A new library resource for magazines

Communication librarian Christine Gola writes that UH students and faculty will soon have access to the entire archives of The New Yorker on line. The New Yorker is not on-line yet, but the data base in which it will appear is called Opinion Archives.

Opinion Archives is an invaluable source of information, containing searchable archives for several important magazines, including Commentary, Commonweal, Harpers Magazine, NACLA (a leftist newsletter on Latin America), The Nation, The National Review, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

These are major publications on both the right, the left and inbetween. The Harpers archive goes back before the Civil War, and makes for fascinating reading on historical subjects. The New York Review of Books runs some of the best essays on serious books in the country. To use them you have to enter your People Soft number and go through the library’s portal, but once you’re there, the archives are easy to use.

Today’s staff editorial on the Valenti sign

Today’s editorial praised the changes coming for the Valenti School. As many of you know, little has been done for the school in many years. Welcome Wilson, the chair of the regents, is charging ahead in changing the name of the school and raising money to enlarge the building. These accomplishments would seem to overshadow an aesthetic quibble over the new sign. As children we were used to being scolded for things that didn’t seem to matter that much. 

Opinion pages seem to be an opportunity to scold people about right and wrong, good and bad.  But we’ve worked all semester on  writing opinion pieces that move information and stories forward. The backing on that sign has a good story behind it. It’s designed so it can be take down in January when the work on the building begins and a welcoming entryway will be built. That’s  the story.

What you don’t want to become is a scold, like George Will, who wrote a piece recently in which he denounced blue jeans.

On writing columns

Columns can range all over the place, from the profound to the trivial and every place inbetween. Columnists are driven by curiosity. Usually they don’t work from press releases.

Verlyn Klinkenborg has one such piece in today’s NY Times. It’s about going to the barbershop. It’s as feathery and light as a souffle. Klinkenborg frequently writes such signed pieces for the Times editorial page, often about the changing seasons, his drive across America and so forth. They provide a welcome relief to the heavy subjects that dominate the page.

Here’s another columnist who deserves to be read and listened to by University of Houston students: John Lienhard, a retired engineering professor who writes and broadcasts The Engines of Our Ingenuity.   Maybe you’ve heard John’s broadcasts on the KUHF radio. Each three-minute long piece is no more than 500 words long, and they’re all on his website. John’s father was a columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Maybe he learned to write by just hanging around with him. But what drives the episodes is his curiosity in how things work, how they were invented. I’ve done two episodes for “Engines,” and learned a lot in doing them. I’d be intensely proud of any student who could write one good enough that he would broadcast it. He’s the best journalist at the University of Houston. If you haven’t heard him, try one of his podcasts.

The last columnist I’m promoting here is Frank Deford, a Sports Illustrated writer who does a Wednesday morning broadcast on Morning Edition for NPR,. He’s a great story teller.

Why am I emphasizing two writers who appear on radio? Because writing a column is all about voice. By voice I mean writing and speaking with assurance, character, emphasis and naturalness. Naturalness is the hardest thing. Once you learn how to fake that– to paraphrase a famous movie producer on sincerety–you’ve got it made.

Opinion and news: Bill Bryson in today’s Daily Cougar

Jason Bess wanted to write an opinion piece about Bill Bryson, who visited campus yesterday at noon. His question was how to make it an opinion piece and not a news piece. Turned out that wasn’t such a big problem after all. He wrote about why he liked Bryson. He mused about Bryson. He drew conclusions.

The straight news story by Solange Inzillo was a model of how to write a news story about a speaker. She led with the most important thing he said, developed the background, followed with more quotations and ended the story with why Bryson was here.  

Jason had those elements, too. An opinion piece can’t work without quotation and background. Then he added that extra thing. He explained why Bryson matters, why we should care. But if he hadn’t included the news elements, the piece would have been blather. He shows again why  opinion writing requires  reporting reporting reporting.

Writing with form

Lisa Gray talked about writing with forms. Is the column a profile or a narrative? Is it an essay or a story? 

You have to make choices about these things. Writers are always thinking about those decisions. They think about how they are going to organize the material. 

Writing opinion pieces is no different from writing other stories. You can’t just say to yourself, “I know my opinion. Now I’ll just let it rip.”  That’s what the ranters and ravers and some of the bloggers do. 

But you’re all better than that. You know you want to push the story ahead with information. Now how do you make the choices?

You can’t do better than to go the Writer’s Craft website and read David McHam’s handouts for feature writing. There’s a lot of good advice there, especially in the handouts about organization. If you haven’t had advanced reporting or feature writing, check these out. if you have had them, they’re well worth reviewing. 

He’s good on writing the lead and about writing the bridge from the lead. 

The simplest advice, but the hardest to follow, is to make each paragraph about a distinct subject. We’ve heard this advice over and over again, but still all sorts of ideas fly into paragraphs. The mind is a wilful and wild thing.  This is where you make a choice. Decide what the paragraph is about. Include only information that fits the topic.

Keep the paragraphs short. Two or three sentences to a paragraph. Long paragraphs don’t read well, either on blogs or in columns of type.

Keep the sentences short. When a sentence goes beyond 22 or 23 words, readers have trouble following it. 

Think about varying the sentence length, the way I did above, and here. Play with the rhythms. Short sentences can be emphatic.

Too many short sentences in a row make the rhythm dull and choppy and predictable.

Above all, know your form. Think about the form. Plan the form. Make decisions.

Writing a column

Our last two assignments are to write columns. We heard from Lisa Gray today about voice and form. Voice usually comes from writing in a relaxed way, though some columnists can be shrill, demanding, pungent, sardonic, ironic, sad, comic. The most important thing is write in a way that is natural to you. Don’t try too hard. That’s not easy to do. The standard advice is to imagine you are sitting with a friend and telling her a story. 

Form can be tricky.  Lisa talked about having a form in mind before she starts writing. The story might be a profile, or a narrative, or a list or an essay. It might be about finding a big idea in a place, or finding a place to express a big idea. But what’s interesting is that she has a sense of the form before she starts writing. 

For you columns, write about something that’s important to you, something you have knowledge and interest in. You need to write it with details. Interviewing someone would be nice. Visiting a place would be good. Stories are about people acting in a time and place. 

My main advice is: don’t write about abstractions and big ideas. Write about people and places and most of all about people doing things: pitchers pitching badly or well, architects designing poorly or well, and so on. 

Write about something you care about.

And, find models for writing. Read some columnists. Who writes well about what you want to write about? Notice how they do what they do. It will always involve details. Take Ken Hoffman’s column in today’s Chronicle. It’s about beating Robert Horry in a backyard game of HORSE. He salts the story with details about the backyard conditions that help him win, about how they had to shoot through branches, or from the edge of the barbeque pit,  and the rim was loose, and so forth. Lots of details make the piece work. Whatever you are writing about, be observant. Put lots of details in the piece.

Foxes and hedgehogs and punditry

Nicholas Kristoff recently published a column that will be must reading for this course. It’s about how badly experts predict the future, especially those who have a strong ideology. Those are are more cautious and pragmatic make better predictions.  He’s writing about a book by a scholar who tracked predictions over a twenty-year period.

Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones. That had to do with a fault in the media. Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!

Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather  be a fox than a hedgehog. But hedgehogs get all the time on tv.