Building a Writing Style

A note on the College Football Playoffs: The seventh and eighth seeds will play for the national championship…they are the two best teams in the playoffs and deserve to be there. There is obviously something to be done about the way teams are seeded!

Today’s Post

_{I went back to the archives to check the St. Albans Messenger, Vermont Sunday News and Burlington Free Press archives, and while there were some minor iterations in}

_{style, probably due to stricter adherence to the AP Stylebook, my stories were written pretty much the same, be they general news or sports, I started in journalism with contributions to the BFA Mercury, the high school newspaper as a freshman and went on to become Mercury editor by my senior year.}

_{I should note that technically my start in journalism was on the circulation end…I took over Kevin McGinn’s Free Press delivery route before I signed on as a writer. Pleasant on nice days, it could be a soggy slog on rainy days and an invitation to frost bite on some of those early winter mornings. It introduced me to 5 a.m. and to a basic form of economics. It also introduced me to hot donuts, as our pickup point was Ann’s Bakery on Main Street in St. Albans and they were always kind enough to give those of us who picked up there a hot donut or two before we started our rounds.}

_{I inadvertently adopted Wells Twombley’s style of not talking down to my audience, forsaking the Keep It Simple Stupid theory which said journalists write to the level of an eighth-grader. I always thought of my writing as a printed conversation…I wrote as if I was talking to someone. If I used a word or six above that eighth-grade level, suck it up Buttercup…or better yet, look it up Buttercup. If the word fit my written conversation, it was in whether convention liked it or not. I also, without really reading a lot of Twombly’s stuff, adopted his irreverence…which carries to this day. Irreverence has no place in general news, but it does in sportswriting as ultimately it is, after all, only a game.}

_{I have been invited to speak to a number of college English classes and Matt Metcalf invited me to talk to his Sports Information class at Canton College a couple of times a year. One of the things I always talked about when it came to writing was using the pyramid style of writing. Put the important stuff in the first two or three paragraphs and then elaborate from there. Part of that comes from the “all the news that fits, we print” theory. There is a finite amount of space on a newspaper page and when you run out of it, usually stories have must be cut. If the important stuff is in the first three of four paragraphs, it can be cut from there and still get the gist of the story across.}

_{The other suggestion is short paragraphs…one or two sentences…a suggestion I routinely ignored. If I could make each paragraph a separate thought, it seemed to work for me. Again it came down to having a conversation with my readers, if it made sense out loud, it made sense on paper.}

_{I was really fortunate to be hired by Cliff Noyes, the editor of the St. Albans Mesenger, as a part-timer during the school year and a full-timer in the summer starting in my junior year in high school. Three of us, Jack Dodd, Ed Blanchard and I had tried out for two spots as on-air talent at WWSR, the local radio station. I finished third. But with my background in writing which started with the BFA Mercury, the high school paper and with the recommendation and encouragement of English teacher George Wood, I landed at the Messenger and Cliff, who at that time was one of the youngest newspaper editors in the country, took me under his wing. I not only learned how to write a good news story, but also how to lay out a page, prepare a photograph for publication from taking the picture to etching it on a plastic sheet to go on the press and how to typeset on a hot lead linotype. I developed the ability to read upside down and backwards and had a early understanding of what the term “leading” means in printing as I slipped slim sheets of lead between lines of type to space out a column. I owe a lot to Gene LaFountain as well as he taught me a ton about photography. from taking pictures to developing film to running the machine. That machine prepped the pictures for printing in the paper by transferring the image to a plastic sheet. The tricky thing is that the machine itself was right at the end of the row of reporters’ desks in a little room and it had a nasty tendency to burst into flames. You had to be part journalist and part Smoky the Bear to get along in the Messenger newsroom.}

_{Our camera supply included a classic Speed Graphics with a film pack for 120 mm film, a Hasselblad which also took 120 mm and a 35mm single reflex camera which I think was a Minolta. The Speed Graphics wasn’t real practical for sports photography, but was great for a lot of other journalistic applications. The Hasselblad had a telephoto lens of a sort and was better for sports, but limited in terms of number of shots per roll of film,  The Minolta was ideal with more shots on a roll of 35 mm film (up to 36), but we had limited lens options for it. I got to be very good  with that Hasselblad. And as well as showing me the way around a camera, Geno also taught me how to develop film. We were strictly black and white in those days and we used battery casings to develop multiple rolls of film at a time. We had spools that you wound the film on, but at times would use the swish method, holding one end of a roll of film and swishing it back and forth in the tank. While rubber gloves were available, we didn’t always use them and the chemicals didn’t do a whole lot of good for our skin tone.}

_{Another key person in the Messenger operation was a lady named Marion, who was our proofreader and with apologies to all of my English teachers through high school and the expository writing professors in college, Marion taught me more about proper word usage, punctuation and spelling than anyone I have ever met.}

_{My writing style has refined a bit as things went along and refined again for a while when the web came along as things were tightened up for easier reading, but I eventually abandoned that theory and went back to my base style as we started considering our web site as our own newspaper and fans wanted a little more in the recaps. My writing style also earned me some pretty good grades at UVM. In the various writing courses, political science and other mass communications courses, the stye seemed to sit well with my professors and as long as I had the vaguest clue of what I was talking about, the good grades followed.}

_{I ended up working full-time at the Free Press while still being a full-time student at UVM from the middle of my sophomore year on. The Free Press as a morning paper, enabled me to take classes until three or so in the afternoon and then go to work until the paper “went to bed” about midnight or a little after. I scheduled a lot of morning classes in case I had afternoon coverage assignments and Don Fillion and I switched off on “doing the desk” which meant laying out the pages and nursing them through the production room. We were a six-day publication at that time so theoretically I had two days a week off. It usually ended up as one as a lot of games and events were on weekends, but I didn’t mind because I really enjoyed the teams and athletes I covered.}

_{May of 1971 rolled around and I was fortunate enough to be named the top senior in the Department of Mass Communications and the Vermont Sportswriter of the Year in the same month. The only drawback with finishing up at UVM was that I no longer had the comfort and fun of dorm living and a campus meal ticket. I was out on my own and the expenses soared, but I was fortunate enough to share apartments with Chris Hapner, the city hall reporter for the Free Press and Chris and I had some great times together.}