First five words

If you’re too chicken for last week’s post, at least try this one for a couple weeks.

Go through an entire news story that you like and just read the first five words of every paragraph. Do this with a new story every day. You’ll start to learn how good writing should start with punchy, clear words that move the prose along.

You don’t have to read the first five words—you could do the first four words, or first six words, or the first line of each paragraph on the printed page. But do something so your brain can regularly absorb what good writing is supposed to be. Over time, your own paragraphs should start off as punchy and clear.

Try it for a couple weeks.

(And then give last week’s post a try. If Stahls can do it, so can you!)

The BEST tip

Pal Stals Kinborg says this is the best tip I’ve ever given him. This, he says, transformed his writing the most.

Sometimes it’s not enough to just be familiar with good writing but to actually have it in your head. Remember how in the November 16 post I asked you to compare the sentence and paragraph structure of your stories with stories in top news agencies? In that posting I urged you to take an honest look to see if your story appears as if it belongs beside professional stories. In this post, I’m going to teach you to honestly examine if your words, thought flow and sentence structure match up with those in top-tier news stories.

Try this: Get a news story...

--Sunday: memorize the headline.

--Monday: memorize the sub-head (also known as “deck” or “bank-head”)

--Tuesday: memorize the first paragraph

--Wednesday: memorize the second paragraph

--Thursday: memorize the third paragraph

--Friday: review what you have memorized that week (headline, subhead and first   

  three paragraphs) several times throughout the day.

--Saturday: take the day off.

Do that with a new story each week for a few months, and, like Stals and I have found, your writing will be taken to the next level. Your thought patterns will be shaped and influenced by what you have memorized. What you then take to the keyboard will be tighter and more articulate.

This is about reality and honestly assessing if your own writing makes the grade.

I realize some personalities will take to this exercise more readily than others. Still, I’ve heard every excuse in the book about why people can’t do this. “I’m slow at memorizing,” (I guarantee I used to be slower than you), “I don’t memorize things…”  Yet these same people will finish the song that I start singing in front of them: “NOW-this-is-a-story-OF-about-how-my-LIFE-got-flipped-turned-up-side-down…”

My point is, we can remember what we want to. And if you decide you want to do this, you can.

Contact me if you want an exclusive tip of how to most effectively memorize something thoroughly and quickly.

Another excuse: “it takes too much time.” It’s actually less than 20 minutes a day. Besides, what else do you have to do, watch TV? If you’re a writer, why not sell your soul to the profession and make yourself the best writer you can possibly be.

Your growth on this will occur over months, not weeks. But it’s worth it. The cheap onion grows quickly, but fine olives come from trees that take decades to mature. Look to the future and think in the long-term.

Similar to other posts, I suggest beginning this exercise with USA Today and The Washington Times. Both offer stories with short, clear, punchy sentences. Use stories from these two sources several times before moving to more advanced writing as found in The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal. Also, start with hard news, especially local stuff in your local major-market daily – police and fire beat. Then you can mix it up with national, world, style, business, sports, etc.  Later you can pull from your favorite magazines.
 

On Sundays you’ll come to find that memorizing a headline is easy and you’ll spend the extra time reviewing older memorized leads. You’ll find you can repeat with ease half a dozen or so story ledes.

I came up with this exercise out of both embarrassment and what I determined was necessity. I had written a play review while working as a younger reporter at a local paper. I was young and had no business writing a play review. The seasoned editor said, "This story sucks.” He was right. Then, with me sitting nearby watching over his shoulder, he took more than 20 minutes to think and punch up certain portions of the story. I watched him lean back and think, mutter to himself, write, think more, mutter more, write more, search through a thesaurus and each time exclaim as if he’d hit gold: “'UNFOLD!' that’s the word I want.” When he was done – angry but with a twinkle in his eye – he barked, “Now study those changes because those are 'A plus' edits.” I was so embarrassed, and I had never wanted a man’s approval more. 

I was impressed with his rewrites and admired two sentences in particular. So I memorized them. Two days later I went back to that editor and told him I had studied his changes. I repeated the two sentences word for word.

He knew his time hadn’t been wasted. I proved I was a person who cared about learning.

I found that exercise so rewarding that I decided to do it regularly on my own.

Memorization isn’t as popular as it used to be. Too bad. Elementary kids used to be required to memorize poems in order to ingrain into them words and descriptions so they could better express themselves. Today, professors require young artists to study the masters. Aspiring photographers also study the greats. Perhaps it’s time to memorize some of the type of writing you’d like to emulate.

Don't start your story with the date

Never start a story with the date. It’s like putting a speed bump at the beginning of the race track.  Certainly the date is important--one of the 5 Ws. But the date should come later in the first sentence or in a later sentence.  A news story should start out with Who or What, not When.

Developing your vocabulary; to use or not to use the thesaurus…

Reporter Elizabeth Lechleitner is great with words. She wasn’t a communication major in college. She was an English major … which means she’s smart. Her use of words is precise, and that precision comes from the depth of her vocabulary.

Here are some of her stories:

http://news.adventist.org/en/archive/articles/2012/01/09/reintroduced-law-again-jeopardizing-status-of-some-churches-in-hungary

http://news.adventist.org/en/archive/articles/2011/04/05/in-bermuda-adventist-ministers-to-gang-community-enlists-support-of-area-ch

http://news.adventist.org/en/archive/articles/2011/05/25/further-definition-on-tap-for-adventist-fundamental-belief-on-creation

She often uses words in her ledes that I wouldn’t have thought to use. I have searched her stories and placed at the end of this posting some examples of her well-placed words. Copy some of these onto a list, and find words in news media ledes that you like and add them to your list. Once in a while you’ll be able to employ a word from that list.

Or even better, just read a lot. That’s what Lechleitner did growing up.

In his book On Writing, author Stephen King says to throw away your thesaurus. He says if you couldn’t think of a word, then you shouldn’t use it. 

I see his point that we should develop our vocabulary naturally by reading lots of good stuff. Then again, I’ve watched an editor make magic happen with a couple of uses of a thesaurus to make a piece shine (more on this in the next posting).

So I see both sides of the [use thesaurus/don’t use thesaurus] issue. For now, here are some of Lechletiner’s great words, many of which were used in the first or second sentence of a news story. You can invoke these when helping readers understand the significance of the news you’re reporting (for more on this, see the September 6 post on Report What Happens and What It Means):

Bolstered

Spurious

Tags

Allay

Corralled

Belies

Embroiled

Would saddle

Could infringe

Swath

Tenuous

Saga