Several years ago, Adam Hochschild, the acclaimed author of King Leopold’s Ghost and other nonfiction narratives, told a Vanderbilt University audience that academic writing doesn’t have to be boring. Scholars of history and science — theoretically any discipline — can use basic storytelling techniques … Read more
It isn’t often that a narrative journalist’s retirement makes the news, but when Sports Illustrated announced this spring that longtime writer Gary Smith would be leaving the business, the public eulogies — and the “ … Read more
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
