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
At the end of 2013, everyone I knew was talking about a single essay: Ariel Levy’s “Thanksgiving in Mongolia: Adventure and Heartbreak at the Edge of the Earth,” published in the New Yorker in November. Read more
Five stories that you must stop and read, right now: last night’s winners in the National Magazine Awards for feature writing, reporting, essays, multimedia and fiction (you don’t need us to remind you that there’s a lot to learn about … Read more
May is bittersweet for the Nieman Foundation, as we send one class of fellows back into the world and welcome another, for a year of study at Harvard. Here, courtesy of the mothership, is the Class of 2015, … 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
A story without sound lies too dead on the page. Imagine “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, without the pop … pop … pop of the operating-room sensors. Or Tom Wolfe‘s “The Girl of … Read more
Our latest Notable Narrative, “For Richard family, loss and love,” is a two-part series by David Abel* of the Boston Globe. Abel spent six months with the Richards, a family of Boston Marathon bombing survivors, … Read more
The Pulitzer judges’ decision* not to award a prize in Features Writing on Monday was disappointing but not unprecedented.** The last (and only other) gap occurred 10 years ago, when stories by Robert Lee Hotz (Los Angeles Times), Anne Hull … Read more
