Whether you spell them “ledes” or “leads,” opening lines get a lot of attention. And why wouldn’t they? Sitting at the keyboard, with all the tedious and sometimes annoying reporting done, a writer is spoiled for choice, a world of … Read more
The sentence: The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. The writer: Matt Taibbi The … Read more
Recommended reading from the New York Times’ Opinionator series “Draft,” on writing: “Keep It Short,” by columnist and author Danny Heitman: To shorten my articles, I often worked through several versions, and with a merciless finger on the delete button … Read more
Last week, a student asked for notable examples of the write-around, that subgenre in which the journalist had limited to no access with the story subject. The most famous examples are Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” … Read more
A few years ago an intern did a study of the writing that showed up in our newspaper. He ran our stories through a computer program that measured the reading level you would need to understand each piece. It turned … Read more
Editor’s note: This is the inaugural installment of our “Why’s this (sentence) so good?” series, in which a writer analyzes a favorite line from a piece of journalistic storytelling. As we explained last week, we’ll fold the series into … Read more
The first chapter of How to Write a Sentence (and How to Read One), by Stanley Fish, begins with this paragraph: In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, “Do … Read more
My story might interest other small-timers with big ambitions. Believe it or not, a four-part series in a local newspaper launched my career as an author. My first book, Running the River: Secrets of the Sabine, was published … Read more
Storyboard isn’t the only Nieman Foundation publication with a rich craft archive. Our venerable sister magazine Nieman Reports maintains a trove of material on narrative and storytelling, and we’ll be highlighting some of that work in the coming weeks. Today’s outtake … Read more
Fifty takeouts from some of the speakers at last weekend’s Boston University conference on narrative, culled from the Twitter feeds of Lauren Alexander, Alletta Cooper, Cat Cowan, Jessica DuLong, John R. Gagain Jr., Sascha Garrey, Nate Goldman, … Read more
