New York Times reporter Jeanna Smialek was stalled on a story. She wanted to describe how people of her generation — millennials — were distorting the economy, and all she knew for sure was there was an image she didn’t want to use: the snake and the egg.

“The snake metaphor was gross,” Smialek said. “You don’t want to talk about food moving through a snake in a nut graph. And I’m like, that’s the energy I want to go for, but less disgusting.”

What she came up with was similar, and better. She compared her generation’s economic impact to a person “squeezing into a too-small sweater.”

“At every life stage, it has stretched a system that was often too small to accommodate it, leaving it somewhat flabby and misshapen in its wake.”

We can pause to appreciate the line, but for us at Beat Academy, the real take-home lesson is how Smialek found it.

“If you could only see the hours of time and debate that went into the sweater metaphor,” she said. “I probably made 16 people talk about metaphors with me before I finally came upon one that worked.”

This, for me, is a healthy reminder of how good writing happens. A lot of it comes from each of us tapping away solo at our keyboard. But sometimes, it’s a team effort; in Smialek’s case, a pretty large team. (Props, by the way, go to her Times colleague Ben Casselman for suggesting the sweater.)

This takes absolutely nothing away from Smialek. In fact, I think it speaks to a strength. As reporters, we know we’re not paid to have all the answers. We’re paid to know who to ask and where to look to find those answers. Smialek applied the same concept to writing.

It shouldn’t surprise us that it worked. Communication is always about passing information from one person to the next. Why shouldn’t a little community effort on the sender’s side make for a better result on the receiving side?

During each season of Beat Academy, we like to take at least one session to focus on craft. This year, we did a generational straddle, pairing millennial Smialek with Poynter senior scholar and baby boomer Roy Peter Clark, aka America’s writing coach. Their mission: To swap tips for writing about all things economic. Watching the two of them bat around the merits and drawbacks of different writing devices was like eavesdropping on two chess masters talking about opening gambits and the best ways for Black to neutralize White’s first-move advantage.

Public writing

It didn’t matter that they sometimes disagreed; there’s never a single correct solution to a writing puzzle. Smialek’s effort to get her metaphor right was in keeping with Clark’s big message that the best journalists are driven by the duty to be what he calls public writers.

“This means assuming as your mission not just getting (the facts) right,” Clark said, “but taking responsibility for what readers know and understand about the world.”

That’s a higher bar than being a good chronicler of events. It means pushing to meet readers — or the audience on any platform — where they are and bringing them to the point so that they understand what you’ve presented so well that they could pass what they learned on to someone else.

Clark’s book “Tell It Like It Is: A Guide to Clear and Honest Writing” lays out specific strategies to deliver the goods.

First among them is slowing things down.

When the subject is dense, shift into first gear. Make the period and the paragraph break your friends.

“I believe it’s the most significant strategy that journalists have available to them to make something comprehensible,” Clark said. “How do you make hard facts easy reading? You do it this way: Shorter words. Shorter sentences. Shorter paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity.”

Using that tactic, Clark took this 34-word sentence:

Efforts to improve housing for Buffalo neighborhoods will receive $5.6 million of the city’s annual federal community development block grant money, according to the application to be submitted to the Common Council tomorrow.

And turned it into this:

Some people in Buffalo think the city needs more and better housing for its citizens. They are trying to do something about it and are asking for help from the federal government. More than $5 million worth of help.

Clark has other tips. Use as few numbers as will get the job done. Quote people who can make things clearer than you can. If there’s a chronology, a natural narrative flow, use it. Avoid jargon, or translate it.

Whacking economics down to size

Smialek’s beat takes her knee-deep through jargon, and she plays off of it.

Consider this opening line to one piece: “There’s a three-letter abbreviation that economists have started pronouncing with the energy of a four-letter word: ‘O.E.R.’”

OER stands for the indigestible term “owner’s equivalent rent,” and while the rest of us might go on about our lives in blissful ignorance, economists throw shade on this measure of housing costs, mainly because it’s been driving up the measured rate of inflation. Smialek knew it would be tough to explain why they hate OER, and why it matters.

“I feel like when you’re going to say something as nerdy as the phrase ‘owner’s equivalent rent’ and the abbreviation, you kind of need to make a joke of it, almost in order to make it accessible,” she said.

A never-ending pursuit

Smialek and Clark had a back-and-forth over how she had crafted the lead in a story about immigrant labor sustaining Maine’s lobster industry. Clark suggested a different approach that pushed a keyword to the end of a sentence. Smialek said she had tried it.

“I spend a lot of time on leads, like an absurd amount of time on leads, relative to the rest of the story,” she explained.

She made her pick because she wanted to shake up the paragraph’s rhythm.

The word at the end of a sentence carries the most power. Varying the cadence catches the reader’s attention. In this case, two equally valid principles didn’t align.

And both writers relished the debate.

“What I’m hearing and what we’re seeing is the way writers care about the technique so much,” Clark said. “You’re thinking about where the periods are, where the commas are, how long the sentences are. All of those things are just part of the craft, that we all hope we’re going to learn something new about the craft every day.”

Some writer of renown once said that no writing is ever done. You simply hit deadline. If the session with Clark and Smialek was about one thing, it was how to make your work as good as possible before you have to move on to the next assignment.