By Roy Peter Clark
Time-starved readers say they want short writing. Editors want to give it to them. Only we writers stand in their way. We – who demand our anecdotal leads. We – who love narratives but revile the nut graph. We – who measure our performance in levels of deforestation.
Truth be told, even we scribes are coming around. We realize that the quill that scraped out “Hamlet” also inked a sonnet or two. Even the stately Poynter Institute, home planet of tree killers, ran its first seminar on Writing Short. We’ve got another planned for this year.
Having spent most of 2003 studying the craft of short writing, I’ve encountered a number of arguments I now believe to be myths. Until we dispel these, not only will our long stories be too long, but our short ones will be too long as well.
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An Editor’s Perspective: Tight Writing is Key
By Tim J. McGuire
This long vs. short debate continues to frustrate me because we’re using the wrong language and confusing the debate. We should not be arguing length. Instead, tight writing needs our focus and attention.
For the past decade I have been convinced we need a pleasant mix of long and short stories in our newspapers. If we offer a steady diet of short stories we are going to lose readers who look to us for depth and insight. If we print only long stories the people who rely on newspapers for “surveillance’ are going to be bored and disengaged.
The real question we need to ask is does every word we print further a reader’s understanding? If we engage in “throat-clearing,” (useless setup paragraphs,) anecdotal leads without a point, unhelpful adjectives and phrases and yards of useless information, we are writing loose stories that are not worth the reader’s efforts.
When we write a 50-inch story that constantly makes a reader say “wow, I didn’t know that” or “damn, I’m glad I invested time in this story,’ we make the newspaper experience unique from any other media experience.
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