Randerolf

Hello,

I’m taking a journalism course this semester. The course is great, but I feel a bit awkward as far as style goes. I’ve written many letters to the editor, a few editorials, and a couple full page articles that have all been published. The subject has mainly been on politics or local music/ nightlife.

I love for my writing to have a pop and sizzle with hooks and lines that roll off your tongue.

Now I enter the journalism style like a drunk gringo trying to speak Spanish. I get the concepts, just my steps are a bit furtive. Brief. Informative. I’ve always strived for this in my letters to the editor.

No questions in articles? A well placed question is powerful! Just ask any screen writer.

My old bag of tricks has a hole in it.

Could you give any pointers to me to liven up my journalistic writing? I would be very grateful. I don’t think that my stories are bad, just mediocre.

I write this post, because I just finished reading an article in Esquire yesterday and I was like “Wow. Magazine writing and the style I’m closer to is so vibrant and lush. My journalism writing feels solid, but still cerebral and cold in comparison.”

Thanks for your time.

If you need any samples or more info, just ask!

shakran

here's the big trick with rules of journalism writing. Learn them. Get good at them. Then, once you're REALLY good at writing according to the rules, feel free to toss them when it will add to the story.

Example, when I was in j-school (broadcast photojournalism is my bag) they told me all sorts of rules. Always shoot on the tripod. Always make sure your camera's level, etc etc. Well over the years I've broken every one of those rules. The trick is to only break them when it will make your story better than if you didn't break them.

It sounds like you're doing more newspaper writing than broadcast writing. An important thing to remember with newspaper writing is why it is like it is. In the early days of long-distance newspaper reporting, reporters would file their stories via telegraph. Problem was that telegraph wires weren't overly reliable, and stories would often be cut off after only a few paragraphs. So they started the "inverted pyramid" scheme, which puts all the details as close to the beginning as possible, with the less important stuff coming last. That way, if it gets cut off, there's still something for the paper to print.

We don't have that problem today, but people are so used to reading news stories written in this style that it is continued today. For hard news, it is the best style generally - after all, you don't want to have to read through 10 inches of prose before you finally find out that Sadaam was captured.

For feature stories, however, it doesn't work nearly as well, so you can break the "rule."

Another thing to remember when training for journalism writing is time. The style of writing you prefer takes a lot of time to get right, whereas straight "newspaper style" does not. This is important when you're given a story at noon that has a copy deadline of 8pm (and consider yourself lucky - in TV, we get stories at noon if not later, and they have to be on the air by 5).

If you want, toss up a story you did recently. What's your style look like in a paper?