Jacqui Banaszynski retired as the endowed Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism in 2017, is editor at Nieman Storyboard, and a faculty fellow at the Poynter Institute. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for “AIDS in the Heartland,” a series about a gay farm couple facing AIDS, and was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer in international reporting for her account of the sub-Saharan famine.
Storytellers in any medium can learn from those in others. Writers must know how to paint mental images through the hieroglyphics of text, apply (and break) rules of grammar to ensure clarity, and translate specialty jargon into widely understood … Read more
I‘m not much on Valentine’s Day. I liked the grade school tradition of exchanging Valentine’s Day cards with classmates. (Is that just a U.S. thing?) Each of us was supposed to have enough cards for everyone so no one … Read more
Editor’s note: We’re looking at the never-ending debate over what is called, in journalese, the “nut graf” — that so-what paragraph or section that pulls out of the news or narrative to provide context and significance. In earlier posts, veteran … Read more
Editor’s note: We’re looking at the never-ending debate over what is called, in journalese, the “nut graf” — that so-what paragraph or section that pulls out of the news or narrative to provide context and significance. In an earlier post, veteran … Read more
Conference panels can be frustrating things. Several subject experts droning on, absorbed with the minutiae of their own work, sometimes failing to make bigger points, often repeating what other panelists have already said, usually running over the allotted time, … Read more
In the original context of “The Overstory,” this sentence applies to a young man — a teenager, actually — who tumbles into the little-known language of coding and programming in the nascent days of computing. The … Read more
There is much to consider in “The Three-Body Problem,” the first in a trilogy by Chinese science fiction novelist Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu). Much of it – physics, astronomy, technology – is beyond my … Read more
If this choice for One Great Sentence seems odd, rest assured we’re not going to go all holiday sappy on you. That’s what the Hallmark holiday movie channels are for. Instead, when this line zipped by in my annual … Read more
A morning’s hasty scroll through Facebook earlier this week showed the above photo from Traci Angel, an author, teacher and freelancer based in Kansas City and a recent Storyboard contributor. In a brief post under the … Read more
This simple statement stands as a truism for all storytellers, regardless of platform or genre. Every writer, filmmaker, photographer, illustrator, podcaster, editor and teacher of same should keep some version of it close at hand. Have it cross-stitched and framed … Read more
