Reprinted from Workbench: The Bulletin of the National Writers’ Workshop,Vol. 4
I’ve been thinking about reading and writing as a professional for almost 30 years. I’ve taught storytelling to journalists for more than 20. But it has only been in the last few months that I’ve learned the most important lesson for those who want to write well.
The lesson is this: There are only two ways of reading. And there are only three ways of writing.
My teacher is a woman I’ve never met. Her name is Louise Rosenblatt. She is retired and living near Princeton, N.J. In the 1930s she began teaching literature to high school students, and eventually taught at New York University. As a scholar, she not only studied great works of literature, but she also was curious about the different ways her students read works like Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet.
She realized early what is now a commonplace: that reading is a transaction in which each reader brings his or her own biography, experiences, prejudices, knowledge, ignorance to the text. The writer may create the text, but the reader makes it a story.
Two Ways To Read
Rosenblatt defines two kinds of reading, which she describes as “the efferent” and “the aesthetic.” Excuse the technical language for a moment; we’ll be getting to journalism soon. The word efferent means to “carry away from.” The reader carries away information, things that have some potential utility. Rosenblatt believes, rightly, that most of journalism falls into this category.
In each case, the reader has something to learn, to carry away from the story, to use in his or her personal life, perhaps to pass it on to another. It should be obvious that, whatever the reader brings to the text, the writer can help the reader carry something away. The writing must be clear and comprehensible, and not call attention to itself.
But much of the reading we do is also “aesthetic,” which is to say that it is rendered artfully. When we read Hamlet, the purpose is not to find our way to Elsinore, or to learn how to dig a grave, or how to poison the tip of a sword. We still read or see Hamlet because it is an experience. A virtual reality. It seeks not to inform us, but to form us.
In the United States, and in other cultures, there is a long tradition of storytelling in newspapers:
This kind of news cries out for stories, not articles. Stories are told through scenes. They have characters who speak with dialogue. Details excite the senses, making the experience more real. Stories also have settings, places characters inhabit. We can see things from another’s point of view.
Richard Zahler of The Seattle Times makes a helpful distinction:
“When we write for information, we depend on the traditional Five Ws: Who, What, Where, When, and Why. But when we write for story, when we thaw out those articles, Who becomes Character; What becomes Plot; Where becomes Setting; When becomes Chronology; Why becomes Motivation.”
Let’s get back to Louise Rosenblatt’s distinction, which she made in 1938 in a book titled Literature as Exploration. But this time, I’ll use language suggested by my former student, now a successful journalist, Darrell Fears. He talks about language that Points You There and language that Puts You There.
Consider this list of contrasts:
Rosenblatt explains this last distinction. Let’s say you swallow some poison and need to find the antidote on the bottle. When you read it, you are looking for specific information that can save your life. You don’t expect metaphor or alliteration. You will notice the words only if the antidote is badly written, creating the “static” that leads to miscommunication.
But we expect a poem to be literary, to use language that calls attention to itself even as it conveys a higher meaning.
So let’s say Hurricane Chip is headed for St. Petersburg. I am desperate for information: Should I evacuate? When? Where? What should I bring with me? What about my dog, Rex?
But after the hurricane has hit, and more than 100,000 people are evacuated, and 37 have been killed, and hundreds are homeless, I am looking for more than information. I am looking for story. I want to share an experience with my fellow citizens. Nothing does this better than story.
Now let’s illustrate the distinction with two pieces from the St. Petersburg Times about education. The first is a standard announcement:
The League of Women Voters of the St. Petersburg area will hold a forum from 7 to 8:30 tonight on controlled school choice, which would allow parents to choose from any school in their attendance zone. The forum will be at the St. Petersburg Main Library, 3745 Ninth Ave. N. Speakers will be Linda Benware, administrator on special assignment–choice programs, and Gabrielle Davis, education committee from the league. For information, call 896-5197.
The writer includes most of the W’s in this announcement. We know Who, What, Where, and When. Why is implied: school choice is an important issue. The writer expects this information might be useful, that it might mobilize the reader. You can drive to the library. Or call the information number. Perhaps the paragraph could be improved by simplifying the technical language (such as “controlled school choice” or “attendance zone”).
Tom French, a writer at the St. Petersburg Times, spent a year reporting at Largo (Fla.) High School and another year writing the story of six students trying to survive American education in the 1990s. In the following scene, a group of struggling students play “show and tell,” usually a game for kindergarten students:
The biggest presentation of the day comes from Mickey. His real name is Steve, but he won’t let anyone call him that. For as long as the kids in the pod can remember, he has always wanted to be known by the name of his hero, Mickey Mouse. This is not a joke. Mickey has a sense of humor about it, but underneath, he is dead serious.
He shows the others his Mickey Mouse harmonica. and his Mickey Mouse cap. And his Mickey Mouse doll, and his Mickey Mouse toothbrush container, and his Mickey Mouse earring. He would have brought his Mickey Mouse underwear, he says, but he doesn’t think they’d really want to see it.
“Anything and everything, I’ve got it.”
He shows them a clipping of a newspaper photo that shows a cow with spots naturally shaped like Mickey Mouse’s head. According to Mickey, the people who owned the cow have already sold it to Disney.
“They got like a million bucks for that cow,” he says.
The other kids are stunned by the sheer number and diversity of the souvenirs. Especially the Mickey Mouse fishing bobber.
“No way,” says another kid, staring at the bobber. “Where would you get that?”
Mickey smiles.
“I don’t reveal my sources,” he says.
Mrs. O’Donnell asks him how the fascination began. It started a while back, Mickey says, when he had quit school for a time and was at home by himself. He was depressed. He was lonely. He felt like a failure. Then he found Mickey Mouse.
“I couldn’t make friends or nothing,” he says, “and it’s like this was my friend, who would never tell me I was a loserhe never argues back.”
A girl nearby raises her hand. “He can never talk to you, either,” she says. “Have you thought of that?”
“I don’t care,” says Mickey. “He never tells me that I’m wrong.”
When he says this, the rest of the class grows uncomfortably quiet. Some of the kids are studying Mickey with amazement. Others are fighting not to laugh. Finally someone breaks the silence.
“Is your house, like, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse?” says one of the girls.
Mickey stands there with an uncertain smile, looking out at the faces of his classmates. He could take their reactions two ways. Maybe he’s made a hit and they’re just laughing at the oddness of his obsession. Or maybe they think he really is a loser, confirming his worst suspicions.
Before it goes any further, Mrs. O’Donnell steps in. Politely she thanks Mickey for his presentation and moves on. A few seats down, among a group of kids who refuse to take show-and-tell seriously, always blowing it off, a boy holds up a can of diet Coke he’s been drinking.
“This is my can,” he says with a smirk. “You can recycle it and get money for it.”
“This is my pen,” says the boy beside him, playing along. “It flies.”
With that, he pulls the pen back and flips it into the air. It sails across the room in a graceful arc, tumbling lengthwise end over end…
This kind of writing depends on intensive reporting that comes, first and foremost, from access. Tom French had to sit in that classroom for many days, before this incident came to light. He is there on another day when the students in the class learn that none of them lives with both birth parents. Stories can be reconstructed from people’s memories, but nothing is better than an eyewitness account–where the reporter is the eyewitness.
When we think about the two ways of reading, and the two ways of writing, it is helpful to think about a spectrum-a scale of 1 to 10. The announcement about the school choice meeting is almost pure information: it scores a 1 or 2. The scene about Mickey Mouse is straight narrative: it scores a 9 or 10.
So what might a “5” look like, something in the middle of the scale? Perhaps an historical account in the biography of a famous person, such as this passage from a book on American inventors:
De Forest’s love of analogy also appears in the poetry he frequently wrote, a selection from which he included in his autobiography. His use of metaphor seems to have emerged unconsciously and spontaneously. For instance, when observing under a microscope the flow of minute particles between electrodes in his wireless detector, he imagined…
This passage contains some information, but also helps us envision a scene of a creative man looking into a microscope.
The Third Way To Write
One question remains: What do I mean in my title when I say there are two ways of reading and three ways of writing? The first two ways of reading and writing should be obvious by now. We read and write for information. We read and write for story. Language points us there. Language puts us there.
So what is the third way: reading and writing for both information and story.
Journalists often write articles that have story elements and vice versa. Moreover, we have some tricks of the trade that help us do this. The first is the anecdote, a word often confused with “antidote”–unless we say that the anecdote is an antidote to the poison of dull writing.
The anecdote is a tiny story within a story, “a short account of some interesting or humorous incident.” The word comes from the Greek meaning “previously unpublished,” suggesting some little secret piece of history or biography. So Chip Scanlan, now director of Poynter’s writing program, tells us that the grieving mother of a girl missing for years leaves the front porch light on for her, and places a piece of tape over the lightswitch so it cannot be accidently turned off. The story tells us about eternal grief, but the anecdote shows us.
Don Fry, my fellow writing coach, suggests a story structure in which anecdotes can be used as gold coins. “Imagine yourself walking along a path through the forest when you come upon a gold coin. You pick it up and put it in your pocket. You walk another mile, and find another coin. Another mile, another coin. Even though you’re tired, you keep walking until the coins run out.” In the same way, a reader will more likely move through an informational story if he or she is rewarded with a gold coin, a tiny bit of story that intensifies the experience of reading.
So an article can be mostly informational and be brightened by embedded stories. Or it can work the other way around. The story can begin with an experience, a narrative, rendered so artfully that we can see it, hear it, smell it. Bill Blundell, now-retired reporter for The Wall Street Journal, once wrote this lead to a story about the disappearing cowboy:
The lariat whirls as the man on horseback separates a calf from the herd. Suddenly, the loop snakes around the calf’s rear legs and tightens. Wrapping a turn of rope around the saddle horn, the rider drags the hapless animal to his crew.
The flanker whips the calf onto its back, and the medicine man inoculates the animal. Amid blood, dust and bawling, the calf is dehorned with a coring tool, branded in an acrid cloud of smoke from burning hair and flesh, earmarked with a penknife in the ranch’s unique pattern and castrated. It is all over in one minute.
Fascinating story. But why are we reading this scene? What’s the point? What is the context? So what? It turns out there are few real cowboys left in an era of cowboy hype. And the author communicates this in a passage called the nut paragraph, or “nut graph” for short:
Finally, there is a little band of men like Jim Miller. Their boots are old and cracked. They still know as second nature the ways of horse and cow, the look of sunrise over empty land-and the hazards, sheer drudgery and rock-bottom pay that go with perhaps the most over-romanticized of American jobs. There are very few of these men left. “Most of the real cowboys I know,” says Mr. Miller, “have been dead for a while.”
Another story begins with a man making himself a Spam sandwich, even though he swore that if he ever survived World War II, where he ate so much of the stuff, he would never eat Spam again. But why read about Spam? Check the fourth paragraph: “Spam lives, believe it or not. The Hormel company sold 91 million pounds of it last year, making Spam America’s most popular canned meat.”
The narrative can slow down, or even stop, for a bit of background or explanation. Think of this structure as the moving train, a reader’s journey created by the writer’s narrative line. Every so often, the train slows down or even makes a whistle stop, during which the reporter may speak directly to the reader to explain, or offer history, or provide context or background.
So we’ve learned that stories can brighten information, and that information can enrich stories.
One other tool to bring information and narrative together is a story form I call the hourglass. This story works well when there is breaking news combined with narrative chronology. The top of the hourglass looks like the old inverted pyramid, but is shorter in duration-perhaps four or five paragraphs. So we learn that a man shot a police officer in the leg, ran into a house, held a boy hostage for eight hours, surrendered without harming the boy, and was finally arrested. What follows is a transition, called the turn. “Police and witnesses gave the following account of the dramatic incident.” What follows is a retelling of events in chronological order, with many more details than a standard story would allow.
Readers now have a choice. They can read the top and quit, or, if interested can linger down in the story.
If any of these ideas serve you well, say a prayer of thanks for the contributions of Professor Louise Rosenblatt.
[Editor’s note: Roy Peter Clark is Senior Scholar at The Poynter Institute and director of the National Writers’ Workshop.]
