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That’s what YOU said. A few ideas you might be able to use to improve the quality of commentary writing in your publication Karl Grubaugh Granite Bay (Calif.) HS Sacramento Bee. So, let’s get a couple of things clear …. I’m a word geek, and we’re going to geek out for the next 40 minutes.
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That’s what YOU said A few ideas you might be able to use to improve the quality of commentary writing in your publication Karl Grubaugh Granite Bay (Calif.) HS Sacramento Bee
So, let’s get a couple of things clear … • I’m a word geek, and we’re going to geek out for the next 40 minutes. • You’ll especially appreciate this if, like me, you really, really love words. (If you don’t … uhm, maybe try another session down the hall?) • BIAS ALERT! I LOVE to read, and what I love to read the most is thoughtful, fun, engaging, interesting commentary … • Unfortunately, not enough of that great stuff is written by students … so let’s see if we can change that, shall we?
A quick intro … • High school journalism (and AP micro/macroeconomics) teacher for a really, really long time • Worked as a sports editor for two years, including a year as a weekly columnist • Occasional copy editor at the Sacramento Bee. • So … I’ve been paid, over the last 30 years, to write columns, to teach column-writing, to edit columns … all of which gives me some things to share with all of you.
Finally, a few broad commentary guidelines … • GET THE FACTS RIGHT! (and a quick anecdote) • Don’t be an idiot, but also don’t be afraid to speak truth to power. • HOWEVER … in the small-town context that is high school, you owe it to your readers to speak with those you intend to criticize … anything else is gutless; our policy is if you won’t talk with the focus of your acerbic commentary, we won’t publish it (another anecdote) • Personal essays get really tiresome unless they have a broader point – the next time I read a vapid piece about “getting outside the Granite Bay bubble,” I am seriously going to puke …
Editorials: The voice of the newspaper • A byline? Probably not. • Input from other editors? Probably so. • Here’s a cool format I found years ago that you can use, too.
Editorial Structure Catch Attention: Begin with a general statement which does NOT indicate the writer’s stand on the controversy. Be careful; don’t make it too obvious. It should be creative, thoughtful and specific. • Catch Attention: • Commit: • Concede • Counter: Strong argument • Convince: Stronger argument Commit: The lead should flow naturally into the thesis, or stance, taken by the editorial. Concede: After stating thesis, recognize strongest opposing argument. “It is true, of course ….” Counter: Switch now into a strong argument in favor of your thesis. “but ….” Convince: Build on your last point by making an even stronger point. Be sure points are backed by facts, examples. ”Of even greater importance …”
Editorial Structure, continued Clinch: Save the strongest argument for last. This discourages rebuttal and leaves the reader with something convincing to ponder. “Finally …” • Clinch: Strongest argument • Commit again: • Cap it off: • A final note: Commit again: Using different words, restate your thesis. Cap it off: Leave the reader with a little something extra: a vision of the future, a revisit to the lead, a call to action, etc. While professional editorial writers use many different structures, this model serves the beginning writer well. Its principles are solid. After writers get more experience, they will discover ways to vary the structure depending on the topic and approach.
Your turn! Hypothetical scenario: Pro-life protesters are demonstrating and handing out pamphlets outside your school (off-campus, but very close). Write the attention-catching lead … and try come up with the three best arguments you’ll use. You’ve got 3 minutes. I’ll wait.
Types of editorials • Focus? Significant news topic with a current news hook • Four types: • Explain/interpret: how the newspaper covered a sensitive topic (we often try to link our editorial to a story on A1) • Criticize: Constructively criticize actions, decisions, situations. Offer solutions! • Persuade: Focus first on the solution; encourage specific, positive action. • Praise: Commend people and/or organizations; more rare. • Style? Typically thoughtful, considered, careful, reflective, serious • Thanks to Alan Weintraut of Annandale, Va.
A model student editorial It goes by many names. Swapping spit. Tonsil hockey. Tongue wrestling. Snogging, if you want to get exotic. In more politically correct terms, it’s known as the dreaded acronym PDA – Public Displays of Affection. Whatever you call it, we call it gross. Young love is fantastic, and you want to show off your boy/girlfriend. We get that, we really do. And you have every right to spend lunch cozied up beside them, stare passionately into their eyes, and hold their hand so attentively that people wonder if you’re actually twins connected at the wrist. And we get that you’re a teenager, and teenagers – by design – are rather tactile creatures. Some of us are still reeling from the hormonal trainwreck that is puberty. We all have urges. But we draw the line at macking between classes. You’re not in The Notebook; you and your boo go to the same school. Stop treating passing period as though it were the last 10 minutes of your life. You will, no matter how long and arduous that history lecture seems, see your sweetie again. We promise. Just, please, knock it off. Think of the people unfortunate enough to catch sight of you, glued to your beloved’s chest and vehemently sucking face. Think of your friends, who, with every glance in your direction, cringe and wonder if they’re being a voyeur by trying to talk to you. The world doesn’t stop when you decide to french your amour, and standing there, waiting for you two to be finished, can be horrendously, painfully awkward. Think of the hapless teachers who don’t avert their eyes in time. You wouldn’t want to watch any of them have a little PDA session with their spouse, now, would you? Because, rest assured, they almost certainly feel just as uncomfortable with your love life as you are with theirs. And finally, think of the perfect strangers who walk in on you and your sweetheart commingling in the hallway. If they’re single, they feel weird, uncomfortable, and perhaps even a smidge lonely. If they’re not, there’s a chance they’ll get competitive about PDA – “How dare that couple be cuter than us!” – and metastasize into another schoolyard snogger. It’s a vicious cycle, but you can help break it. Resist the urge to fall prey to the age-old adolescent stereotype of the grossly affectionate young couple. You’re dragging down the school’s collective maturity with your tongue-spelunking, and we all know you’ll get by without it. Nobody wants to see it, no matter how cute you think you are – not your friends, not your teachers, and certainly not the Gazette. We just have the guts to tell you. So come on, be a decent human being. Leave the hanky-panky at home. --Haley Massara, former co-editor-in-chief of the Granite Bay Gazette (now at UC Berkeley)
What makes it work? • Lead makes the reader curious as to what “it” is, and gradually introduces the topic. • Addresses reader directly; conversational tone makes it read less like a lecture. • A bit sillier than your average editorial, but makes a point about an irritating issue, and humor helps that point to resonate. • Varied sentence structure; pronouns are correct (“you” for reader, “we/us” for writer). • Fabulous vocabulary, including a wild array of different terms for “kissing” (my fave – “tongue spelunking”)
Column writing • Purpose? • Entertainment/humor • Information • Indignation • Etc. • Read the folks who do it best! • Leonard Pitts • Rick Reilly • Maureen Dowd • Gene Weingarten • Others? • How do I teach column writing? • Not easy (is it a gift?) • I regularly print a column for my staff meetings, have kids read it, and discuss why it works • Being published in the Gazette op-ed section is COMPETITIVE! • Try to avoid too many first-person, Chicken Soup For the Soul-style essays – the best columnists are also excellent REPORTERS!
Some faves … Gene Weingarten, Washington Post The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself. The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame. The language's demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America's daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely. In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically clueless misspelling "pronounciation" has been seen in the Boston Globe, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News, Washington Jewish Week and the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, where it appeared in a correction that apologized for a previous mispronunciation. On Aug. 6, the very first word of an article in the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal was "Alot," which the newspaper employed to estimate the number of Winston-Salemites who would be vacationing that month. The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of "spading and neutering." The Miami Herald reported on someone who "eeks out a living" -- alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a "doggy dog world." The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of "prostrate cancer." Observers say, however, that no development contributed more dramatically to the death of the language than the sudden and startling ubiquity of the vomitous verbal construction "reach out to" as a synonym for "call on the phone," or "attempt to contact." A jargony phrase bloated with bogus compassion -- once the province only of 12-step programs and sensitivity training seminars -- "reach out to" is now commonplace in newspapers. In the last half-year, the New York Times alone has used it more than 20 times in a number of contextually indefensible ways, including to report that the Blagojevich jury had asked the judge a question. It was not immediately clear to what degree the English language will be mourned, or if it will be mourned at all. In the United States, English has become increasingly irrelevant, particularly among young adults. Once the most popular major at the nation's leading colleges and universities, it now often trails more pragmatic disciplines, such as economics, politics, government, and, ironically, "communications," which increasingly involves learning to write mobile-device-friendly ads for products like Cheez Doodles. Many people interviewed for this obituary appeared unmoved by the news, including Anthony Incognito of Crystal City, a typical man in the street. "Between you and I," he said, "I could care less."
What makes it work? • It’s funny! • Love the sophisticated vocabulary, and the way Weingarten allows readers to become insiders as he attacks the dumbing down of the language. • What else?
One of my favorite student columns… The baked good is a beautiful thing. Aside from being the most delicious sub-genre of dessert ever devised by man, they are commodities, a sort of karmic currency, to be baked and bought whenever one needs an extra dose of sugary deliciousness in her day. But there’s this cake fad that’s starting to bug me. I’m not sure how it came about, or really, why cake has suddenly started to irk me, but perhaps you’ve started noticing them, too. Whenever an even mildly popular girl celebrates a birthday, she’ll be promptly given an obnoxiously large cake, still in the pan, clearly thrown together by her friends in a last-minute yet somehow omnipresent birthday gift. Birthday Girl and her friends will parade this gloriously ugly, gruesomely well-frosted abomination of a cake around all day long, laughing and picking at it with plastic forks from the cafeteria. I envy this girl and her cake. I envy how obviously homemade it is, and how the 12 pounds of sprinkles dumped on top of it make it look like a tray of unicorn vomit. I envy the fact that this cake will invariably be carted around through all of Birthday Girl’s classes, and though she’ll never show much interest in actually eating more than a forkful of it, I will never, ever be able to bum a piece. Maybe I’m just bitter. I’ve been cursed with a summer birthday, which means that if I get a cake, I’ll have to eat it indoors sitting down, like a civilized human being. I’ll never get to eat a crumbly, icing-inundated half-stale hunk of cake-like substance in alternately freezing and scorching Granite Bay weather, huddled around the cake pan with a few of my friends. And I guess it’s that classic experience I regret not having, mediocre as it may be. Maybe it’s the proliferation of the cakes that bugs me so. I mean, there really can’t be a birthday in all of my classes every day, can there? The pastry pandemic has gotten so uncontrollable that there is actually a table in the girls’ locker room specifically reserved for cakes, cookies and the like. Even then, the plates are fighting for space. I’m sure part of the recent cake influx is due to Sadies. What better way to ask out your man than with a big heaping dish of fatty, chocolatey awesome? I know I wouldn’t say “no.” But even so, the cakes are everywhere. Are these girls just searching for excuses to bake things now, and parade them around the school, making everybody wish that they, too, had cake? Could there be a cake conspiracy? Is it an endless chain of pining for cake and then flaunting it? Maybe what I’m hoping for is office-style cake socialism – that is, everyone gets pastries whenever anyone brings any. But this is America, and I suppose we all have the right to our own sweet, frosting-topped property. Just because I’m amiable to making truly irresponsible amounts of hideously delicious cookies and distributing them to my peers on the Gazette staff doesn’t mean I should expect the world to be so forthcoming. Ultimately, though I may gripe out of jealousy as those girls tote their treats around campus, I hope that perhaps someday I, too, will get my very own fail cake, even if I have to make it myself. After all, that’s kind of the beauty of the sloppily-made from-mix pastry – you don’t need any special occasion. You just need a few hours, an egg and some cake-craving friends. It’s the memories of baking things that make them so sweet. --Haley Massara, former co-editor-in-chief of the Granite Bay Gazette (now at UC Berkeley)
What makes it work? • Vernacular. Haley writes the way she speaks. • Not the deepest of topics, but one not often looked at with a critical (envious) eye. • This is really what “voice” is – word choice, description, the way the writing flows.
Your turn again! Revisit your earlier attention-catcher about the pro-life protestors … Does it sound like you? Can you make it at all more lively, relatable or conversational (or maybe even funny)? Take a few minutes, awkwardly talk to the people next to you, I’ll wait again.
Other things you can do in your op-ed sections • Forums • Letters to the editor • Heard on the Bay (on the street Q&A) • Editorial cartoons– single panels and strips • Thumbs up, thumbs down • Point/Counterpoint • Design issues: Big illustrations, column mugs, drop caps, etc.
