Author

Roy Peter Clark

@RoyPeterClark

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

“If the history of the earth’s tides should one day be written by some observer of the universe, it would no doubt be said that they reached their greatest grandeur and power in the younger days of Earth, and that they slowly grew feebler and less imposing until one day they ceased to be.”

—Rachel Carson, "The Sea Around Us"
September 13, 2017

Full life, tight space? Consider narrative shorthand.

An interesting writing move recently caught my eye in Rosalind Bentley's Atlanta Journal-Constitution profile of poet laureate Natasha Trethewey. For lack of a better name, I’ll call it the "narrative…
October 17, 2013
Keeping it real: how round characters grow from the seeds of detail

Keeping it real: how round characters grow from the seeds of detail

When I first read the New Journalism manifestos by Tom Wolfe in the late 1970s, they changed forever my vision of narrative. In spite of my Ph.D. in English, I…
January 24, 2011

The Persuasive Narrator

We call lots of things “stories” in American journalism, but very few of them are true narrative storytelling. Most journalistic accounts are reports, whose primary purpose is to pass along information…
May 23, 2006

The Line Between Fact and Fiction

Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression.…
September 7, 2004