Write Stuff

If, threatened with waterboarding, I were forced to choose the biggest writing problem I see, it would be the nut graf. It’s talked about a lot in Craft classes but I still find myself questioning students about why their stories don’t explain to readers why they should care.

What makes a good nut graf? I use the words sweep, context and road map. I want to know how the story will help explain the importance of an event, incident, or personality (the “sweep”). I want to know how the story fits into the history and culture of our times (the “context”). Finally, in a rich nut graf, I want to discover the themes, the landscape of the story, the “road map” that tells me where the story is going and whether I want to take that journey.

Said even more simply, a good nut graf tells readers what’s in it for them, what they’ll learn, and why they ought to take the time to read your story.

Read almost any consequential story in the Times, WSJ, or Daily News, and you’ll see good nut grafs. The same goes for broadcast scripts. In profiles of people, such as the live-ins that Craft I students are now working on, Prof. Svoboda calls the nut graf the “Joe is not alone” graf. What is it about ‘Joe’ that reflects a larger theme, a recurring pattern, an emerging trend? That’s a useful way of thinking about it.

The nut graf – btw, it’s not always just one graf, but one cohesive idea — is so important that I often recommend that reporters write it first, or at least make notes for the themes and details to include. That can start as you take notes, and can continue as you come back to the newsroom to file your stories. It’s important to think about what you’re about to write. Put yourself in the minds of the reader and ask why they should care. Force yourself to take the helicopter view, to see the story in all its dimensions, and then provide that perspective to the reader.

The nut graf also benefits the writer. By organizing the thinking about what makes the story important, the nut graf will give the writer a structure and organization that will allow the story to flow naturally from one theme to another. It also will allow the writer to more easily choose the best story-telling quotes and details to advance the arc of the story.

Rima Abdelkader’s recent story on how foreign media handle American colloquialisms – a story that helped push page views at NY City News Service to record levels – did a nice job of explaining why a reader should care:

Joe Sixpack. Hockey Mom. Maverick.
Even for those passionately following the presidential election, the definition of these campaign buzzwords can change with the voter, pundit or reporter who interprets them.
Imagine, then, how foreign language journalists must struggle to put the terms into context for their audiences when such words often have no direct translation.
That problem faced Al Jazeera reporter Abderrahim Foukara when he wrestled with how to describe “maverick.” The world’s most watched Arab network finally decided to define the American colloquialism as “a bird that sings outside the flock.”
For Al Jazeera, and foreign-language media throughout the world, the issue of how to translate the language of American politics is more than just a matter of journalistic accuracy. Their decisions reflect their own diverse histories and cultures, as well as their ethical guidelines about bias in translation.

The last three paragraphs provide a cohesive summary of why the reader should care: the sense of the story, a specific and interesting example and the sweep and context of the issue. It caught the attention of readers as diverse as the editors of the Huffington Post to an individual American blogger in Guatemala.

Last point: Whenever you read stories in print, scripts, online or blogs, find the “nut graf” and ask yourself whether it succeeded, and why. Take away those lessons and apply them to your own stories.

Writing Tips
Use storytelling quotes, not quotes that simply convey information better paraphrased by the writer. Craft professors, appropriately, urge students to make sure to put quotes high in their stories. But student reporters often overcompensate with too many boring or rambling quotes rather than a few sterling, storytelling ones.
My advice is to establish a very high standard for any quote. It must help you tell the story, reveal a personality or express outrage or joy. With many quotes, you can capture the essence and write it far stronger yourself.

Karina Ioffee used strong storytelling quotes in her story about Colombian parents who attended the sentencing of the man who had killed their son seven years ago:

Residents of Bogota, Colombia, Leonor and Armando Garzon got on the first flight to New York after hearing about the attack. Both parents sat with their son — one of three children — as he lay in a coma for weeks.
“I caressed him and talked into his ear, in case he might hear me,” Leonor Garzon said. “But he never woke up.”
“Our lives the past seven years have consisted of knocking on doors seeking help to bring to light this merciless and cruel crime that you committed,” Leonor Garzon said at the sentencing, speaking directly to McGhee. “You’ve deprived us of living a full life in our old age and of family unity….we can never be together again.”

Shout Outs

Everyone contributed mightily to our lights-out election coverage, which makes it hard to single out any one person. But Jere Hester deserves a loud shout out for the planning and leadership he provided for the entire effort.

I’m always looking for a felicitous phrase that shows writing chops. Here’s how Carla Murphy summarized what happens at a storefront church headed by the Rev. Terry Lee:

All rely on Lee’s storefront church, in which the Holy Spirit is invited to enter, wipe its feet, disrobe, chat, eat, drink, dance, jump and relax, for up to six hours at a time.

That satisfied my craving for active verbs, and whetted my appetite for more.

Joe Nocera, the Times’ business columnist, Tuesday presented a primer on reporting to Tim Harper’s Craft Class. The veteran business writer and columnist has covered everyone from Boone Pickens (from his Texas oil-patch days) to Steve Jobs (who called Nocera a “slimebucket”). He’s also explored issues from Google’s daycare problems to the extraordinary financial meltdown and bailout of the past few weeks.

Here are Nocera’s nuggets on reporting:

• Make the first phone call. The hardest thing to do in reporting is to make the first phone call, when you don’t know much. It’s like an insurance salesman making a “cold call” on a customer.
• Keep them talking. Once you’ve got them on the phone, ask simple questions, “I don’t mean to sound dumb but how does a ‘credit swap’ work?” The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.
• Luck matters. Creating your own luck matters more. After some persistent reporting, and a lot of questions to Apple PR folks, Nocera got “lucky” when Jobs called him names and, yep, gave him some great stuff for the column he was writing.
• Don’t be afraid of what you think. If you’re outraged by something, your reporting can show readers why they should be outraged, too. Do the reporting, then trust yourself to tell the reader what you found.
• Don’t be afraid to go against the grain. Just because Treasury tells you the banks are spending all that government money to ease credit doesn’t mean it’s so.
• Get specific storytelling details. Make yourself so familiar to your sources you become a fly on the wall. Nocera years ago immersed himself in Pickens’ deal-making sessions and captured the image of Pickens in a bathrobe eating a Granny apple. In a story with a lot of financial numbers, that image is the one Nocera and readers most remember. (OK, Nocera also copped to sharing a few drinks with Pickens along the way).
• Make your writing a conversation, not a dissertation. Don’t write to your sources in the jargon they use. Write to readers as if you were telling them a fascinating story.
• Follow the “5 Moms” rule. When a source hooked up Nocera with a Google mom, she unloaded to him the problems she was having with the company’s vaunted daycare program. She enlisted four other Moms for Nocera. When that many people tell you something’s wrong, you’ve got a helluva story. You’ve also got the reporting evidence to rebut the official company line.
• Learn the rules well so you can break them later. The need for strong reporting, accuracy and fairness never changes. But there are guidelines – rarely use questions and quotes leads – that can be broken by wise heads, as Nocera’s columns show.

We’re not against long sentences here but too often writers lose their way and don’t understand the story they’re trying to tell the reader, if you get what I mean, hopefully, as scribes pile on the clauses, modifiers, punctuation and parenthetical phrases (Parody alert!). To help stop this trend, take a look at the lead in a Times story from Istanbul by Sabrina Tavernise:

High school hurt for Havva Yilmaz. She tried out several selves. She ran away. Nothing felt right. “There was no sincerity,” she said. “It was shallow.”

So at 16, she did something none of her friends had done: She put on an Islamic head scarf.

In most Muslim countries, that would be a nonevent. In Turkey, it was a rebellion. Turkey has built its modern identity on secularism. Women on billboards do not wear scarves. The scarves are banned in schools and universities. So Ms. Yilmaz dropped out of school. Her parents were angry. Her classmates stopped calling her.

Check out the length of her sentences. The longest one is 19 words, the one with the colon. Her meaning is clear. The sentences work to pull you into a lengthy story about one young woman’s struggle with her identity, and her country. The nut graf also sets the scene for what is to come.

Caution: The short sentence can be overdone. The best writing often varies sentence length, using short sentences to make a powerful point, the longer sentences to convey information or continuity. But the short, declarative sentence often is the best antidote to tangled, tortured writing.

Shout Outs

Here are some good examples of short, clear sentences to power a story. Lee Hernandez used them for his Daily News story on the designer Isabel Toledo:

When Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, wore an elegant black tunic and palazzo pants to a Calvin Klein fund-raiser in Manhattan last June, Isabel Toledo swooned.

“Michelle really wanted to be sophisticated, and she did it,” says the Cuban-American designer.

“Graphically, she was a visual message that read, ‘I’m in control.’”

Toledo should know — she designed the set.

Simple, easy to read, a powerful verb in the lead — “swooned” — and short sentences that make a point. One quibble: Given the lead, keep everything in the past tense. Use “said” instead of “says.”

Matt Townsend kept it simple, but powerful, in his Daily News lead on the rescue of a pregnant woman in Brooklyn:

Two good Samaritans carried a seven-months pregnant woman out of her smoke-filled Brooklyn apartment building Saturday after a discount store in the building caught fire.

When Yole Basile’s three daughters screamed, “Mom’s up there,” laundromat manager Karl Ahrendts and neighbor Francisco Jaenchaies knew they couldn’t wait for rescuers to help the woman.

“I looked at the other guy and said, ‘Let’s go,’” said Jaenchaies, 33. “If she would have died, it would have been like two people dying because she’s seven months pregnant.”

The pair raced up to the third-floor flat on New Lots Ave. in Brownsville where the 34-year-old woman was lying helpless on her bed.

Quick Takes

Maureen Ker and Jessica Firger did a good explainer on “pop-up stores” that create marketing buzz for retailers. Kate Zhao did some excellent reporting on how China may not welcome the U.S. with open arms when Treasury folks come calling for help with the credit crunch.

The Wrong Stuff

Hey, we can learn a lot from bad writing, too.  Check out the Write Stuff blog for our Wrong Stuff bad writing contest, and please post your best examples of the worst writing in the journalism you’ve read recently (Caution: No fair sending in anything from your colleagues. Let’s pick on others even as we recognize that we’re capable of similar atrocities with the language.)