The Young Man and Journalism

by Chester Sanders Lord

CHAPTER III

NEWSPAPER COMPOSITION—THE ART OF WRITING IN SIMPLE YET ENTERTAINING FASHION

The young man just starting in journalism is asked to write in the simplest words and the shortest sentences at his command. He is told that the reader wants facts rather than elegances of expression and that the plainest language is the best newspaper style.

By plain language is not meant the language of the child’s primer, but rather the use of good Saxon concrete nouns and active verbs in sentences not embellished with verbose phrases. Nevertheless, when editors tell the young reporter to use the plainest language they mean usually that they will be satisfied with it in his routine reporting. But they encourage the study of “how to produce rich effects by the use of familiar words,” how to write not only with steadiness and strength, but also with those little embellishments of incidental word and phrase that lift the work above the commonplace. And they unceasingly urge the necessity of good writing—for not anywhere is good writing appreciated more than in a newspaper office.

To write the simple language requires much study and practice—more, indeed, than to write the other kind. It is natural for people, children especially, to use simple words, but the schools and colleges have taught, until within a few years, the writing of rather high-sounding prose. Textbooks have reflected Dr. Johnson’s ornate paragraphs, Macaulay’s massive profundities, Washington Irving’s beautifully rounded florid sentences, and Sir Walter Scott’s superlatives. For years and years they were commended to students of literature for imitation. The effect of this teaching remains. We find it difficult to write in the same simplicity with which we talk. It does not come natural to us. The editor gave fine advice to the cartoonist from whom he wanted an article. Said the cartoonist: “He just offered me one suggestion—inasmuch as I was not a regular writer—that I refrain from trying to write and simply tell in my own words as though I were telling it to my wife.” That’s it: refrain from trying to write if you wish to write in simple language and simple style.

It is well enough to write as you talk if you are a good talker. Hundreds of articles of advice in the last fifty years have urged young men to write as they talk. But almost all talk is without study, is commonplace, is not the expression of consecutive thought, is disjointed construction. It is recognized that dictated articles have less finish than those penned. Nevertheless, the direct way, the simplest way is undoubtedly the best way of writing. Emerson says: “The speech of the street is incomparably more forceful than the speech of the academy.” Lafcadio Hearn says of Kipling: “No one has managed to produce great effects with so few words.”

But why speak of it as “newspaper style,” when there isn’t any such thing? Almost every kind of writing is used by newspapers. All kinds of literature are printed in them—the scholarly essay, the article of argument, the expository editorial paragraph, the story of fiction, the language of verse, the consideration of art, music, the play, all sorts of description of all kinds of happenings in every part of our old earth—and all are written without uniformity of diction or construction. There is no style that the newspaper rejects. The experienced editor seeks diversity of writing and of topic in every column. He studies to that end.

Some style of writing is so plain that you do not notice it. It is like the well dressed man whose clothing is so simple and appropriate that it is not attracting attention wherever he goes. Merimee said of Stendhal that he despised mere style and insisted that a writer had attained perfection when we remember his ideas without recalling his phrases. Of George Saintsbury, the English critic, it was said: “He always thought it of more importance to utter the thought than to care about the form of utterance.... If he had given more attention to style we should have been deprived of some of the benefits of his knowledge.”

Indeed, some great newspaper narratives are of such absorbing interest in themselves—great disasters like the sinking of the Lusitania or the Titanic—that the reader’s attention is entirely concentrated on the facts and he does not notice the diction or the construction. No matter how disjointed or horribly written the narrative may be he finishes it with the impression that he has read a great article. Nevertheless, every article is the better for good telling. And probably no greater newspaper accomplishment exists than the ability to write well. It is of increasing value as the young man goes on to higher grade work.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in a lecture to the Cambridge students urges them to study writing and to practice writing, to write and rewrite with intent to gain facility in diction and in the fashioning of sentences, and especially to seek to make their prose “accurate, perspicuous, persuasive, and appropriate.” He would insure greater accuracy by the study and practice of the use of words. Thought and speech being inseparable, it follows that we cannot use the humblest processes of thought—cannot resolve to take our bath hot or cold, or decide what to order for breakfast—without forecasting it in some form of words. Words, in fine, he urges, are the only currency in which we can exchange thought even with ourselves. Does it not follow, then, that the more accurately we use words the closer definition we shall give to our thoughts? “And by drilling ourselves to write perspicuously we train our minds to clarify our thought, since language is the expression of thought. The first aim of speech is to be understood and the more clearly we write the more easily and surely we will be understood. Not to be understood is to be a sloven in speech.”