word choice, contributes to this characteristic of your writing. "When we select one word over another of equal denotative value, we likely make the selection based on the connotative meaning of the word. And by using that connotation, we effectively establish a mood or texture -- the tone -- of the story," wrote Professor David Brill (1992, p. 32).

"In fact, tone is one of the most important elements of writing -- and perhaps the most frequently overlooked."

GIVING AN IDEA FOCUS AND DEPTH

A large portion of chapter 2 was devoted to finding a successful article idea. Although some attention was given to developing the idea and giving it focus and depth, let us return to this in the context of writing. Focus comes throughout the article, but it begins with the lead. A well-chosen lead, or introduction, tells the reader what you mean to achieve in the article. It is up to you to guide the reader through the article, much like a road map, with the theme or idea you introduce in the beginning paragraphs.

For a writer, focus is the key. If you can remember this, you will do better as a writer. Your articles will be stronger. The focus must carry through the rest of the article after you have constructed the lead. It carries through the body and dominates the ending, also.

Think of the focus as the article's angle. To write a feature article only about appliance repairs leaves so much to write that a series of books could be produced. But to write about a shop that repairs household appliances is another matter. And to center the attention on the 85-year-old owner who does all the work himself redirects the article still again.

FINDING A SATISFACTORY STYLE  

William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White (1979) in their classic ‘The Elements of Style’, offered cautionary hints to help you find a style that works. Consider these items:                        

1. Place yourself in the background.

                        2. Write in a way that comes naturally.

                        3. Work from a suitable design.

                        4. Write with nouns and verbs.

                        5. Revise and rewrite.

                        6. Do not overwrite.

                        7. Do not overstate.

                        8. Avoid the use of qualifiers.

                        9. Do not affect a breezy manner.

                        10. Use orthodox spelling.

                        11. Do not explain too much.

                        12. Do not construct awkward adverbs.

                        13. Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.

                        14. Avoid fancy words.

                        15. Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.

                        16. Be clear.

                        17. Do not inject opinion.

                        18. Use figures of speech sparingly.

                        19. Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.

                        20. Avoid foreign languages.

                        21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat. 

You must be disciplined not to fall to the temptation to drift in your writing. Examine each paragraph as a unit. Is it necessary? Does it help get to the point? Then examine each sentence within each paragraph. Does each sentence help maintain the point of the paragraph? Then, finally, examine a word within each sentence. Are all words needed? Do they help the purpose of the individual sentence?

GETTING AN IDEA DOWN ON PAPER  

How do you get the ideas in your mind on paper? Surely, as there are many outlets for your work, there are many approaches to the physical act of writing. Some veteran writers like to labor over a manual typewriter as they have done for years. Others use electric typewriters. But most writers have entered the computer age with a technological leap to powerful personal computers and multi-featured word processors. 

There are writers who work in the early morning because they are morning people. They rise and jump at the chance to get their creative juices flowing while they are fresh. Others, it seems, cannot get going until finishing several cups of coffee, a newspaper, the mail, and other activities. These writers seem most comfortable during the afternoon. And, as you have guessed, some writers thrive at night. When all is quiet and the day is almost done, these writers are busy at creating and work through much of the night, only to rest in the morning. 

There are writers who use a dictation machine or tape recorder to write, turning over the mundane duties of typing and preparing a manuscript to an assistant. These "idea" writers do not want to be bothered with clerical duties of typing or setting up a printer. Yet, some writers feel much closer to their work when they can do just that - control the typewriter and other effects of the writer's private work environment. Some still prefer to write their manuscripts by hand; and do not deal with any machines at all, not even tape recorders. 

You can find writers who work in absolute silence to enhance their concentration. Some work in a social environment where other people are present, such as an office. The interaction seems to stimulate and inspire rather than interrupt and retard. Others like to have a stereo playing loudly, or softly, or the television tuned to a program for background noise. 

Some writers produce a manuscript in one long and exhausting effort. Others produce it in bits and pieces. Some writers write a manuscript as it is presented, from beginning to end. You will find others who write the middle first, the end, and then the beginning. Some authors research first, then write. Some professionals simultaneously research and write. There also are writers who revise as they write, a sentence at a time. You also can find writers who write many pages and then revise. Some people write in an office at home. Some lease office space to get away from distractions at home. And others, who have full-time jobs doing something else, like to write in their regular work environment.

Writer's Digest Senior Editor Thomas Clark says a critical step in getting started as a writer is setting up. "One of the most important commitments you can make to your writing is to set aside an area where you write," Clark (1990, pp. 24, 26) explained, "What is essential to your mindset is that your 'office' have an air of exclusivity.

Developing Good Habits of Writing:  

Where one writer writes:

Each writer needs his or her own "nest" for productive writing. It can be a corner in the bedroom, an office in the basement, or any other secluded location. Freelance newspaper and magazine writer Wendy M. Grossman specializes in computers and para normal science writing. A member of the Association of British Science Writers and founding editor of Britain's Skeptic magazine, she began freelance writing in 1990 from her home outside London in Richmond, Surrey. She was asked to describe her individual writing work habits. Other people think I'm disciplined, but I think I'm as disorganized as hell. I have an office in the largest room in my flat, which has a full-sized desk, and a couple of filing cabinets. At the moment it also has three computers and a laser printer. If you're going to review hardware, you need space to put all the boxes in.           

But really, I can write anywhere, and often do: On planes, in coffee shops, outdoors, in the living room, in bed. For me, a note book computer is vital - spend 14 hours a day sitting in the same office, and you go mad. I have the office set up with a TV, speakers for the stereo system, and a radio. I have three phone lines (one for the modem and one for the fax). I grew up working in front of the TV, and I find it helps to have some evidence that the outside world is continuing to revolve. I have a second desk which holds the old PC for my half-day-a-week assistant to use. (Grossman, 1998, personal communication) a bout it . . . you're telling yourself that writing is important." Beyond this first step, Clark strongly recommends these other nine tips to establishing yourself in the professional writer frame of mind:

• Involve yourself with writing such as attending writing classes or conferences.
• Equip yourself with writing tools.
• Read books about writing and other writers.
• Put words on paper.
• Write every day.
• Decide what type of writer you seek to be.
• Think small to build confidence.
• Send out your work after completing it.
• Expect some rejection and analyze the reasons for rejections.

These work styles are as unique as any other personal habits. You have to find what is right for you. Try a variety of combinations to determine what is the most productive and efficient environment for your writing. Then, as Zinsser has said, stick to it. The habit of writing counts. It is not so important what constitutes the habit, as shown later.

ORGANIZING ALL THAT INFORMATION  

To be organized in your writing means you are more efficient and, likely, more effective and productive. Organizing gives focus by giving each story a dominant element (Sweeney, 1993). Organizing does not come easy to some people. Some writers are naturally disorganized people, so they have to work harder to get to their writing goals. University of Pittsburgh magazine editor David Fryxell believes that. "By getting organized -wresting order out of the chaos of your writing process -- you will be liberated to be all that you can be as an author," Fryxell ( 1990) said, "Once you know where a story is going and how you'll get there, it's a lot easier to pay attention to the scenery en route. In other words, by getting organized, you'll write not only faster, but also better." 

There are several concerns when organizing the information you have collected for your article. Remember that the organizational approaches vary depending on the style of writing and the medium, but there are several standard ways of organizing yourself before you even start writing. Discussions of both common newspaper and magazine organizational strategies follow. 

Different organizational approaches represent the personality of the writer as much as do the space where you work, your typewriter (or computer), and work habits. Probably the most common way to get the mass of information you have collected is to use an outline to get started. Writers who use outlines have different styles of outlining as well. Some write formal sentence outlines and others use simple topical outlines. Others sketch an outline of an article on their computer screen or on paper in their typewriter and fill in the gaps as they sift through the notes of interviews that have been completed. A good procedure for beginners might be the following steps:

Think of the main points of the article and make these topics the Roman numerals of your outline. These are also your article's main sections.

Next, divide each of the main sections into subsections. What are the major characteristics, or concerns, of each Roman numeral section? There might be just one characteristic or several dozen. List each so you will not forget to include these as you begin to write portions of the manuscript. Letter each of these A, B, and so on.

If the article is going to be lengthy, you might want to go beyond the alphabetic listings. If you do extend the outline, these will be details of each subsection and they can be numbered 1, 2, and so forth.

On longer articles, or articles with sidebars and boxed inserts such as many magazines use, you should use separate outlines for the sidebars. Often, after writing the main article, you spot a portion of the main article outline that lends itself to a "take out" or "sidebar." 

These steps will help you to write and organize and it works well for longer manuscripts. Shorter (less than 1,000 words) articles common in newspapers might not need this sort of rigorous organizational plan, but even shorter pieces benefit if you find yourself confused about what you have before the writing stage. 

The newest and more complete full-feature word processors offer outlining tools in addition to all of their other features. This does not mean, of course, that your computer does the outlining for you. However, word processor software contains features that permit creation of collapsible outlines based on text that you have entered. This way of viewing the words you have written may help you to create, organize, and move text more easily. Word processing software such as Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and WordPro offer such features and more. But these can be costly for beginners on a budget. You may wish to use a less expensive package with fewer features. Another one of the conveniences of personal computers and word processors is the ease of moving things around. If you use a computer to write, take ad- vantage of the flexibility and ease of organizing and reorganizing your facts eve at the outline stage. Although paper outlines and computers are one approach, there are others. Some experienced writers prefer the standard file card in 3 x 5 or 5 x 7 sizes. This approach works well for shuffling and reordering the information once it is listed on cards. The approach, again, is pretty straightforward: 

• List each important point on an individual card.
• Place cards with related information in the same pile as you sort through the deck.
• Order the piles according to the sequence you want the information to flow in the article.
• Sort each individual pile to logically support the general point the pile of cards represents.

Still another approach is to use a notebook.

• Divide it into sections and place relevant information about each section into the binder.
• Then you can move material as necessary, page by page, or section by section, until you get it into a sequence that you want to use to write.
• Another technique some writers use helps them to get "the big picture" of the organizational plan of their article.

This approach requires these steps: 

1. Write a very rough draft of as much of your manuscript as you can.
2. Take scissors and cut it up, a paragraph at a time.
3. Tape or tack the pieces to a wall or bulletin board.
4. Study the pieces on the wall. Move the pieces as needed to improve the flow and direction of your article.

The New Yorker writer and author Ken Auletta has moved from using a pen and a legal pad to using his computer, but he continues to use the same approach to finding organization within his article or book notes. Auletta (1997) said:

You gather all this material and what do you do? The answer to that...is to spend a lot of time doing the most laborious indexing. I put it all in an index and stare at it. Then I move it around and try to figure out what the structure is. I master the material of the "trees" of this forest and then step back, sit with it, and try to figure out what is the forest I want to write about. I start with an index and try to wind up with a table of contents. I always find the key thing is to find that lead. We all do that in daily journalism, but I think it is true of the longer form as well. Get the right voice down, the style. Does it make sense? Does it sum up where you want to go? This indexing is the most unpleasant part of everything I do. And yet, it is the most essential single thing you do.

BASIC STRUCTURE OF FEATURE ARTICLES  

Newspaper features employ a variety of leads and organizational plans. You want your article to start well and retain readership for the rest of the article. This part of the chapter discusses approaches to leads, tools to hold the parts together, general organizational techniques used in features, developing and using writing style rules, and point of view.

Developing the. Right Lead

Writing authorities Patricia Kubis and Robert Howland (1985) stated that the lead, or opening paragraph, of a magazine article should achieve three goals:

1. Tell the reader what the article is about.
2. Provide the tone and mood of the article.
3. Catch the reader's attention and entice the reader to go further into the article. 

Certainly the lead works with the title of the article and the layout of the first two pages to grab the reader. But the best package of color graphics will not keep a reader unless the author has done a big part in hooking the reader with a strong lead. The lead is crucially important. It can help determine the mood of the article. It should persuade the reader to stay with the article. Here are some of the basic newspaper (as well as magazine and newsletter) leads commonly used for features: 

1. Summary lead. This lead gives the traditional five w's and h (who, what, when, where, why, and how) in as few words as possible. Some summary leads focus on one or two of these elements of the story and save the others that are judged less important, for later in the story. 
2. Salient feature lead. This lead focuses on one major characteristic of the story. Instead of several points in a color story about a festival, the salient feature lead emphasizes one point about food, music, or weather, for example.   
3. Anecdotal lead. This lead is also called a case-approach lead and The Wall Street Journal feature lead. The reason is simple: stories with this lead use a specific representative example or story to illustrate a point about a situation that is discussed in general after the lead of the story. Thus, instead of writing about the woes of unemployed oil workers in Texas, this approach would describe one person or family in to the lead.          
4. Quotation lead. Some writers like to open a feature with a quotation. The quotation can be from a person being profiled or an expression of sentiment common at a meeting or concert, but it must catch the gist of the article while being the exact words of a source important to the story. 

Delayed-suspended interest lead. This lead deliberately holds the big news of the story from the reader to tease the reader further into the story. It is a lead that works well when there is some question of the outcome of a situation, such as an article about a lost memento that is found or an article describing the sudden joy of a big contest prize winner.            

Question lead. This sort of lead asks a question of the reader, usually in direct address. The key, of course, is to be sure to answer the question in the story, preferably in the top half of the story while the question is still in the reader's mind.

There are still other frequently used approaches to leads. Many writers like to use straight narrative or highly descriptive writing. Some like to employ comparison and contrast for effect. Some use startling statements for impact. You will spot some leads that play on words, using puns as attention grabbers. Also, you might find others with use of direct address as a tool to get to readers who might otherwise find their interest drifting off ( Cook, 1991; Garrison, 1990).

Leads should entice readers into the article. Adjunct professor and freelance writer Sally-Jo Bowman (1990) described the work of a good article lead in this interesting manner: "Writing nonfiction articles is like feeding a baby. You warm the little fellow up with a couple of bites of chocolate cake, and when he opens his mushy mouth for more, you cram in some broccoli" (p. 38). Whatever the lead approach, it should be a stirring paragraph. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Edna Buchanan says this about her lead-writing philosophy: "My idea of a successful lead is one that might cause a reader, who is having breakfast with his wife, to spit out his coffee, clutch his chest and say, 'My God, Martha! Did you read this?"  Knight-Ridder, 1986). Leads must be effective and serve the article's purpose. Writer Jan Bowman used a highly descriptive approach to create images in the reader's mind to begin her recent article about winters along the Oregon coast for Trailer Life magazine. Her lead sets a scene for the travel-oriented reader:

Some think it's more Scottish than Scotland, but all agree it's one of the most beautiful coast-lines in the world. 

The scene at Cannon Beach reminds me of an Elton Bennett painting, with beach walkers snug in their jackets and huge monoliths at the sea's edge that make the human silhouettes look like stick figures upon a vast backdrop. The scene is awash in a delicate peach color and sounds are of waves colliding with hard basalt and then softly coming to rest upon the sand. The season is winter, but it is a fine day to be out. RVers are discovering what I've long known. Except for a few places on the extreme southern edges of this country -- and I've been caught in snow storms on the Mexican border -- one of the most temperate winter climates in the contiguous 48 states is found along the Oregon coast, particularly the southern half. 

Though rain is frequent, RVers can select one of the many fine campgrounds with activities -- even Jacuzzis and swimming pools -- to use as a base for exploring the territory. Bring along those books you've always wanted to read; relaxation is a component of happy traveling. But when sunny days put rainbows on spectacular surf, head outdoors to see the action, or, don your wet suit if you're a surfer. After a storm, the air has a freshness unique to this western meeting of land and sea. You'll want to inhale deeply. The beaches become tangled, inviting treasures of artifacts that stir us to scavenge among them for treasures of shells, agates, driftwood and, if one is lucky, glass floats. ( Bannan, 1997, p.30).  In terms of structure, magazine leads are not bound by the same rules of newspaper lead writing in that most newspaper editors prefer short leads that are supported by subsequent paragraphs. Magazine leads are more flexible and are as often quite long as they are short. Their purposes remain the same, however.

Pulling the Various Pieces Together  

Another important part of the article is a single sentence or paragraph that gets to the real point of the article. You can create a very strong lead, but few leads truly give focus to a feature article. A lot of writers give different names to that function, but it is a paragraph or sentence that tells readers what is really going on. The article may get off to a great start, but that super lead might not get to the essence of the article. You do that -- get to the point of the article -- with what is called a billboard paragraph, a nut graf, or a summary paragraph. These statements offer your theme or thesis. This part of the article can be the lead, but it is rare in feature writing. Instead, it usually comes right after the lead is established, or played out. The focus statement is short and to the point. "[W]riters lead in with several paragraphs -- frequently anecdotal -- then pop in the billboard to sum up the main point, the angle of the story," wrote Wilson ( 1990, p. 31), a freelance editor with the Los Angeles Times. "It's not unusual to follow a billboard with a supporting or amplifying graph, or a quotation for impact and validity." 

In 1998, Wall Street Journal staff reporter Christina Duff wrote a front-page feature about contemporary telephone behavior and manners in U.S. society. Her story examined the changing rules of society when it comes to using the telephone. Her story described changes in how Americans use the telephone that have occurred as telephone technologies have offered new features such as answering machines. Is use of an answering machine acceptable? If so, how? She says yes it is acceptable, but it was not always that way. In fact, when the telephone was first introduced, many Victorian-era Americans thought using it was neither socially acceptable nor civilized behavior. Although this has obviously changed, there are other questions. For example, is "screening" calls acceptable behavior? Duff's story sets the situation with an anecdotal lead in this way:

WASHINGTON -- The home phone rings. Shelly Masters, a lawyer, reclines on her love seat, flipping channels. It rings again. She cranks up the volume and stays put. 

And why shouldn't she? Ms. Masters, age 33, is quite comfortable letting a ringing phone ring. The answering machine clicks on. "Shel? SHEL-LY! Will you pick up the phone? I know you're there." Ms. Masters stares at CNN. A life blissfully uninterrupted. 

The caller, a friend, doesn't see it that way at all. Reached later -- on the first ring -- Reagan McBride is fuming. "She's like, lying to me," Ms. McBride says. The 32-year-old graphic artist makes a point of answering her phone, and she expects others to do likewise. 

This is a country of callers sadly divided. On one side are those who remain phone slaves. These souls continue to treat each ring like a fire alarm, disrupting dinner interrupting lovemaking, muting the TV and shushing the kids. Often, experts say, these are anal-retentive types who overly respect authority. They probably don't jaywalk. And no doubt they eagerly open junk mail. 

And then, several paragraphs later, Duff offers the purpose of her article with the all-important nut graf: 

In truth, phone behavior had to change. The wife used to be home manning the phone. Now, the last thing she wants to do after a day of gainful employment is chew the fat. Telecommuters turn off the ringer after hours to help divide work and home life. And with New Age "team" structures at work, many others are talked out by the time they leave the office (Duff, 1998, p. A1). 

Transitions are also critical for success in writing, especially in longer pieces. Transitions are often misused and underrated. They link major portions of an article together in an effective way. These can be road maps for longer articles. They tell readers where they have been and where they are going. This might not always be obvious to your readers. Transitions can be a sentence or two, or just a phrase or few words, often containing the common elements of the two parts being linked (Garrison, 1990).

Organizing the Article

Story organizational forms are also broad in scope to give you flexibility in fitting the organizational plan to the story. There are variations in approaches, often based on length and not whether the article is written for any particular print medium. There are some differences involving lengthier magazine articles, of course. The body, or middle, of a magazine article is the "meat" of the sandwich. Once the article gets started with a well-conceived lead, the momentum must continue. Linking together the pieces with transitional sentences and paragraphs, this is where you must bring in the material that you promised your reader in the lead. Regardless of what organizational plan you use for your topic, your conclusion serves a completely different purpose.

This is where you clean up, you wrap up, and you tie everything together. In magazine feature writing more than most newspaper or newsletter writing, the conclusion plays a vital role. It is a chance to summarize the major points again for the reader. It is a chance to reveal the delayed or surprise "finish." It is a chance to give the storytelling its closure. Conclusions can be several pages or several sentences. Regardless of the length, the conclusion should not leave the reader hanging in mid air by what you have chosen to say. Reach some form of resolution. Close it out. But be careful of writing too much, as some beginning writers will do. Remember that you do get a second chance at the conclusion, if you need it, when you rewrite. These are the main time-tested story structural approaches of features:

1. Inverted pyramid. This approach might work for some features, but it is best used in straight news writing. This approach is less appropriate for feature material because it is structured by most important to least important priorities. It usually requires a summary lead. 
2. Chronological order. This follows sequencing of events. When a feature recounts events or describes a procedure, this approach might be best
3. Essay. A rather standard approach to all writing, this is found in columns, analyses, reviews, and other personal opinion or subjective writing. The essay format is standardized with an introduction, middle, and conclusion.
4. There will be many occasions when a combination of these three plans works best for your article. Certainly there will be some subjects that are best handled by one approach or another, but be prepared to mix the best of each of these when the subject calls for it.

Writing with Style (books)

Although leads and organizational plans are at the top of the list for beginners to learn about feature writing, there are other concerns. Stylebooks contain a wealth of writing rules that make them the top reference book of many writers. Stylebooks include spelling, punctuation, capitalization, other types of grammar, information formatting, writing and reporting advice and policies, and other guidelines. Remember, however, that most major publications maintain their own stylebooks and usages in writing vary from publication to publication. Certainly the differences are distinct when newspaper usages are compared to magazine usages. And there may be a separate set of writing style rules that evolve as online publications mature in the next decade. Two of the most popular stylebooks are those published by AP and UPI. Get a copy of whatever book is used by the newspaper, magazine, newsletter, or online publication that you write for and use it as you write. You will notice the professional touch it gives your work if you ask questions of your own writing, learn the most common usages, consult it regularly about the usages you do not learn, and apply the usage rules evenly throughout your manuscripts.

Using the Right Point of View  

Another consideration is point of view in your writing. Feature stories for newspapers are most often written in third person, but in some situations, such as personal experience articles, columns, and travel articles, the writing is often in first person. Remember that when you choose to write in first person, you become a significant part of the story. Do you want to be the focus of the article? If so, chose the first person "I." If not, write in third person or even second person.

WRITING ADVICE FROM MADEMOISELLE 

Michelle Stacey, Mademoiselle magazine managing editor, recommends a sensible approach to writing for beginners. She offers this advice about the writing process:

First drafts are for putting it all on paper, for getting over the staring-at-a-blank-page stage, for thinking up a wonderful lead that you'll probably hate in the morning. They are not for publication. There's always that dangerous, heady moment when you've finally finished a draft of the piece, when the whole thing sits there in a neat (or not-so-neat) package. You're in the throes of first love. "This is so great," you think. "I may not even need to revise this!" Don't you believe it. That's the moment to dive back in, pencil in hand, and revise, rewrite, reorganize, rethink. But once you've gone through another draft or two and you really know it's close this time -- how do you make it into a piece your editor will love, too? 

When it comes to final polishing of a story, I like to think in terms of danger points. There are three danger points in every piece that you write, and there are points every editor looks at and usually ends up having to revise. Save your editor the trouble on these and your stock will rise immediately.

• The lead. Yes, you have already tinkered with this. You may have gone through two or three different ones. But there's a trick I've had to do as an editor so many times that it's become a basic rule: Look at the second or third paragraph. Chances are your real lead is right there. I can't count the number of times I've had to chop off the first one or two paragraphs of a story -- paragraphs that, when you were writing them, made you feel comfortable, buttressed, safe, but that turn out to be completely unnecessary. Beat your editor to the chopping block. 
• Transitions. The most misused and underrated parts of a story, these turning points can be the weak links in the strongest of chains. There is a popular misconception that transitions consist of latching on to a stray word or concept in the last sentence of a section and using that poor stray as a rope to swing, Tarzan-like, to an entirely new section. "Speaking of cows," you write, "Mrs. O'Leary . . "This is the sort of lazy writing that has made many a weary editor write "weak trans." in the margin of a piece. Good transitions always have some connection to the main thrust of a piece; they are your opportunity to ask yourself: "Why am I writing this next section? How does this fit in with my overall thesis?" Once you've answered those questions, you can convey the answers to the reader. Transitions remind the reader of where you've been and where you're going; they shouldn't exist in a void. Don't be afraid that you're explaining too much. "Another aspect of municipal disasters that historians tend to ignore is the element of plain bad luck," you write. "Take, for instance, the case of Mrs. O'Leary's cow . . ." 
• Favorite parts. Those luscious turns of phrase that make your heart beat a little faster every time you read them, those especially creative sentences where you've really found a new way to say something . . . be suspicious of these. They're probably the worst writing in your story. I know it seems unlikely -- and painful-but trust me on this one. Those lovely phrases are more likely to be overwritten, hard to understand, high-falutin', and low in content. The best writing does not go out of its way to be cute or beautiful; it is good because it is clear, informative, and says what needs to be said in the most succinct and effective manner. That is elegant writing -- it doesn't draw attention to itself. Go back to every favorite part you have and don't give it any breaks: Is it doing its job in the piece, or is it just serving your ego? Be ruthless.

Now you've got a piece to warm an editor's heart. Is that the last work you'll ever have to do on that story? Don't bet on it -- at least if you're writing for a magazine. The nature of magazine writing, with its finely tuned attention to voice and a very specific audience, almost always requires that an author make further revisions. But if you can make your editor say, "This piece is close, really close!" when she reads your story, you've made her day. Trust me on this one. (Stacey, 1988, personal communication)

A LOOK AT A PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING ARTICLE  

Miami Herald Local section columnist and feature writer Liz Balmaseda earned the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her columns and feature articles for the newspaper's local section each Wednesday and Saturday. Her articles show a variety of approaches focused on people. Her features, written as fixed-length columns, always seem filled with lots of direct quotations from the people about whom she writes. Balmaseda wrote human-interest feature articles for The Herald from 1987 to 1991 after 6 years of news reporting and production for The Herald city desk, Newsweek, and NBC network news. She began her award-winning column in 1991. Balmaseda (1993, personal communication) said I of her 10 articles in her Pulitzer-winning package almost did not get written. She was in Haiti on assignment and went with her photographer to a particularly poor part of the island near Port-au-Prince. She explained what led to the story:

I went to this village while the photographer took some photos and did not plan to write anything. We went behind this old slaughterhouse and saw a strip of little houses. We went to one to meet a family there. I saw that it was a wonderful look at daily life in a poor, poor place. When we went into the house, I did not plan to write anything, but suddenly, on this hot day, it started raining very hard. We were trapped because my photographer could not take his equipment outside. So, I sat there and thought to myself, "this is a blessing." I had been staying in a nice hotel on another part of the island and was suddenly dropped into a life and culture I'd never come into contact with before. It was the real Haitian life and its rhythms. 

The man's wife came home soaking wet. The kids from the village were dancing in the rain, but the man protected his kids by keeping them inside. The dynamic of the scene was really incredible. In that moment, I learned what kept life going on that island. In the rain, I saw hope. There was hope in the kids dancing, in the kids catching rain drops with their tongues, in the refreshment they felt from the rain on such a hot and humid day. In it, they saw hope.

I went back to the hotel and thought, "I can't write this. There's no news peg. No press conference. No quotes. No real news." But I thought what the heck? What's the worst they [her editors back in Miami] can do? So I wrote the story. Of all the stories I did, they [her editors] liked this story best and put it on the front page. They loved it. And that was one of the stories that won the Pulitzer. Something inside me said to take the risk and write that story. I did it. If you have the instinctive reaction -- if something moves you -- then do it. Follow that feeling.

Her story of the man and his family demonstrates a sensitive first-person approach to writing about the political and economic oppression, as well as the indomitable spirit, of the people of Haiti. "It is my favorite of all of them," Balmaseda says. This is her story of one family in Haiti: 

PORT-All-PRINCE, Haiti -- Those are the neighbor's children dancing in the rain, thrusting their faces skyward, trying to catch the raindrops in their mouths, singing a song that gets lost in the deluge. 

Those are not the children of Morales Leger. His children are inside, dry, pleased nevertheless to witness the downpour on such a suffocating day.

From his house across the alley, he and I watch the neighbor's girls in their euphoric convulsions, drenched, entranced. 

Morales, a man of 64, has put out large tin pots to catch the clean rainwater, a blessing on this humid Feast of the Ascension. He pulls his young son close to him, kissing his cheek, explaining that "he easily gets the flu." The sudden storm caught me as we talked in his home. Entirely by chance, I found myself dropped in the middle of daily life in a squalid shanty strip where a desperate existence churns on endlessly, even on feast days.

The rain hammered on the tin roof, veiling doorways and windows in misty curtains. A shower of relief. To arrive at his house, I crossed the ancient slaughterhouse, walked along the muck-filled canal where pigs slept. The stench of human and animal and vegetable waste clung to my face like a mask. I took quick, shallow breaths through my mouth.

A young woman bathed in the pig water, scrubbing her arms with a pink bar of soap, as if the rosy suds could extinguish the film of God-knows-what-is-dumped-in-there.

I had passed more than a dozen wooden doorways framing swollen, naked children. Inside, their mothers and sisters and maybe cousins lounged in a darker dimension. Because this was a holiday, no one was working. Normally, this place is alive from 4:30 a.m. with wailing animals and haggling merchants who later sell the fresh, warm meat at the market.

Then, I slipped into the home of Morales Leger. Within dim, green walls there are two beds over which gauze mosquito nets dangle. There is a pink, child-size potty chair where his youngest girl, Philocles, 2, fidgets, naked. 

We talk about his life. He has not worked steadily in years. He was a sergeant in the military for 26 years, though he says he is not a political man. He left the service 17 years ago and has worked odd jobs since. 

He married a woman much younger, Margareth Coustan, 29. He delivered their four children in his home, on their matrimonial bed. He writes their names in my notebook in a spidery hand: Gina, 8, Philomene, 5, Philippe, 3, Philocles, 2.

He lifts the youngest from her chamber pot, slides a piece of cardboard over its seat, and kisses the girl gently. 

• My consolation," he whispers, kissing her again.
• Then it begins to rain. 
• I ask him about Haiti, about politics and refugee boats, and the regime du jour. 
• But he shakes his head. 
• "It is a divine presence that guides us. That is all," he says, offering me a seat in his home.

The rain is powerful and relentless. In a while, his wife arrives, soaked and shivering. She sets down a flat basket of bruised chayotes and mangoes on the kitchen floor.

From what I can understand, she brings back what the market ladies don't sell.

A 25-year-old neighbor named Jonny explains that friends sometimes help her buy food.

"She has many mouths to feed," he says. "She has plenty babies."

And another is on the way. Margareth is five months pregnant.

Why so many babies? I ask.

Morales answers for her.

"They are my security," he says, clutching his chest. "They are my future."

The gray canal outside his window has become a swift river rushing away from the shanty strip, rushing toward the bay, washing the putrid smells, washing the mud off the pigs, cleansing the woman who bathes in the pig water. 

After the rain, everything along the alley glistens, and in the distance a rainbow has appeared. 

A couple of days later, I watch a storm approach from my hotel balcony high above the capital. The city seems to dissolve gradually into silver sheets of water that sweep inland from the bay, across the slums and markets. 

I think of the slaughterhouse and the resilient souls who dwell on its fringe. Probably, they're happily getting wet.

I know I learned something that afternoon at the house of Morales Leger. I learned that neither poverty nor politics can break the Haitian spirit.

I learned that sometimes it can rain on the most putrid of days. 

I learned that in this place where hope is too often elusive, the children of Morales Leger, his hope and consolation, are truly his wealth. (Balmaseda,1992, p.1A).

USING DIRECT QUOTATIONS 

Strong feature articles come alive with liberal use of direct quotations from a variety of people and, occasionally, even documents. People make features work and their words, through your use of direct quotations, give life to your story.

There are some rules about quotations in magazine and newspaper features that you should remember. First of all, in much of your article writing, you will find that quotations help to back up generalizations made about a person, place, or thing. Quotations give the article an element of reality beyond the perspective of the writer. For features, it means you can let someone else speak in the article, using his or her exact words.

The Miami Herald's Balmaseda says she depends a great deal on direct quotations for her articles and columns about people. Balmaseda (1993, personal communication) explained, "I don't always have a lot to say about a subject. I ask a question and let people say it for me. Sometimes people say it better. Many times, people who never get into the paper say things very beautifully and I feel compelled to use what they say. Quotes give you something to hang the story on. But you also have to recognize that some people don't have something to say and you have to be selective." 

Paraphrasing can work as effectively as direct quotations. Sometimes, paraphrases work better. There are occasions when you can state something more efficiently and more meaningfully. This avoids the sense of over quoting and overstating. Full-time freelance writer Hank Nuwer (1992), author of a book on pledging and hazing, believes paraphrases are the desired alternative to bad and inappropriate quotations, also. 

THE WRITING PROCESS: HOW ONE WRITER WRITES 

Veteran freelance writer Bill Steele has written and edited for newspapers and magazines. He has worked with both large and small publications. His own writing habits are well established and he shares them: I usually begin at the beginning, (i.e., by writing my lead). That's the newspaper background showing. However clever or cutesy it may be (I try to avoid cutesy, but some publications want it), it has to tell the reader what the article is about; if you don't know that yet you need to do more research, or at least more thinking. The lead pretty much determines what I have to talk about first, and that helps set up the structure of the article-what some people would call the outline. I seldom do an outline per se, although I may scribble a few sentences that show what comes first, what comes second, and so on. Often the sentences are transitions that show how I'm going to get from one area to the next. I think of the structure from the point of view of a teacher: What does the reader need to know before I introduce this piece of information? Sometimes I get stuck and have no idea what comes next. In that case, I may pick up some other part of the article and write that -- say, some biographical information on the person I interviewed. Thanks to the computer, I can have that floating around until I figure out where it goes, then just paste it in. Sometimes when I'm stuck I just go out for a walk; I'll start out thinking about other things, but after about a mile, the article ideas will come back in and I'll see a way to solve the problem. Then again, often the answers will come to me when I'm in bed trying to go to sleep, which is a nuisance because I have to get up again and write it all down. I do see writing as a problem-solving process, a sort of engineering job if you will: How do I put this structure together with the materials I've got? These days I write perforce in front of the computer. That's not much of a change, since I used to write in front of the typewriter. I was never much for writing in long- hand; I can go faster on a keyboard, and the only way to keep up with my thoughts in longhand is to write illegibly. The workspace now is sort of L-shaped, with the computer screen in front of me and the disk drives and printer off to the right. I have a swing-arm lamp that illuminates the space on the desk to the right of the keyboard and the keyboard itself without throwing much light on the screen. Notes and stuff I have to look at go on the desk under the lamp - and eventually get piled up to where I spend a lot of time leafing through for the thing I need.

The dictionary, thesaurus, White, and a few other basic references sit on the desk just behind that space, and works in progress get stuffed into stacked trays to the left. I get some of my work done in my head while walking or lying in bed. The majority of the work, really, gets done inside my head; the computer is just the place I put it after it's done. I remember a panel of the comic strip "Shoe" in which someone says, "Why are you staring out the window when you should be working. Start pounding the keyboard." To which Shoe replied, "Typists pound keyboards. Writers stare out windows."

Writer's Digest columnist Art Spikol (1993) feels direct quotations can add much to nonfiction, if they are used effectively."Quotation marks have a power far beyond the space they occupy in print," he argues. "Use a quotation mark, and the reader infers: Here's something somebody actually said. Here's a living, breathing individual about to speak to me. Here's something the writer thought was important enough to set off with those funny little apostrophes" (p. 55).In addition to quoting one individual at a time, many experienced feature writers use quotations to recreate dialogue to provide for the reader the effect of being there - getting to watch history occur, for example, through the words of the persons who were present. It seems to make the passage move more quickly, too. Here are some helpful guidelines in using quotations in your writing:

1. Make certain it is clear in the flow of your article just who is speaking. This is especially true if you change the person being quoted.
2. Vary your verbs of attribution. At times, you should rely on the standard verb, said, but there are other more precise verbs. Most feature writing uses the past tense verb, said, instead of the present tense verb, "says." Remember that verbs and verb tenses have specific meaning when used, so take care in selecting just the right word.
3. Vary placement of attribution verbs. It will be necessary to place them at the beginning of a sentence on some occasions; avoid using the verbs only at the end of sentences. Thus, use past tense as your standard tense for attribution.
4. Be careful in using long quotations. If you must use a lengthy quote from a person or text from a document, make certain you have introduced it to the reader to explain what you are doing and why.
5. Dialogue quotations add a great deal. Use them. But be clear who is saying what. And break up long passages of dialogue, if they are necessary, with some description of action by the speakers.
6. Quote exact words and do not change the words in the quotation. Even incorrect grammar will give the reader insight into the personality of the individual speaking.

You must also be very careful to be accurate with direct quotations. Quotations cannot be made up. Most professional journalists do not subscribe to the approach that modifying direct quotations is acceptable. This debate continues because some journalists and writers feel it is not troubling to "clean up" direct quotations to make them more understandable without changing the sense or meaning, others believe writers should not play with reality.

There are some legal limits, too. A writer for The New Yorker had a suit filed in federal court against her because a doctor believed he had been libeled by misused and even fabricated quotations in the article based on personal interviews by the writer. Although the case was dismissed on two occasions, it was returned to court a third time and the writer was found to have been wrong in her use of quotations by a jury. But when the jury could not decide a judgment award for the plaintiff -- the foreman said it was hopelessly deadlocked on that issue -- the judge eventually declared a mistrial. Regardless of the judgment, these matters of honesty accuracy and are serious for feature writers. The safest way to avoid such legal problems is to be accurate and correct and not to fabricate or alter what was said in any deliberate manner (Salant, 1993).

REWRITING, REWRITING, AND MORE REWRITING 

Some writing experts call rewriting an art form. Kubis and Howland (1985) said, "If you are a real writer, you know that rewriting is the name of the game" (p. 205). Unless you are a particularly gifted writer, you will seldom find that a first draft is sufficient for publication. Most writers find that to finish a manuscript is an achievement of note, but the real work comes in revision. 

The best policy is to finish the first draft, then let it sit a while - overnight or longer, if possible. Then read it from top to bottom with a fresh mind and clear head. You can be more critical and make some true improvements in the work. Each time you do this, the manuscript gets better as words are changed or cut, sentences are revised, and passages reorganized. Your goal is to revise until what you have to say flows smoothly. Revise the work until it seems to glide as you read it. Although beginning writers may need more rewrites, as you become more experienced, you will write, revise, and polish to finish an article in three distinct stages. 

Rewriting will help you make your thoughts clearer and, at the same time, more efficient. You can use this stage to add information, delete it, or clarify it. Rewriting is a necessary step. Even after that initial surge of creativity in writing the first draft, rewriting makes a significant difference in the quality of your work. Thus you must make the time to rewrite. It is a part of the writing process. Build it into the article production cycle you use. And remember one key question: If what you have written is not clear to you, how can it be clear to someone else? Rewriting is the answer.

BORROWING FROM FICTION WRITERS  

Some of the best nonfiction writers in the United States also write in a fiction style or use the tools of short story writers and novelists. They may not always realize it, but they use the same techniques. Use of dialogue is but one frequently found example. Countless successful and popular U. S. novelists began as nonfiction writers, of course. Mark Twain. Walt Whitman. Ernest Hemingway. Tom Wolfe. Gay Talese. Patricia Cornwell. Numerous modern journalists have crossed into fiction and crossed back. There is as much in common with the two approaches as there is not. Four elements in particular -- levels of abstraction, storytelling, use of tension, and development of characters-work effectively in many forms of feature writing:

• Abstraction: Summaries separate from the specific, seem to be the opposite of what most feature writers use in their writing. Feature writers seldom delve into the theoretical world, right? Without getting overly philosophical, they do. Although an abstract is the essence of something, such as a series of events or a single event, writers often write in the abstract. You do. There are often times when you are general, others when you are specific. Hart (1991e) makes this proper observation: "The best literary writers recognize the importance of varying abstraction levels, depending on the purposes they have in mind. But lots of journalists pay little attention to the degree of abstraction in their writing. Out of habit, they stay at the same middling abstraction levels all the time, that cruise-control approach robs their writing of both meaning and impact" (p 1). Hart likes to use a ladder metaphor in referring to levels of abstraction in writing. Think of the bottom of the ladder as the most concrete, or single item, and the top of the ladder as the most general, or everything. And in between, you find varying degrees gradually going from the specific to general as you refer to the item in your article.  
• Storytelling: Humans have always been storytellers. And when typesetting came along, the stories began to be preserved. Journalism, in its most primitive form, began to evolve. Feature writers are storytellers. There are both long and short stories to tell. We tend to tell the short ones. However, think of telling stories as something more than just anything you might write. Stories in the strictest form involve more than what most news and feature writers offer. Some experts say that journalists simply tell the end of a good story. Storytelling involves a dynamic beginning, an unusual setting, and contrast between content and style. Because storytelling involves an entire plot, a good feature writer using storytelling techniques includes the beginning, middle, and then the ending. And the story is often told in this manner, also. Storytelling, in the most traditional manner, is done first-hand. It uses common literary devices such as shifting points of view, irony, dialogue, and surprise endings. Today, it may seem to be a lost art. It was common earlier in this century and remains popular with some magazine and nonfiction book writers (DeSilva, 1990; Hart, 1991d; Wood, 1997). 
• Tension: Another tool used by successful feature writers who borrow from fiction writers is tension, the stretching and straining of human emotions to their limits. Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer Madeleine Blais (1984) said she likes to build her feature articles around tension involving the central sources, or the characters, in her articles. Without it, she says, her articles would not be worth writing. "Tension offers an element of surprise. It allows the reader to imagine many possible endings to the course of the piece. If there isn't some kind of tension, there's no story" (n.p.). One effective method for creating high levels of tension is foreshadowing, or hinting at things to come through some description in the article. This works because it hooks readers into finding out what will happen later in the narrative (Hart, 1992).
• Characters: In the preceding paragraph, sources were also described as characters. It is often helpful for feature writers to think of their sources as characters in the overall story they are telling. Naturally, in nonfiction feature writing, the realities of the situation limit what the characters do and do not do. Feature writers develop sources/characters in their articles through description and use of direct quotations. There is little else. Although all sources cannot be developed into characters, it helps in some articles. Sources are distinct. If feature writers could use some of the descriptive techniques that novelists use in describing their characters, readers would benefit from deeper knowledge of the people in the stories. We should take opportunities, when they come along, to describe people through their words and our observations of their behavior. We also should describe them in terms of their appearance, their possessions, their values, their beliefs, and even how they move, express themselves with their hands, and how they talk ( Hart, 1991a, 1991b). 

It starts with storytelling skills, some experienced feature writers believe. Joan Ryan, columnist and feature writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, emphasizes the basic storytelling skill to appeal to readers. Ryan (1997) stated, "When you tell a story to a kid, it doesn't matter what it's about: Galileo or Abraham Lincoln or some kid having a bad day. If it's well told, that kid will sit there slack-jawed listening to you. I think we never outgrow that. I think we always want to be told a good tale. And I don't think it matters what the subject matter is." Auletta (1997) believed that any time a writer begins a project; he or she should examine the question of how to tell the story:

You don't want the story to dominate the facts and to shape it in a way that's misleading, but essentially you have to figure out a way to tell a story. One of the things that's critical to story telling is to convey a sense that you are trying to be an anthropologist. That is to say you are going out there and you are trying to capture the essence of what you are reporting on ... be it a personality, an organization, or an incident. To do that, you are going there with Colombo-like questions: innocence, don't know the answers. I always keep this aphorism ... in mind: "Truth is a liquid, not a solid."

READABILITY OF WRITING 

Regardless of what you use to write your manuscript, good writing must be readable, just as it must be understandable. Readability is simply a term that describes how easy something is to read. Writing experts have been studying readability for about 50 years and have devised various rules and formulas for readability. As American Press Institute's Wardlow (1985, p. 15) observed, these tools for measuring readership have different ways of getting to the same points about readable articles: 

• Short is better than long.
• Simple forms are best.
• Personal is better than impersonal. 

Well-known readability formulas include those created by Rudolph Flesch (946, 1949) in the 1940s and Robert Gunning (1968) in the 1960s. Flesch found that there is an ideal number of 17 to 19 words per sentence. The ideal number of syllables is 150 per 100 words and an ideal percentage of personal interest words, such as pronouns, is 6% 100 words. He also said that sentences that have human interest, such as direct address, questions, or quotations should be about 12% of the total. However, Hart (1990e) cautioned: "[W]e all need to understand that while readable writing may be simple, it isn't necessarily simplistic" (p. 1).The late 1980s brought personal computing into writing education. As a result, there are now numerous programs available in secondary and higher education that address writing and readability. Students of writing, as well as writing teachers, now can use computer programs to calculate these readability assessments on the spot. Some grammar and writing checkers are now a part of more sophisticated word processing packages, going well beyond the usual spelling and thesaurus features. Other forms of analysis of writing are also possible, through computers, to determine mechanical and structural writing errors that would reduce readability. Many of these programs are available at low cost through software clearinghouses or local personal computer stores.

POLISHING AND EDITING MANUSCRIPTS

You can also think of rewriting as a self-editing process, but the process is somewhat different. Rewriting means writing it over and over until it is right. Self-editing is making changes on the existing manuscript without rewriting major portions. The focus here is on self-editing. There are two ways of looking at manuscript editing. First, you must consider what has to be done on your own part to improve your manuscript. This is an important stage and it is the most significant portion of this discussion. The other, the handling that another person gives your manuscript, also remains vital to the writing process, yet it is out of your control for the most part. But what can you do to improve your article? What is within your control? One editor has an answer. Phil Currie (Wardlow, 1985, p. 45), a Gannett Company news executive, offers this checklist of the most significant problem areas to look for: 

1. Dull, wooden phrasing
2. Poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation
3. Story organization
4. Errors of fact or interpretation
5. Holes in stories, completeness
6. Clutter
7. Redundancy

There are other concerns in tuning a manuscript. You must, as noted before, match a publication's stylebook. You must answer the unanswered questions. You have to check for attribution strengths and weaknesses. Finally, as any copy desk chief will tell you, tightening is always a concern about a manuscript: Watch for wordiness.

WRITING IS GROUNDED IN REPORTING SKILLS

Lucille S. deView, writing coach for the Orange County Register, says feature writers are: like the dancer grounded in ballet who can switch to tap, jazz, or modern dance -- and enjoy performing all of them. The grounding comes from solid reporting skills honed through writing obituaries, doing the police beat, covering sports, any and all tasks that bear down hard on the who, what, where, when, and why. The joy comes from leaping beyond these vaunted five W's, to write with style and grace. The skilled feature writer borrows techniques from literary masters to infuse stories with a lyrical quality. Within a short span of time, the feature writer may twirl from a scientific breakthrough to the newest discovery in fashions; from explaining the stock market to a how-to piece on cultivating roses. The rewards are great, especially for the writer open to new ideas but blessed with common sense. Some suggestions:

1. Do not mistake celebrity or education as the only sources of intelligent discussion, wit, or sagacity. People whose occupations are humble and names unknown may provide the deepest insights and most compelling quotes. Factory workers go to the symphony; a housemaid becomes an opera star; stevedores publish poetry; homemakers become bank presidents, and more.
2. Be unbiased in your writing. Sexism and racism often take subtle forms and ethnic stereotypes persist unless we are careful to avoid them. Since a majority of women are in the workplace, a writer's vocabulary must keep pace. Use the word "executives," not "businessmen"; "firefighters" instead of "firemen." And do not write "woman doctor"; just say "doctor."
3. Don't make racial exceptions. If you say "the articulate black professor," you imply most are inarticulate. Don't indicate race unless it is relevant tothe story. Why mention "the Hispanic bookkeeper" when you would not say "the German bookkeeper"?
4. Use the word "disabled," not "handicapped." People "use" wheelchairs; they are not "confined" to wheelchairs. Use appropriate terminology for specific disabilities. Is the person "hearing impaired" or "deaf"?
5. In general, don't call older people senior citizens. They prefer being called older persons. When so many are active and healthy, it is not appropriate to say a person is "80 (or 90, or more) and still going strong."
6. Don't portray younger people as always troubled. See the individual, not the group.
7. Practice problem-solving journalism. Explaining the dimensions of a dilemma is helpful to your readers; finding an answer is curative. Seek the solution, test it, and pass it along if it has merit.
8. Do interviews in person, not on the telephone. Not seeing the person's raised eyebrows or scowl is a risk -- and a lost opportunity for colorful writing
9. Make each assignment a learning experience. See it as an opportunity to enrich your writing and your life. (de View, 1993, personal communication)

Editing Your Article and Working with Editors

 In 1915 The Washington Post reported that President Woodrow Wilson had taken his fiancée, Edith Galt, to the theatre but rather than watch the play the president 'spent most of his time entering Mrs. Galt'. They meant 'entertaining' Robert Hendrickson, ‘The Literary Life and Other Curiosities’. The importance of journalists editing and proofreading their own work before giving it to editors is stressed. Three kinds of editing are outlined: filling in gaps, reading the article for structure and rhythm, and the laborious line-byline editing. A case study of the editing of a profile piece is presented to demonstrate the value of editors helping journalists improve stories. You have finished writing the feature. Good stuff. I knew you could do it. If the piece is not needed yesterday save the file and take a break. You have earned it. Reporting and writing a 2000 word plus feature is a lot more work than it looks. Or it should be. If you are not at least a little tired afterwards you are either a consummate craftsman or you did not put much effort into it. Readers have little understanding of the work required to produce a good piece of writing. They think because a piece is easy to read it must have been easy to write. I wish. It was Red Smith who said, sure writing is easy—all you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein. Smith was an outstanding American sportswriter until his death in 1982. His columns may be decades old now but he really was a consummate craftsman. There are moments, of course, when you are on song and what a buzz that is, but there are times when you don't feel like writing at all, and even times when, as Stephen King puts it, 'you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position'. 1 Many features are written against a hard deadline, but one of the aims of the planning process is to build in time to edit and proofread. Just as you should take charge of your professional life by generating the bulk of story ideas, so you should edit the feature before handing it over to the editor who commissioned it. Editors appreciate clean copy because they have to rescue so much that isn't. It is not simply   a matter of running the computer spell check over it; spell check is a problem I will come back to. There are four stages of editing that feature writers can do:

• Filling the gaps
• Reading it out loud
• Editing line by line
• Proofreading.

FILLING THE GAPS

After a break, the first step is to read through the feature to see if there is anything left out. The act of writing clarifies the mind and propels it forward. Even well-organised feature writers finish a story and see changes to be made. You write and edit in two different frames of mind. As John Gould, a local newspaper editor, told Stephen King during an early stint as a journalist: 'When you write, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. ' 2 Look at what you promised the reader and whether you have kept your word. As discussed earlier, it is easy for feature writers, immersed in their story, to overlook the bleeding obvious question. It is also easy to overlook small matters. Readers will put up with one unanswered question, maybe two, but much beyond that they will register annoyance and turn the page. For instance, in a profile of film-maker Michael Moore that appeared in The Sunday Telegraph, Moore's earlier tenure as editor of the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones was covered but there was only a cryptic reference to why he quit after only five months. Given that Moore is left-wing and the magazine has a strong reputation for the kind of journalism for which Moore subsequently made his name, it was puzzling. 3 It is also easy to clutter stories with unimportant characters and events. If you think there is a contradiction between answering nit-picking questions and stripping out clutter you are half right. There is no contradiction, but it feels as though there is. Writing a good feature requires clear thinking skills of a high order because you need to provide enough information to answer relevant questions readers might have about the topic, but not so much as to overwhelm them. This is why at all stages of the research and writing, you keep tacking back to the question, what is this story about? You have to be clear-eyed in pruning out material that is not relevant to the story; simultaneously you are always looking for more and better quality relevant information. Do final checks at this stage. While writing, you may have chosen not to check a particular fact because it would have interrupted the flow. Fair enough, but as you sweep through your material to see if there is anything important left out, check facts too. It is easy to misspell someone's name in the rush of writing. It is easy to misspell names full stop. Even a simple name like John Brown can be spelt Jon Browne. Particularly check numbers, quotes and anything that smells of a potential lawsuit. If in doubt about the latter, talk to the editor or consult a good textbook, such as Mark Pearson's The Journalist's Guide to Media Law, 2nd edition (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2004).

READING IT OUT LOUD  

Look at the story's structure, its lead and close. Does the structure tell the story well? Does the tone match the content of the piece? Is the lead polished and diamond-sharp? How do you react when you read the close? Does the pace vary? Is it quick when it needs to be and not, when it isn't? Does the piece read well? The best way to check is to read it out loud. You may feel like a dag doing this in a newsroom, although senior writers like Gary Tippet are known for regaling colleagues with passages as they write them. Read it under your breath if you are self-conscious. Find a good reader among your colleagues; by good reader I don't mean a member of a book club, but someone who will read the feature carefully and offer honest, constructive criticism. It has to be honest, otherwise they are wasting your time or worse; it has to be constructive, to help you improve the piece.

EDITING LINE BY LINE

This is the hard part. You need to prune your feature, to which you have become inordinately attached. You have put so much effort into it, this story is so important, it is almost poetry. It is okay to feel this way. It is your work and if you are not passionate about it, it is unlikely anyone else will be. But the story has to fit into a space, it is competing with dozens of others, and, hey, this is journalism; the whole newspaper is created top to bottom every day and when it is done, you come in the next day and do it all again. Magazines go through the same process weekly or monthly. You need to begin looking at your beloved feature through the eyes of an editor; if you don't the editor will and their comments will make you feel as if you have been king-hit with a case of king prawns. Stephen King's early mentor, John Gould, who King credited with teaching him more about writing in ten minutes than he learnt in years of English literature classes, had a formula: final version draft–10 per cent. This is good advice; almost every draft of a feature (or novel or textbook, for that matter) can be trimmed by 10 per cent. The question is: how? Begin by getting into the right frame of mind. The English writer and critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said, 'Murder your darlings. ' 4 It is an alarming image, necessarily so. The darlings are those little pieces of literary self-indulgence that are not about the story but you showing off. Close your eyes if need be, but plunge a stake through your darlings' hearts or they will suck the story dry. Try thinking of it this way: imagine your feature was written by a complete arsehole. Now set to work on it.

PROOFREADING

Mistakes are unavoidable in journalism because, despite all technological advances, a newspaper or magazine is, in the end, a handmade object. Technology is only as good as the people who invented it, which bring me back to the computer spell check program. By all means use it, but it is not, repeat not, a substitute for proofreading your story word by word for the simple reason that a word may be spelt correctly (spell check gives it a tick) but may be the wrong word (spell check gives it a tick—D'oh!). A student handed in an assignment in which the word 'loose' was used at least a dozen times when they really meant 'lose'. Full marks for spelling, none for proofreading! Reading for errors is different to reading for sense, let alone pleasure. It is not fun and it takes time, but few error-prone journalists survive long in the industry. You read slowly, focusing on each word to see if it is spelt correctly, to see if the sentence is punctuated correctly, if a report title is named consistently throughout the piece, a person's age has not changed between paragraphs seven and 21, and so on. To see this process in action, begin by reading this profile I wrote of Australian author Robin Klein, published in The Weekend Australian Magazine.

 

THE FLEETING MEMORY

By Matthew Ricketson [Precede] A stroke has left Robin Klein, one of Australia's most popular children's authors, with vivid long-term recall but a tenuous grasp on today. 

1. Hunched over her desk at 12.20 one spring night in 1999, Robin Klein pursued the scurrying figures on her computer screen as they built fortifications for their next battle in 'Age of Empires'. The game was light relief from the spade work of writing, although one of its medieval scenarios helped inspire the starting point for the plot of her latest novel. She writes up to a dozen drafts of a book before showing it to her editor, and this one was only a couple of drafts away.  
2. Klein was engrossed in the action when without warning a searing pain gripped her, as if someone had struck a match inside her head. The 63–year-old children's author cried out and her daughter Ros, who lived at home in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne, found her clutching the left side of her head. 'Call an ambulance, ' was all Klein could manage. 
3. She had suffered a cerebral aneurism, a type of stroke. Some strokes come from a blood vessel bursting in the brain, others from a clot in the blood supply. An aneurism is a weakness in the wall of an artery that makes it balloon out, rather like the flawed inner tube of a bicycle. It may be brought on by the effects of smoking or hypertension, but it is often a congenital weakness, as it appeared to be in Klein's case. Some aneurisms rupture early, others not until later in life. It is an uncommon condition and victims have no idea of the time bomb ticking away—the aneurism simply sits there, causing no discomfort. 
4. Klein spent three weeks in intensive care. Aneurisms can be killers and the doctors feared she would succumb. But very slowly, watched by friends and her four children, Klein began to recover. Klein spent a further month in hospital, before being moved to a rehabilitation centre called Dunelm. 
5. Visiting family and friends were puzzled by Klein's mental state. She had little short-term memory, but could recall childhood events of 50 years before. Her imagination seemed to be roaming ceaselessly. Dunelm, with its nurses, rules and patients, conjured thoughts of her father who had been wounded during battle in World War I and of her daughter Ros, who had been training recently in the Army Reserve. Klein's novel-in-progress had a martial theme. At Dunelm she began thinking the novel could revolve around an 11– year-old growing up in an army training camp run by his parents. 
6. Fiction writers have rich imaginary lives; children's writers also have an ability to recall the textures of childhood. Klein appeared to be not just recalling hers, but re-experiencing it. Would this make her novels more authentic? 
7. For two months Klein's mind drifted between her memories, her imaginings and reality. Those close to her were distraught. She was no longer in danger of dying but she was no longer the Robin they knew. The Robin they knew loved writing; she had once told her editor at Penguin, Julie Watts, she felt ill if more than a few days passed without her writing.
8. Klein still saw herself as a writer, but no longer of novels. She told her longtime agent, Tim Curnow, when he visited: 'I'm sorry I can't write books for you. I've got to write army training manuals now. ' In all likelihood, though, Klein will not write any training manuals, either. The aneurism's scrambling of short-term memory cripples her as a writer. She may still be able to recall perfectly her father's throaty laugh, but she can watch the same movie two days running and not remember she has already seen it. Imagination may be crucial to writers, but not if they are unable to connect thoughts and analyse them.
9. When The Weekend Australian Magazine interviewed Klein recently she had still not written anything since being struck by the aneurism. 'I remember being very confused, ' she recalls now. 'One minute I was a little kid rocking a doll to sleep, the next minute I was getting married in a church in all my wedding finery. I remember thinking, “what's going on? I'm bumping all over the place. ” I knew something had happened but not really what had happened. It was a bit like watching yourself on a film. 
10. She has recovered enough to move out of Dunelm and in with her son Michael and his family in nearby Menzies Creek. We meet at her old home, where Ros now lives alone. To a stranger, there are no physical traces of Klein's condition. A small birdlike woman with a surprisingly unlined face, she chats in the lounge room of the old timber cottage with its views of the lush Dandenongs while her daughter brings in coffee and muffins. She slips into the sharp-edged banter she and Ros exchanged for the many years they shared the family home after the other three children moved out.
11. Later, though, watching an education video made about Klein in 1997, I am struck by how she actually looks better now than before her illness. Since the aneurism she has shed weight, no longer suffers from migraines and, most remarkably, has sloughed off the arthritis that plagued her for many years. Where it had once hurt her fingers so badly just to type that she experimented with a voice-activated computer, now the fire like pain has gone.
12. These are not typical reactions to an aneurism, although it is unclear whether Klein's short-term memory lossmeans she does not notice these conditions or reflects the still limited understanding of the mysteries of the brain. 'So, that aneurism was a good thing, ' she says, seemingly without irony. Ros laughs bitterly; Michael Klein, who has driven his mother over for the interview, shifts his seat on the couch.
13. She shows no signs of anxiety about being interviewed, something that once would have given her a conniption. She is naturally reclusive and grew more so with time, granting interviews only if her publisher insisted. Although she enjoyed the adulation of her young readers, she always looked for an excuse to call off a school visit. 'Can't we say my arm's in plaster and I won't be able to sign any autographs, so I'd best not come, ' Ros recalls her mother saying on several occasions.
14. Klein's shyness is one reason she is not as well known as she could be—she is out of step with the current demand for writer as performer. Adults rarely take notice of children's books, which is another reason why few outside her immediate circle know about Klein's illness. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is a rare phenomenon—children's literature that has crossed over to the adult world.
15. The best-selling Australian children's author, Paul Jennings, believes Klein has 'contributed more to helping Australian children read than J. K. Rowling, yet you hardly ever see her name in the newspaper'. The hype surrounding Rowling's books and the film adaptations disguise the general invisibility of the children's book world.
16. Other children's authors are treated as if they really do live at the bottom of the garden and eat fairy bread, according to Nadia Wheatley who has won prizes for her books for teenagers but is best known for her biography of Charmian Clift.
17. Klein is one of Australia's most popular children's authors, alongside Jennings, John Marsden, Emily Rodda and Andy Griffiths. In Australia her books, published by Penguin, have sold more than a million copies. Her Penny Pollard series, published by Oxford University Press, has also achieved healthy sales. Her books have been translated into seven languages.
18. Klein's career predates the other authors'. She started writing relatively late, nearing 40, and as one of her editors, Rita Hart, recalls: 'She just wrote and wrote. She was so full of ideas. '
19. Jennings remembers being 'really impressed and overwhelmed' when he began visiting schools in 1986 to promote his first book, 'because every kid's desk seemed to have a copy of Penny Pollard on it'. They still do: figures released last year showed eleven of the top 100 books held in Australian school libraries were written by Klein.
20. She has written at least 50 books since 1978, as well as more than 100 short stories and school readers. Many of her books are still in print, which is increasingly rare in the modern publishing world with its shrinking back lists. Klein's best known books are Hating Alison Ashley (published in 1984 and regarded as a classic of Australian humour), and the Penny Pollard series, the first instalment of which was published in 1983. The sixth instalment was published in 1999 and is Klein's most recent book—and probably her last.
21. Klein has also won numerous awards, including two Children's Book Council gold stickers, a NSW Premier's Literary award in 1992, and six of the awards voted for by children. Appealing to both children and judges of literary awards is uncommon.
22. Mark Macleod, children's publisher at Hodder Headline, believes Klein would have won more literary awards if not for an apparent bias against humorous books. Hating Alison Ashley was shortlisted and should have won, says Macleod, but no humorous novel won a CBC gold sticker until Nick Earls' 48 Shades of Brown in 2000.
23. Hating Alison Ashley is written from the perspective of grade six girl Erica Yurken, whose unfortunate name prompts a rash of nicknames that constantly undercut her desperate desire to rise above her inelegant surroundings at Barringa East primary and prepare for a glittering career on the stage.
24. The book has not dated because its appeal has little to do with a stenographic rendering of the latest kidspeak and everything to do with children's experience of school, teachers and other kids. Erica hates the beautiful, composed new girl Alison Ashley because she is everything Erica aspires to, but the book turns on how each girl learns more about themselves by shedding their prejudices about the other.
25. Children's author, Judith Clarke, wrote recently of Klein's unrivalled understanding of 'the adolescent yearning for the perfect, the lovely and romantic, beyond the mundane world of everyday'. Clarke says Klein portrays compassionately the way young people come to terms with their dreams, learning to distinguish between fantasy and truth and discovering the possibilities of both the real world and themselves.
26. The source of Klein's empathy seems to be her bone-deep recall of her own childhood, a quality she shares with many outstanding children's writers. Born in the northern New South Wales town of Kempsey in 1936, Klein was the eighth of nine children. Her father, Lesley McMaugh, received a war veterans' pension and ran a small family farm. She recalls the family's poverty: 'I remember walking along the main street on a Saturday morning, shopping and looking in the shop windows with the pretty dresses, and I was just consumed with sadness that we couldn't get them. '
27. She and her sisters were teased about their clothes. 'Oh, you're wearing that funny old dress again, ' they would say. 'You'd just keep your face perfectly straight, without flinching a muscle, to show that you didn't care. Underneath, of course, you're dying, but you never show the other kid that. '
28. There were books in the house, scrambled from second-hand sales, and all the children were early and avid readers, but there were not enough to satisfy their curiosity. Their parents told them to write their own books, and Robin in particular took them at their word, starting with The Beautiful Widow of Perrin's Creek in primary school. She grew up thinking everyone wrote their own books, telling herself stories at night or plunging into the imaginary worlds that others like Ethel Turner and, later, Shakespeare and William Golding had created.
29. Her love of stories made her an oddity; she did not enjoy her office jobs and it was only after she married Karl Klein at the age of 20 and began raising their four children that she found her passion a source of enjoyment and power. She loved cuddling on the couch, reading to the kids or making up her own stories; one became her first published book. A light went on in her head when she realised it was possible to make a living from it.
30. Few do, but Klein is a gifted storyteller. For several years she worked as a teacher's aide at a primary school in a housing commission area in Melbourne's south-east. Many of the students would not be seen dead with a book, but soon the teachers knew that if they sent the aide down the back of the excursion bus her exotic stories of army captains in the war would settle the natives. Those experiences, she recalls with a laugh, resurfaced years later when writing Hating Alison Ashley.
31. If Klein's memories of a decade ago are still sharp, she is blithely unaware that more than once in a 90–minute interview, she retells the same story. She is confused about Dunelm, describing it as an army camp. Her son Michael says: 'It was never an army camp. ‘But the army put me in, didn't they?' 'No they didn't. It was just a hostel where you stayed to recover.' And they did get me recovered, did they? Am I a lot better?' Says Ros: 'You're a lot better than you were. 'Oh thank you … you liar. You're lying, aren't you?' 'No, I'm not,' Ros replies. Her mother laughs and says: 'When she gets that smirk on you know she's lying about something. So I am safe to let out on my own?' 'Maybe, ' says Ros with a half smile. 'Oh, god! She's a bitch isn't she, ' she says, laughing again. 'I learnt it all from you, Mum. '

Their banter continues. Its robust wit is a feature of the strong family she raised and of Klein's writing. Though there may never be a new book, that skill and empathy endures in every Australian school library.

In the next few weeks the magazine published three letters, all of them positive. One, from an Anna Renzenbrink, read:

Reading about author Robin Klein's stroke reminded me of the sadness I felt on hearing that Roald Dahl had died …I am very sorry that there may never again be a novel from this fantastic children's author. Hating Alison Ashley has one of the best punchlines I have ever read in a novel, and I enjoy it even more now at age 24 than I did at age ten. Klein's books are entertaining, engaging and essential reading for any literate Australian childhood. 

The magazine's editor, Helen Anderson, was happy with the piece, readers liked it and I was reasonably satisfied. Would it surprise you to learn the original article was rejected by another magazine editor? Perhaps not if you knew the original was nearly 4000 words long and not especially good. This is a case study in the value of editing, both by the journalist and the editor. The impetus for the story came from Julie Watts at Penguin, who edits both Klein's and Paul Jennings' books. She told me about Klein's aneurism; I wanted to write the story because of the peculiar mental state Klein found herself in, and because she is an outstanding author who has not received the recognition she deserves. I pitched the idea along those lines to the editor of Good Weekend, Fenella Souter, and she liked it. It took a long time to do the story, partly because it was difficult to set up interview times with Klein and partly because I was juggling it with university work. I also did too much research for a magazine profile, probably a hangover from having recently written a book.These details of my life are only relevant because they help explain why the original version was nearly 4000 words (it is reprinted in the appendix beginning on p. 254). When I finally sent it to Fenella Souter she had forgotten she had even commissioned it, meaning I had neglected my own advice of keeping in touch with editors, and in any case she did not think the story worked. This upset me; I had put a lot of effort into the piece. Stupid editors, what would they know? Well, she was absolutely right. Nearly 4000 words on a relatively unknown writer is too much, and I had failed to properly bring out the poignancy of Klein's situation.I took the idea to Helen Anderson at The Weekend Australian Magazine and she too liked it but agreed only to look at the story. I went back and pruned it to 2912 words. What was cut and on what grounds? The main cuts were:

• Understanding Klein's condition was complicated by her storyteller's habit of exaggerating—one paragraph.
• Detail on the number of Harry Potter books sold in Australia—one sentence.
• Detail on the number and type of awards she has won—one paragraph.
• Comment on her writing across a variety of genres—one paragraph.
• Material about a teenage novel Klein wrote about a drug addict—one paragraph.
• Details about the games she and her sisters played as children—one and a half paragraphs.
• One of the quotes about the family's poverty—one paragraph.
• Material about her mother having no time to cuddle her children— one paragraph.
• Exaggerated stories her parents told her—one sentence.
• Details about Klein's early working life—one paragraph.
• Material about letters Klein receives from fans—six paragraphs.

The reasons for the cuts were that there was far too much information and analysis of Klein's writing for a feature in a general interest magazine, there was too much biographical material about someone who is hardly an A-list celebrity, and sifting fact from fiction in Klein's stories of her past was a diversion from the main theme of the story. All the cut material would be included in a biography of Klein; that is, the material itself was not rubbish, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anderson emailed, saying she liked the story and wanted to run it. She had a few queries that required new material but she wanted to trim the piece to 2700 words. She sent me a version that she had already worked on to make space for the new material. She cut: 

• One paragraph from a two-paragraph precede I had written.
• Several references to Klein's daughter Ros amounting to two paragraphs.
• Another detail about sales of the Harry Potter series.
• Two paragraphs about Hating Alison Ashley and another Klein book, The Listmaker.

Anderson continued the cutting I had already begun, with an important addition. She drastically reduced the role of Klein's daughter, Ros, in the story because she was secondary. My problem had been that Ros was the conduit to her mother and much of my contact had been through her. As a writer it was natural to include her; an editor has never met the source and simply asks whether they are central or peripheral to the story action. In her accompanying email, Anderson said more material was needed on aneurisms.

At the moment you don't even give a brief description of what it is, or more detail about how it affects this person. How does it affect most sufferers; are Robin's symptoms common; is it common, for example, for conditions such as arthritis to be 'cured' after an aneurism? To me the intrigue of this feature should rest on how a strange, unexpected explosion in the brain affects—in negative and positive ways—the two most vital characteristics of a passionate writer: imagination and memory. I think you need to develop that as the main focus of the feature. If Robin had been a doctor, say, or a scientist, the tragedy might be less poignant, or poignant in a different way. I feel the potential of this side of the story, but it's not there at the moment.

You don't make it clear why she hasn't written since the illness. We have no idea what her capabilities are now. At one stage I thought the notion of living more frequently in childhood memories would be an odd advantage for a children's writer—obviously not, but you don't tell us why. In general, I'd like to read more about the slippery nature of memory and imagination, in relation to the illness afflicting this writer. Otherwise, I'm afraid, it's just a story about another writer. 

This is a stellar example of the writer missing the bleeding obvious question. Of course the nature of aneurisms was central to the story. Why hadn't I seen that? I had seen it at the outset when Julie Watts told me about Klein's stroke but lost it while reporting and writing. I then interviewed Klein's doctor and another doctor I knew and put in the new material. It was only four paragraphs (numbers three, six, eight and twelve in the published story) but it improved the piece greatly. Finally, Anderson felt the ending did not quite work. She wanted to trim the dialogue between the Kleins. Originally, it ran for a few more lines with Robin scolding Ros before she added: 'It's nice to have a daughter who's one of your best friends, though. ‘After which I had written a closing line: 'It would be even nicer, for her family, her colleagues and for thousands of children around Australia, if she was fully recovered and writing again. ‘In a phone conversation shortly before the piece was sent off to the printers, Anderson and I agreed this ending was a touch sweet and substituted the one that was published. This case study should help you see how easy it is for journalists to get lost in the thickets of a story and how important editing and editors can be.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 

• Find a colleague and read each other's feature stories. Provide honest, constructive criticism for each other. How easy or hard do you find it to be completely frank with colleagues or to consider their comments about your work?
• Take your feature story and reduce its length by 10 per cent without losing anything important.
• Proofread a page of a newspaper or a magazine feature article and list every grammatical or typographical error. If you cannot find any, keep reading carefully until you do.

Summary: William Strunk, once said, "The best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules", some experts have noted that a majority of feature-writing Pulitzer Prizes in the past decade have been won by individuals writing stories cast as literary nonfiction (Hart, 1995). They do this by identifying classic story elements in daily life. You can do it also. The elements are relatively simple to list: characters, use of dialogue, use of conflict and tension, and strong organization using scene construction. 

According to William Zinsser, good writing a disciplined, rigorous effort that comes from practice. It takes rewriting, what he calls "the essence of writing" (p. 4). It takes the same regular, daily schedule that a craftsman might use in making furniture or artwork.

After we see Malapropism, i.e. misuse of often similar but incorrect words. These sorts of writing mistakes come from laziness and from ignorance of the language. 

According to Michael Bugeja, magazine writing professor and Writer's Digest contributing editor the seven essential elements are:

topic,    theme,     title,     viewpoint,    voice,    moment,   and endings.

Professor Ernest Brennecke (Wardlow, 1985, p. 24) created the following eight sentences and eight different meanings by changing the location of one word. Read the sentences or say them out loud. Notice how the meaning of each sentence changes as the location of the word only changes. Here's a lesson -- one you should not forget -- about saying precisely what you mean in a sentence.                    

Only I hit him in the eye yesterday.

                        I only hit him in the eye yesterday.

                        I hit only him in the eye yesterday.

                        I hit him only in the eye yesterday.

                        I hit him in only the eye yesterday.

                        I hit him in the only eye yesterday.

                        I hit him in the eye only yesterday.

                        I hit him in the eye yesterday only.

According to Writer's Digest Senior Editor Thomas Clark other nine tips to establishing yourself in the professional writer frame of mind:

1. Involve yourself with writing such as attending writing classes or conferences.
2. Equip yourself with writing tools.
3. Read books about writing and other writers.
4. Put words on paper.
5. Write every day.
6. Decide what type of writer you seek to be.
7. Think small to build confidence.
8. Send out your work after completing it.
9. Expect some rejection and analyze the reasons for rejections.

According to University of Pittsburgh magazine editor David Fryxell believes that. "By getting organized -- wresting order out of the chaos of your writing process -- you will be liberated to be all that you can be as an author.

A good procedure for beginners might be the following steps: 

1. Think of the main points of the article and make these topics the Roman numerals of your outline. These are also your article's main sections.

2. Next, divide each of the main sections into subsections. What are the major characteristics, or concerns, of each Roman numeral section? There might be just one characteristic or several dozen. List each so you will not forget to include these as you begin to write portions of the manuscript. Letter each of these A, B, and so on.
3. If the article is going to be lengthy, you might want to go beyond the alphabetic listings. If you do extend the outline, these will be details of each subsection and they can be numbered 1, 2, and so forth.
4. On longer articles, or articles with sidebars and boxed inserts such as many magazines use, you should use separate outlines for the sidebars. Often, after writing the main article, you spot a portion of the main article outline that lends itself to a "take out" or "sidebar." 

According to the New Yorker writer and author Ken Auletta, You gather all this material and what do you do? The answer to that...is to spend a lot of time doing the most laborious indexing. I put it all in an index and stare at it. Then I move it around and try to figure out what the structure is. I master the material of the "trees" of this forest and then step back, sit with it, and try to figure out what is the forest I want to write about.

These are the main time-tested story structural approaches of articles: 

• Inverted pyramid. This approach might work for some features, but it is best used in straight news writing. This approach is less appropriate for feature material because it is structured by most important to least important priorities. It usually requires a summary lead. 
• Chronological order. This follows sequencing of events. When a feature recounts events or describes a procedure, this approach might be best
• Essay. A rather standard approach to all writing, this is found in columns, analyses, reviews, and other personal opinion or subjective writing. The essay format is standardized with an introduction, middle, and conclusion.
• According to some writing experts call rewriting an art form. Kubis and Howland (1985) said, "If you are a real writer, you know that rewriting is the name of the game.
• The best policy is to finish the first draft, then let it sit a while -- overnight or longer, if possible. Then read it from top to bottom with a fresh mind and clear head. You can be more critical and make some true improvements in the work.

Readability

Writing experts have been studying readability for about 50 years and have devised various rules and formulas for readability. As American Press Institute's Wardlow (1985, p. 15) observed, these tools for measuring readership have different ways of getting to the same points about readable articles:

• Short is better than long.
• Simple forms are best.
• Personal is better than impersonal.

POLISHING AND EDITING MANUSCRIPTS 

According to Phil Currie the most significant problem areas to look for:

1. Dull, wooden phrasing
2. Poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation
3. Story organization
4. Errors of fact or interpretation
5. Holes in stories, completeness          
6. Clutter
7. Redundancy