Writing: July 2007 Archive Page

The car could be up on blocks and be just as astonishing. | It goes to show you how we in the press so often miss the big stories that are right under our noses. There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: "God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought." His editor cabled back: "Forget flood. Interview God." --Ebert on "Herbie: Fully Loaded" (2005)

Watching "Bedazzled," I was reminded of the ancient newspaper legend about the reporter sent to cover the Johnstown Flood. "God stood on a mountain top," he wrote, "and saw what his flood waters had wrought." His editor cabled back: Forget flood. Interview God. Why was I remembering this old story? -- Ebert on "Bedazzled" (2000)

"God stood on a mountain here today," he wrote, "and saw what his waters had wrought." His editor cabled him: "Forget flood. Interview God." That was my reaction while watching "Gospa." Ebert on "Gospa" (1996)

Watching "Fire in the Sky," I was reminded of a famous old journalism story. Sent to cover the Johnstown Flood, reporter Bob Considine began his story: "God stood on a mountain top here today, and surveyed the damage that His floodwaters had wrought." His editors cabled him: "Forget flood. Interview God." In the case of "Fire in the Sky," my advice to the filmmakers would be, forget the five pals and their problems, and spend more time with Travis Walton inside the spaceship. --Ebert on "Fire in the Sky" (1993)
Forget Flood. Review Movies. (rogerebert.suntimes.com)

It's a great anecdote. I don't see anything wrong with using it four times over 12 years, but it's interesting to see how the text of the story changes.

As I see it, a good reporter is like a pinball in play, always gathering, writing, revising, gathering, writing, revising--until time runs out. The job is as simple, and as hard, as that.

The advice here is based on the teachings of reporters I admire. It is also based on conclusions I have drawn during 26 years as a writer, editor and teacher. --Jim Hall --Beginning Reporting (VCU)

Looks like a great resource.

There once was a horse-riding chap
Who took a trip in a cold snap
He stopped in the snow
But he soon had to go:
He was miles away from a nap. --Lore Sjöberg --Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks (Bad Gods)

bootlegs are wierd the only time i gop online is to blog on this my space woich juliet you are free to bring oiver to m,y site as its mine and i own it, anyway i dont know i told all myf riends an dyou too to be there 1030 sharp because weve been allabout goping on time and i was told 1030- then there was one of the mopst remarkable technicaL PVERSIOGHTs in my entire career- the oplder dudes whove done hgouse sound from, SIR a jillion times forgot to TURN ON THE SUBWOOFERS. so i beeged for 15 mopre minutes to figure out why the hell a real band wich would be moine sounded like a trebley backing band to an american idol songbird, tweeters are the hiogh end and woofers tge low but sib woofers are the bass and the toms and kick growl and i rtold stu the truth= chicks just do not end up with drummers of his strentgth and aptitude- whatver that fguy nedsx to keep him happy - wich sinc ehe has a farm on tghe Isle of Wight and just nothing fazes him - isnt to hard- hi sintetion is just to play cdrums and imA bit of a dudem, im thinking and i think im right abou tthis we need obne more Samantha level ro0kc ballsy song - even though has that fine razors edge al;mist cheeze but not bridge wich quuickly turns ballsy= mne and pete wrote one "car crash" wich wqe doid at studio b when LP was prepping for her biog and hey i aint getting in any trouble again so no fucking names- --Courtney Love --nyc wtf?Warning, horrific spelling and grammar per usual! (Courtney Love's MySpace)

This is sort of a random chunk out of a 7000-word blog entry. One single paragraph in the middle is about 3500 words long.

I had previously blogged a speech Love gave in 2000, which was a well-argued, detailed explanation of how the recording industry makes millions off of bands that (according to Love) barely make any money at all. I found that speech persuasive and enlightening, but I find what she wrote in her MySpace page to be completely incomprehensible. The really funny thing is that people are leaving comments praising Love and thanking her what she wrote...

Wow. I guess it really is the thought that counts.

Interest in ombudsmen has increased in response to all the polls showing that readers do not hold newspapers in particularly high regard. This problem is hardly a novel one. Similar circumstances led Ralph Pulitzer to establish a Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play at his New York World in 1913. According to a 1916 issue of American Magazine, Pulitzer had become concerned about the increasing blurriness between "that which is true and that which is false" in the paper. He had reason for concern. One of the questionable practices uncovered by the bureau's first director, Isaac D. White, was the routine embellishment of stories about shipwrecks with fictional reports about the rescue of a ship's cat. After asking the maritime reporter why a cat had been rescued in each of a half-dozen accounts of shipwrecks, White was told, "One of those wrecked ships had a cat, and the crew went back to save it. I made the cat the feature of my story, while the other reporters failed to mention the cat, and were called down by their city editors for being beaten. The next time there was a shipwreck there was no cat but the other ship news reporters did not wish to take chances, and put the cat in. I wrote the report, leaving out the cat, and then I was severely chided for being beaten. Now when there is a shipwreck all of us always put in a cat." --Cassandra Tate --What do ombudsmen do? (Organization of News Ombudsmen)

--Bull Run Victim Photo -- Editing QuibblesYahoo | AP (will expire))

No, Lenahan lies on a hospital bed.

The redundancy of "as shows" and "showing" and "he was gored" and "were gored" also bothers me. And the inconsistency doesn't do much for me, either. The same caption refers to "traditional bullrun" and "morning bull run," and a little later also says "the bulls horn entered beneath his skin."

It's impossible to remove all such mistakes from a stream of copy that goes out around the world, but so many mistakes in one caption suggests something other than carelessness. Where was the editor?

Something about that smug little grin tells me that Mr. Lenahan is unlikely to care.

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text. --Sidewalk stencil choose-your-own-adventure (Flickr)

Very cool concept.

Schwartz is describing how the two main characters in the student film will sit on a couch, simultaneously reach for popcorn and inadvertently touch hands, when Kit Reiner of Silver Spring and Max Simon of Potomac -- both 18 -- cry out, "Just like in 'Lady and the Tramp'!"

And Schwartz could take it no more. "Stop!" he yells.

"Try to think less about which movie scene you are reminded of and more about the way people really act in real life. Everything isn't related to a movie!"

Really?

To most of the workshop students, life has become totally visual. They are members of not so much the Me Generation as the Eye Generation.

"I really don't like reading a story. I like seeing it," says workshop student Craig Patterson, 17, of Grove City, Ohio. "I almost always prefer the movie version of a book. Movies can capture the beauty of an image more than books can." --Linton Weeks --The Eye Generation Prefers Not to Read All About It (Washington Post (will expire))

Hmm... a reporter sits in on a summer film class, and is shocked --- SHOCKED!! -- to learn that the students who are motivated enough to pay for it are likely to think in visual terms. What is this world coming to?

To be fair, the subhead is "Students in Film Class a Microcosm of a Visually Oriented Culture," so the WashPo makes it clear these are not random students. And even among English majors (who one would think are more likely than the average student to be interested in reading), I do often notice that even students who are excited by writing often approach a first-person narrative as if they are describing a movie. Thus, they write "A big smile spread across my face" or "I gave him a puzzled look," conveying the interior state of their first-person protagonist from an external, visual point of view. Most have never considered alternatives, such as quoting dialogue ("You remembered the violets!") or the protagonist's unvoiced thought ("Was Smitty trying to use a 20-gauge reamer on a blown gasket? God, what I wouldn't do to get away from these clueless hicks!"). If you plan the story to SHOW why the protagonist likes violets, and even if you don't actually stop to explain what a 20-gague reamer is and why a hick would think it was appropriate to use on a blown gasket, when the protagonist's reaction to the violets or the reamers convey information about character, setting, plot, etc., then the details have done their job.

"The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags," says Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University and one of the organisers of this year's International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds.

"These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as more people moved into urban centres, the use of underwear increased -- which caused an increase in the number of rags available for paper-making." --From Rags to Riches, Or How Undergarments Improved Medieval Literacy (Alpha Galileo)

Filing this for a future "history of the book" unit. Via Language Log.

I won't be stuck standardizing verb tenses in business documents my whole life. One day, I will copyedit the Great American Novel.

"Sure," you say, "along with every other detail-oriented grammarian in the country." Yes, I know how many idealistic young people dream of taking a manuscript that captures the spirit of 21st-century America and removing all of its grammatical and semantic errors. But how many of them know to omit the word "bear" when referring to koalas? How many know to change "pompom" to "pompon"? --Someday, I Will Copyedit The Great American Novel (The Onion (Satire))