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Joel Achenbach
On Writing
OPINION
WRITING
A friend of mine who was looking
for a job, who has written some opinion journalism but has never
been a hard news reporter, recently said to me that she was
thinking that maybe she could get a job with the Style section
of the Post, the feature section, because, you know,
she'd never had any reporting background at all, and I thought
if that is how most people think of feature writing, which is
it's the kind of writing that doesn't require you to be able to
report. You know, I guess you're just supposed to be able to
make it up. There is, I never learned what the word "feature"
means, I always think, "what does that mean, feature writing?" I
guess it's because they blow the picture up big on the page, and
feature it somehow. In practice I guess it means any story in
which the, the writer writes at a pace that assumes that someone
doesn't have anything better to do than to read the newspaper in
the morning. It's like, sometimes you pick up a feature story,
and it's like, this long meandering, you know, throat-clearing
beginning about someone going off to the grocery store one day,
and you're thinking, what's the story about, you know, I have
other things to do. A feature story should have as much velocity
as a news story. You know the way a news story begins, you know,
"Yesterday, ..." or a classic news story would be, "President
Kennedy was killed by a sniper Friday," you know, I think that
was the lead. The UPI lead. So it's like, it just tells you what
the story's about. A feature story should also, it should begin
with velocity, it shouldn't just, it shouldn't just be just
mumbling and meandering. But as for how to actually do it or
what a feature story is, I mean, I think it just sort of comes
naturally. Each individual person can put their own feature
style into it. How you tell a story. And everyone has their own
way of telling a story. And the key thing is to get rid of all
the rules, and all the conceptions you have about how writing
should be done, and just to tell your story. You know, just go
out and entertain people, tell it the way you tell it around a
campfire.
QUOTATIONS AND THE BIG FREEZE
The number one
disease in journalism is the quotation in general. Quotations I
really believe are wildly overused, and we use them so much
because they're easy. In fact, a lot of writers who have a
paragraph that is their own words, and then they'll have a
quote, and then a paragraph, in their own words again, and then
a quote, they kind of bounce back and forth between, you know,
"and other people feel otherwise," you know, and then a quote,
and we use quotes as though we're not confident in ourselves, in
our own ability to tell the story. I think it was when I was in
Miami, I remember one time there was this horrible freeze, it
was the Christmas Freeze of '83. And the result of this freeze
was that all the fields down in South Dade were killed, all the
crops, all the beans, and all the tomato plants, all of these
things that normally live through the winter, because it doesn't
get that cold there, were all killed. And I was going out
looking for people to give me reactions and describe it, and I
did quote people in the story, but the key part of the story was
simply me deciding "Ok, I'm gonna describe this, I'm gonna say
what it looks like." And I wrote what it looked like. I just
described it in my own voice, in my own writing, and I didn't
have to go to some expert, in this case a farmer, to say, "Gosh,
look at it, it looks terrible out there!" You know, at some
point just say, "The beans are dead," ok? All the beans are
dead, all the corn is dead, all the tomatoes are dead, you know,
just say it! You don't have to have someone come and say, "Gosh,
look, all the tomatoes are dead," you know, in any case, I think
the quotation in general is a problem. Now what I do with this
column I do, I'm very guilty of using too many expert quotes.
EXPERT QUOTES
I mean, I have to back up what I
say, because since I don't know any of these specific things. I
write about physics, and chemistry, and biology, and history,
and politics and economics, and I don't know anything about any
of those topics, I'm not an expert myself, in any of those
things, so I depend on the experts to tell me what's going on,
and typically I'll interview them at great length, such as when
you came in here, I was talking to someone about baby talk, and
then you know, I, in the column explain it, and then throw in
the expert quote, to sort of back up what I'm saying. So I feel
like I need it in my column, 'cause otherwise people would say,
"Well, why is he telling us this, how does he know?"
I poke fun at it, because the
weird thing is, there's an expert on everything. I mean, can you
believe there's someone who studies baby talk? She's a
developmental psycho-linguist, you know, and she's written a
textbook on babbling, da-da, ma-ma, all that stuff. There's an
expert on everything. It's a great country. There's someone
studying everything you can imagine, there's a Ph.D. in that.
Of course there are people who
are full-time research librarians for the Post, and
they can find a lot of great leads in terms of like, who are the
experts, and there's computer databases now, so they pull the,
they can pull the clips going back years, obscure things, but
that's one of the best things about working for a newspaper, is
to have the ability to search all the databases. I guess if
you're a freelance reporter, I don't know how you'd do that.
LANGUAGE,
ETC.
If you told me right now that I usually write in passive
voice, I would believe you. I don't, you know, things like
subjects and predicates you know, I don't pay attention to it.
Like I said, I try to write the way I talk, for better or worse.
And as you know, I don't talk so great, but I, as far as passive
voice and active voice, I just don't know, I don't think about
that. It's hard enough to write a story and make it entertaining
without worrying about where your gerunds are being placed
relative to your transposed prepositional doodads. You know, I
don't know. You know, I don't pay attention to it. The piece
about E prime, the funny thing was, I interviewed a guy who
never uses the verb "to be." He doesn't say "is," he doesn't say
"are," doesn't say "were" or "was," and he's learned to speak
without using the verb "to be." Which is nutty if you ask me.
But, I don't mean to libel the man, but in any case, I try not
to think when I write, about how I'm doing it. If you're doing
that, chances are you're going to write in a stilted fashion,
you're gonna write in journalese, you're gonna write like the
way they write in the New York Times.
Did I say that? I'm sorry.
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