Poynter. » Chip on Your Shoulder

Rhetorical inventory of Obama’s budget, deficit speech reveals talking points, strategy

Chip Scanlan — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:26:54 +0000

The torrent of news stories, analyses, editorials, columns and blog posts about President Obama’s speech on his budget plan focused, appropriately, on the numbers.

But there’s another way to look at it: analyzing the speaker’s words in ways that… Read more

Putting Voters in the Analyst’s Seat

Chip Scanlan — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:53:25 +0000

Political analysis of campaign debates has long been the business of the chatterati: news analysts, commentators, spin doctors. That won’t change, at least not in the ’08 presidential campaign.

But now the digerati — computer wizards — have teamed… Read more

Diagramming Palin’s Sentences

Chip Scanlan — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:40:12 +0000

Forget politics. Anyone who’s interested in clarity should study this post on Slate.com by author Kitty Burns Florey: “Diagramming Sarah: Can Palin’s sentences stand up to a grammarian?”

In her post, the novelist and copy editor says:

Train Crash Leads LA Times to Create Django Database on Deadline

Chip Scanlan — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:27:31 +0000

At 4:40 p.m., Friday, Sept. 12, a Metrolink commuter train collided with an oncoming freight train in Chatsworth, Calif., northwest of Los Angeles. The crash, the Los Angeles Times reported, was “the worst in modern California history,” killing 25 and… Read more

Whose Journalism Is It?

Chip Scanlan — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:32:18 +0000

Journalists work hard to report the news and tell the stories of our time. They contribute creativity, energy, passion, critical thinking, doing their best to reflect their community’s diversity and behave in an ethical fashion. I’ve heard people making comments

The Best Writing Tip of All Time: Sit

Chip Scanlan — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:22:28 +0000

Having trouble getting the writing done?

I faced that familiar problem a few days ago. I had finished a chapter of my journalism textbook, patted myself on the back, and promptly felt myself shutting down. Starting the next… Read more

No time for The New Yorker?

Chip Scanlan — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:57:12 +0000

CORRECTION APPENDED

Unread New Yorkers have been gathering dust lately — sprawled on the coffee table in the living room, perilously stacked on the bedroom bureau and resisting gravity in unstable columns on every unclaimed office… Read more

Can Chess Make Us Better Writers?

Chip Scanlan — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:50:13 +0000

I’ve never played chess. It always seemed too hard to learn. But a story in last week’s New York Times has me thinking about giving the game another shot.

The story focused on plans to introduce… Read more

The Smell of War

Chip Scanlan — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:42:22 +0000

We know all about the fog of war, but what about its smells?

In newsrooms I’ve visited I usually offer a bounty to anyone who can locate a story with sensory details that require the nose. I’ve never had… Read more

M&Ms: New Life for Old Lessons

Chip Scanlan — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:28:30 +0000

On January 17, 2006, I launched “The Mechanic and the Muse,” a blog that would, I hoped, track my continuing quest to master the writing craft and share the lessons that every act of writing contains — from fact-gathering… Read more