Writing for Journalists

Wynford Hicks, Adams Sally, Harriett Gilbert, Tim Holmes, Jane Bentley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138932104, 9781138932098
• eBook ISBN: 9781317394198
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The new edition of Writing for Journalists focuses on the key issue for writers working across all forms of media today: how to produce clear, engaging and illuminating copy that will keep the reader hooked from start to finish.

Written by skilled specialist contributors and drawing on a broad range of examples to illustrate the best professional practice, this edition includes:

• chapters on how to write news, features and reviews whatever the format used for delivery
• expanded chapters on writing for digital publication in both shortform and longform
• top tips on writing columns and blogs from leading professionals
• an exploration of the importance of style and its impact on great journalistic writing
• an extensive glossary of terms used in journalism and suggestions for further reading

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This is an essential guide to good writing for all practising journalists and students of journalism.

1
Introduction

What this book is

This book is about the craft of journalistic writing: putting one word after another so that the reader gets the message – or the joke – goes on reading and comes back for more. Good writing is essential to journalism: without it important news, intriguing stories, insight and analysis, gossip and opinion could not reach their potential audience.

Writing can also be a pleasure in itself: finding the right word, getting it to fit together with other words in a sentence, constructing a paragraph that conveys meaning and creates delight … There is pride in a well-written piece, in the positive feedback from editors, readers, fellow writers.

This book is a practical guide for those who write for publication in print or online, whether they are students, trainees or more experienced people, whether they work for a particular publication or as freelance contributors. Though aimed primarily at would-be and practising professionals it takes a broad rather than a narrow view of journalism. It recognises that a journalist today may well be a political activist, a sports fan or an academic, say, doing journalism in their spare time – probably not being paid for it – while a ‘freelance’ is not necessarily someone who has chosen to be one.

We have revised and updated the book for this third edition. Inevitably the biggest changes are in the section covering digital publication where there are now separate chapters on shortform and longform writing. In general we have tried to concentrate our advice on online writing into these chapters rather than making frequent references to it in the rest of the book.

There is also a new – but very short – chapter on writing columns and blogs which recognises how the personal is a dominant theme in today’s journalism. This is the argument of Speaking Personally by the ex-Guardian journalist Rosalind Coward. As she says, ‘Thirty years ago the columns that existed were mainly addressing political, advice or lifestyle issues. Now there are columnists in every section of the newspaper.’ Or as Andrew Marr, whom she quotes, puts it in My Trade, ‘There are columns on gardens, cheap wine and etymology, columns on bicycling, on “my lovable children”, on bird watching and sex with strangers, columns on every form of activity and dreaming known to mankind. There are ghosted columns by celebrities, and columns by celebrities that would have been much better if they had been ghosted.’

In revising the book we have kept most of the examples of good and bad practice that were included in previous editions: there seemed little point in replacing material that remains relevant.

What this book is not

This is neither a book about journalism nor a careers guide for would-be journalists. It does not set out to survey the field, to describe the various jobs that journalists do in different media. Nor is it a review of the issues in journalism. It does not discuss privacy or bias or the ownership of the press. It does not try to answer the question: is journalism in decline? Thus it is unlikely to be adopted as a media studies textbook.

It does not include broadcast journalism, though many of the points made also apply to TV and radio writing. It does not give detailed guidance on specialised areas such as sport, fashion, consumer and financial journalism. And it does not try to cover what might be called the public relations or propaganda sector of journalism, where getting a particular message across is the key. Magazines published by companies for their employees and customers, by charities for their donors and recipients, by trade unions and other organisations for their members – and all the other publications that are sponsored rather than market-driven – develop their own rules. Journalists who work in this sector learn to adapt to them.

Except in passing this book does not tell you how to find stories, do research or interview people. For detailed advice on interviewing see Interviewing for Journalists.

Though subeditors – and trainee subs – should find it useful as a guide to rewriting, it does not pretend to be a sub’s manual. It does not tell you how to cut copy, write headlines or check proofs. It does not cover editing, design, media law …

We make no apology for this. In our view writing is the key journalistic skill without which everything else would collapse. That is why we think it deserves a book of its own.

Who cares about writing?

This may look like a silly question: surely all journalists, particularly editors, aspire to write well themselves and publish good writing? Alas, apparently not. The experience of some graduates of journalism courses in their first jobs is that much of what they learnt at college is neither valued nor even wanted by their editors and senior colleagues.

Of course, this might mean that what was being taught at college, instead of being proper journalism, was some kind of ivory-tower nonsense – but the evidence is all the other way. British journalism courses are responsive to industry demands and taught by journalists.

The problem is that many editors and senior journalists don’t seem to bother very much about whether their publications are well written – or even whether they are in grammatically correct English. As Harry Blamires wrote in his introduction to Correcting your English, a collection of mistakes published in newspapers and magazines:

Readers may be shocked, as indeed I was myself, to discover the sheer quantity of error in current journalism. They may be astonished to find how large is the proportion of error culled from the quality press and smart magazines. Assembling the bad sentences together en masse brings home to us that we have come to tolerate a shocking degree of slovenliness and illogicality at the level of what is supposed to be educated communication.

It’s true that some of what Blamires calls ‘error’ is conscious colloquialism but most of his examples prove his point: many editors don’t seem to bother very much about the quality of the writing they publish.

Others, on the other hand, do. There is some excellent writing published in British newspapers and periodicals. And it is clear that it can help to bring commercial success. For example, the Daily Mail outsells the Daily Express, its traditional rival, for all sorts of reasons. One of them certainly is the overall quality and professionalism of the Mail’s writing.

But if you’re a trainee journalist in an office where good writing is not valued, do not despair. Do the job you’re doing as well as you can – and get ready for your next one. The future is more likely to be yours than your editor’s.

Can writing be taught?

This is the wrong question – unless you’re a prospective teacher of journalism. The question, if you’re a would-be journalist (or indeed any kind of writer), is: can writing be learnt?

And the answer is: of course it can, providing that you have at least some talent and – what is more important – that you have a lot of determination and are prepared to work hard.

If you want to succeed as a writer, you must be prepared to read a lot, finding good models and learning from them; you must be prepared to think imaginatively about readers and how they think and feel rather than luxuriate inside your own comfortable world; you must be prepared to take time practising, experimenting, revising.

You must be prepared to listen to criticism and take it into account while not letting it get on top of you. You must develop confidence in your own ability but not let it become arrogance.

This book makes all sorts of recommendations about how to improve your writing but it cannot tell you how much progress you are likely to make. It tries to be helpful and encouraging but it does not pretend to be diagnostic. And – unlike those gimmicky writing courses advertised to trap the vain, the naive and the unwary – it cannot honestly ‘guarantee success or your money back’.

Getting down to it

Make a plan before you start

Making a plan before you start to write is an excellent idea, even if you keep it in your head. And the longer and more complex the piece, the more there is to be gained from setting the plan down on paper – or on the keyboard.

Of course you may well revise the plan as you go, particularly if you start writing before your research is completed. But that is not a reason for doing without a plan.

Write straight onto the keyboard

Unless you want to spend your whole life writing, which won’t give you much time to find and research stories – never mind going to the pub or practising the cello – don’t bother with a handwritten draft. Why introduce an unnecessary stage into the writing process?

Don’t use the excuse that your typing is slow and inaccurate. First, obviously, learn to touch-type, so you can write straight onto the keyboard at the speed at which you think. For most people this will be about 25 words per minute (wpm) – a speed far slower than that of a professional copy typist.

(There’s a key distinction here between the skills of typing and shorthand. As far as writing is concerned, there’s not much point in learning to type faster than 25wpm: accuracy is what counts. By contrast, the shorthand speeds that most journalism students and trainees reach if they work hard, typically 80–100wpm, are of limited use in getting down extensive quotes of normal speech. Shorthand really comes into its own above 100wpm.)

Even if you don’t type very well, you should avoid the handwritten draft stage. After all, the piece is going to end up typed – presumably by you. So get down to it straightaway, however few fingers you use.

Write notes to get started

Some people find the act of writing difficult. They feel inhibited from starting to write, as though they were on a high diving board or at the top of a ski run.

Reporters don’t often suffer from this kind of writer’s block because, assuming they have found a story in the first place, the task of writing an intro for it is usually a relatively simple one. Note: not easy but simple, meaning that reporters have a limited range of options; they are not conventionally expected to invent, to be ‘creative’.

One reason why journalists should start as reporters is that it’s a great way to get into the habit of writing.

However, if you’ve not yet acquired the habit and tend to freeze at the keyboard, don’t just sit there agonising. Having written your basic plan, add further headings, enumerate, list, illustrate. Don’t sweat over the first paragraph: begin somewhere in the middle; begin with something you know you’re going to include, like an anecdote or a quote. You can reposition it later. Get started, knowing that on the keyboard you’re not committed to your first draft.

Revise, revise

Always leave yourself time to revise what you have written. Even if you’re writing news to a tight deadline, try to spend a minute or two looking over your story. And if you’re a feature writer or reviewer, revision is an essential part of the writing process.

If you’re lucky, a competent subeditor will check your copy before it goes to press, but that is no reason to pretend to yourself that you are not responsible for what you write. As well as looking for the obvious – errors of fact, names wrong, spelling and grammar mistakes, confusion caused by bad punctuation – try to read your story from the reader’s point of view. Does it make sense in their terms? Is it clear? Does it really hit the target?

Master the basics

You can’t start to write well without having a grasp of the basics of English usage such as grammar, spelling and punctuation. To develop a journalistic style you will need to learn how to use quotes, handle reported speech, choose the right word from a variety of different ones. When should you use foreign words and phrases, slang, jargon – and what about clichés? What is ‘house style’? And so on.

The basics of English and journalistic language are covered in a companion volume, English for Journalists. In this book we have in general tried not to repeat material included there.

Different kinds of print journalism

There are obviously different kinds of print journalism – and thus different demands on the journalist as writer. Conventionally, people distinguish in market-sector terms between newspapers and periodicals, between upmarket (previously ‘broadsheet’) and downmarket (previously ‘tabloid’) papers, between consumer and business-to-business (from now on in this book called ‘b2b’) periodicals, and so on.

Some of these conventional assumptions can be simplistic when applied to the way journalism is written. For example, a weekly b2b periodical is in fact a newspaper. In its approach to news writing it has as much in common with other weeklies – local newspapers, say, or Sunday newspapers – as it does with monthly b2b periodicals. Indeed ‘news’ in monthly publications is not the same thing at all.

Second, while everybody goes on about the stylistic differences between the top and bottom ends of the newspaper market, less attention is paid to those between mid-market tabloids, such as the Mail, and the redtops, such as the Sun. Whereas features published by the Guardian...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Writing news
• 3 Writing features
• 4 Writing columns and blogs
• 5 Writing reviews
• 6 Writing for digital publication – shortform
• 7 Writing for digital publication – longform
• 8 Style
• Glossary of terms used in journalism
• Further reading
• Index