An effective editorial has two ingredients, observed Richard Aregood, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials at the Philadelphia Daily News: a position and a passion.
After reading interviews with 25 award-winning editorial writers recently, I’d add a third: a process.
A self-confessed process junkie, I believe that where writing is concerned the journey is as important as the destination, if not more so. We learn to write by writing, by making our way through a thicket of confusion, slogging our way through, and if we’re smart, by applying the lessons of success and failure on that trip to the next one.
To prepare for a writing workshop with editorial page editors gathered at Poynter last month for a “Leading Opinion Pages in Critical Times” seminar, I looked back at a quarter-century of such road maps outlined by the winners of the editorial writing award given every year by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and published in the Best Newspaper Writing series.
As always, I was on the lookout for the mileposts, shortcuts and hazard signs that good writers alert others to when they talk about the way writing is made.
And as ever, these reflective practitioners reminded me what I first learned from Donald M. Murray, one of the pioneers of the process approach to writing. No matter what the genre, the deadline or the length, writing is a process, a series of decisions and steps that every writers makes and takes.
Consider this prescription for compelling editorials from John Fensterwald who won the ASNE editorial writing award in 1992 at the Concord (N.H.) Monitor:
“Don’t take any paragraph for granted. I don’t assume a powerful lead alone or strong arguments and logic will carry readers to the end of editorials. At the first obtuse fact and boring tangent, readers will ditch them. I try to make each paragraph a venture into the unknown with a payoff worth pursuing. Word play, analogies, humor, strong verbs, a critical detail they haven’t seen elsewhere are the rewards. Predictability kills- not only the enthusiasm of the writer, but readership of the page.”
From idea through revision, the process of writing editorials offers lessons that can benefit any writer, from scriptwriter to sonneteer, from those churning out cop shorts to long-form narratives.
(Affiliations reflect those at the time of interview.)
The importance of reporting:
“The beginning of all journalism is getting out into the world and seeing live people dealing with real life. It’s the beginning of all philosophy and it’s the beginning of all journalism. It’s the starting point for everything.”
–N. Don Wycliff, Chicago Tribune
“A lot of editorial writers try to get by on their writing or their outrage, and not on their reporting. That just doesn’t work. You’ve got to have facts. In an article, you use them to inform. In an editorial, you use facts to persuade.”
— Michael Gartner, Ames (Ia.) Daily Tribune
Using chronology for clarity:
“Write in a way that people could understand the intricate doings at the International Monetary Fund. What you try to do is throw out all the junk, get down to the essential facts, and then organize them, usually in a time sequence, so you can see what flows from what.”
— Michael Gartner
One story, one theme:
“You need to have a point and you need to get to it immediately. Editorials should have one subject, and there’s no need to beat it to death. … An editorial should be a 300-word essay.”
— Mike Jacobs, Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald
Voice:
“I like writers who maintain an independent voice, regardless of what they’re writing. They may be writing the institution’s point of view, but they are still writing as one journalist to the audience. They’re not trying to say, “Here I am, a group of six people. Listen to us.” … I think a lot of readers are turned off by that sort of all-knowing, corporate-type voice.”
— Bailey Thomson, Mobile (Ala.) Register
The cons of outlining:
“If I’m outlining, I might as well be writing.”
— N. Don Wycliff
The pros of outlining:
“The least effective work I do is when I don’t take the time to outline it.”
— John McCormick, Chicago Tribune
Recipe for a lead:
“Everyone wants good leads, but it’s more important than ever. … Strong writing, freshness, something out of the ordinary. … You know what those leads guarantee? That they’ll read the next sentence.”
— Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal
The power of the paragraph:
“The paragraph is a thought. It’s a pause. It’s a pause to move on to another point of another line of argument. Running thoughts together is the sign of disorganized thinking. … The paragraph is a place where, if you are reading it, you will pause, take a breath, and then move on. … The cadence is marked by paragraphs.”
— Mike Jacobs
Endings matter:
“It can’t just end — it needs the kind of finality that a good short story has. … The ending is the punctuation — it’s like when Mary Lou Retton did that flip and landed and stuck. That’s what the ending does. There’s no wavering here, there’s no question. What this ending does is put the last punctuation mark on your opinion, on what you think and why, and it leaves the reader with the feeling that this is intelligent, this is correct. And sometimes that requires an emotional sort of ending … it requires some passion, and sometimes it just requires a very thoughtful coda.”
— Dianne Donovan, Chicago Tribune
“It is imperative at the end that you wrap it up and get out of the editorial in a very clean and neat and energetic way. I choose ‘energetic’ consciously. You don’t want readers to drop off. You want to pump them up a little bit at the end.”
— Daniel Henninger
Revision:
“I’m constantly going back and reading as I write: ‘It’s taking me too long to get into this,’ I’ll say this to myself, or, ‘Jesus, make your point.’ Often I’ll read it out loud at home at night to see how it sounds.”
— Michael Gartner
Fact-checking:
“I don’t take anybody’s word for a fact. I learned early on, never trust a secondary source when the primary source is available. I always live in fear I’m going to have a fact wrong. When you have a fact wrong, it diminishes the credibility of everything.”
— Michael Gartner
