I thoroughly enjoyed this reading, not so much because of what it said about political writing, but because of what it said about writing in general.
It is my firm belief that students in grammar and high school are not taught to write. Standards are not high enough, which leads to convoluted and unclear prose.
Orwell lists 4 writing sins: dying metaphors, operators, pretentious diction, and meaningless words.
I think one of the reasons I enjoy journalism so much is because it isn't convoluted (for the most part.) We are taught to simplify. Good journalists are experts and taking a complicated topic and putting it into words that a reader who has no knowledge of the subject can understand.
Five characteristics of academic or scholarly prose
According to the reading, they are:
1. Academic prose emphasizes nouns rather than verbs.
2. Academic prose uses static verbs rather than action verbs.
3. Inflation and embellishment characterize academic prose.
4. and 5. Academic prose is also characterized by long and complex sentences.
As I mentioned above, I think that many of these characteristics make writing unnecessarily complex. Too often, people write with the intent of sounding smart, not making sense.
Again, this is why I like jornalism. We would never say :
A fumigation occurred.
Rather than:
The farmer fumigated his field.
Chapter 8"Short is beautiful. Short and simple is more beautiful. Short, simple and interesting
is most beautiful."
- Don Gibb, educator
Soooooooo true.
I think it is important that the book points out that good writing begins with good reporting. I think that too many reporters don't get detail. It's the small things that make a story special. Small descriptives sprinkled throughout a story make for easier reading and a more enjoyable experience for the reader.
I also liked the section on making numbers powerful. I have found that it is best to hold numbers unless you can write it in a way that is truly astounding. Numbers in lede's rarely work. They cause the reader to get stuck unless they are written in a way which they flow well.
Three Mile Island Report
Observations:
I love the fact that in the five hours between the press conferences, Livingood talked to another reporter who could explain the terminology. He found a way to understand something that was completely foreign to him. The other reporter told him to ask a question which Livingood didn't understand, but he did it anyway. The anwer to that question ended up showing the reporters that the accident was far worse than they had thought. He made sure he had his bases covered and decided that he could get a better grasp on it later.
I think it was really interesting to see that different papers assigned drastically different numbers of reporters to the scene. The Philadelphia Inquirer had 2 dozen reporters on the story. A vast majority of papers simply relied on 1 or no reporters and AP or other major news sources for coverage.
I thought the section on sensationalism was very interesting. Because the TMI incident had so many unanswered questions, speculation was bound to occur. And with speculation comes misinformation, possibly misinformation taken as fact. It also mentioned that because so many reporters were on the scene, the need for new information was huge. Every paper and broadcast station was trying to find a unique angle on the accident, which lead to sensational reporting.
In the section about what reporters would have done differently, I think it is interesting that they say they wished they had had more technical information. I think that with clear information, especially in a situation that was as confusing as this one, covering a story is much easier.
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