Legal Writing

News Product Placement a Kroc

Posted on July 23, 2008
I'm receiving phone calls this week about a plan to use product placement during certain broadcast news programs. The product in question is a cup of coffee from McDonald's. In one version of the plan, McDonald's cups would be visible on news sets...

From Rim Editor to Ram the Editor

Posted on July 21, 2008
I'm feeling more than a bit xenophobic these days, and I'm blaming it on the movement to outsource newspaper copy editing services to India. I was interviewed on this topic recently for a public radio program in New York City called "The Takeaway" with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji...

Proof That Remnick Is Wrong

Posted on July 16, 2008
RELATED "Satire's New Home in Journalism," by Kelly McBride In a world awash in random irony and snarky cynicism, it is wise to consider the healing words of David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. Defending satire and his choice of cover art, Remnick told National Public Radio that he disagreed with those critics who thought that rank and file Americans would not get the humor in the cover...

Numb Nuts: Newspapers Are Stupid

Posted on July 15, 2008
I can't imagine what George Carlin is thinking today as he laughs down at us from heaven or up at us from heck. Oh, yeah, I used heck so as not to offend the readers of this Web site, especially the children who might stumble upon this post on their way to Romenesko...

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Fragging Without Shame

Posted on July 10, 2008
I sit at this moment in my doctor's office staring at my cholesterol numbers, and they are not good. Too much pizza and Pepsi, I guess. I look up and notice two pieces of office art: a scale model of the human heart and the head of a giant alligator. The gator looks like he is about to eat the heart...

Good Semicolons Make Good Neighbors

Posted on July 09, 2008
My wife Karen worked with cancer patients for many years and taught me that an essential part of recovery is a good sense of humor. So when our great pastor, Father Robert Gibbons, announced to the congregation that he'd need surgery for colon cancer, I rushed up to him after Mass with this happy thought: "Father, by the time they're finished with you, you may be the only man in American who knows how to use a semicolon...

How I Wrote 'Father Tim' -- and Why

Posted on July 02, 2008
I hope you get a chance to read my essay "Father Tim: Irish Catholicism and American Journalism."  Unlike most of my work for this Web site, this essay is not about writing, reporting, editing or language. Instead, it is a reflection upon religion and culture, as expressed in the passing of an important figure in politics and journalism...

There's Parallel, and Then There's PARALLEL

Posted on June 20, 2008
When David Shribman was a young reporter, he attended a dinner to honor a famous Navy hero, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. Present at the event were three American presidents: Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and Richard M. Nixon, "a spectacle that Sen. Bob Dole would later immortalize as a gathering of 'Hear No Evil, See No Evil ...

Too Much Wind Beneath Our Wings?

Posted on June 13, 2008
I was the world's worst Boy Scout, a member of the Beaver Patrol (not kidding) in Troop 177 in suburban New York. I hated swimming, could barely tie my shoes, and my idea of roughing it was spending a night at a Holiday Inn. I am left with two dominant memories: a paralyzing attack of poison ivy and a family of Eagle Scouts whose favorite activity was leafing through their father's collection of girlie magazines...

Avoiding The Trap

Posted on June 13, 2008
My errors in grammar and usage are more embarrassing than yours. Like the preacher caught with the prostitute, like the dentist with bad teeth, like the insane psychiatrist, the language expert who stumbles risks becoming a laughingstock.My mistakes come from inattention, haste, or careless proofreading, but some come from ignorance...

Give Me an S. Give Me Another S. Whataya Got?

Posted on June 11, 2008
Language scholars have a word for the sound made by the letter s. They call it a sibilant, derived from the Latin word meaning "to hiss." Leave it to the scholars to call something a sibilant when they could have as easily called it a hissy, but then that might have been mistaken for a synonym we use in the South for tantrum...

The Thinking Writer's Emoticon

Posted on June 06, 2008
The first research I remember on the effects of word processing was produced by a New Jersey professor who contrasted the work of students using Apples vs. those using IBM personal computers. He concluded that while the Apple kids wrote cleaner looking stories, the PC kids produced the better writing...

I Cannot Tell a Lay

Posted on June 02, 2008
In his famous essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell asserts that he is not concerned about correct grammar and syntax, "so long as one makes one's meaning clear." But I cannot recall a single lapse in old George's language that would require the application of a hickory stick to his great anti-colonial bottom...

Why the Littlest Words Can Mean a Lot

Posted on May 28, 2008
RELATED There are occasions, of course, when an substitutes for a, a distinction influenced by sound. The path to getting this right is simple and governed by your dialect and your ear. If a word begins with a consonant sound, use a. A vowel sound requires an...

Give Us Your Toughest Spelling Words

Posted on May 23, 2008
When I came into journalism in 1977, I was commissioned by the American Society of Newspaper Editors to create a spelling test for reporters and editors. That idea seemed lame, I thought, until the day I stood next to a news editor who had misspelled the word "dilemma" in a huge headline...

A Little Practice, Not Magic, Will Turn You Into a Better Speller

Posted on May 21, 2008
This week I'm offering two essays on why good spelling matters, how it can mean the difference between love and lust, between laughter and loss. But first let me sit in wonder at the realization that, once again, we've made a connection between language and enchantment...

Hey Kids, Got a Grammar Problem? Let's Take a Vote!

Posted on May 16, 2008
I confess my intolerance for dichotomous thinking. When it comes to red state vs. blue state politics, I'm a little bit purple. When the phonics zealots wage war against the "whole language" hordes, I stand on the 50-yard line and shake my head. In a country vs rock debate, call me rockabilly...

Fifty Writing Tools: Quick List

Posted on May 16, 2008
Use this quick list of Writing Tools as a handy reference. Copy it and keep it in your wallet or journal, or near your desk or keyboard. Share it and add to it.I. Nuts and Bolts1. Begin sentences with subjects and verbs.Make meaning early, then let weaker elements branch to the right...

'Look it up in the OED!'

Posted on May 13, 2008
To live inside the English language, I need the help of my two favorite dictionaries: The Oxford English Dictionary (or OED) and the American Heritage Dictionary (or AHD). Webster-philes can express their own preferences in their own books. For me, these two lexicons offer the history of our language at my fingertips, with the OED showing me where English has been and the AHD where it's headed...

What the Big Bopper Taught Me About Grammar

Posted on May 08, 2008
In our common culture, grammar has taken on at least three sets of meanings and associations. It still refers to the etiquette of writing and reading, the conventions that allow us to create a standard written English, the technical term for which, according to critic John Simon, is "grapholect...

The Glamour of Grammar

Posted on May 06, 2008
Today I begin the online publication of a new unwritten book titled "The Glamour of Grammar." Depending on your point of view, "Glamour" will be a prequel or sequel to "Writing Tools" and will be blessed with the same publisher, Little, Brown. Many of you will remember that the essays that grew into the book "Writing Tools" first appeared on the Poynter Web site...

Poynter Honors Sportswriting Legend

Posted on May 01, 2008
Roy Peter Clark, Dan Jenkins, Buddy Martin On April 18, The Poynter Institute concluded its third Sports Journalism Summit by giving its version of a lifetime achievement award. You can say it was "no contest." The recipient was the legendary Dan Jenkins, a novelist who gave us "Semi-Tough," and a veteran columnist whose first love is college football, though his mistress is golf...

Voting Scandal Mars Motto Election!

Posted on April 29, 2008
RELATED "Cast Your Vote: Six-Word Journalism Mottos""Motto in Journalism: In Six Words" It appears that Florida has done it again: botched another election, that is, without benefit of early primaries or hanging chads...

Six-Word Journalism Mottos: The Top Entries

Posted on April 25, 2008
Thanks to the hundreds of you who submitted entries to our contest. Your assignment was to create a motto for contemporary journalism in six words. Some of these bits of wisdom, it must be said, were pretty lame. But many stood out as sharp, humorous, ironic, iconoclastic, idealistic or delightfully cynical...

Motto for Journalism -- in Six Words

Posted on April 21, 2008
I read a cool interview in the St. Pete Times with Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the quirky classic "Freakonomics." Inspired by several analogies, Dubner and friends created a contest in which people submitted a new motto for the United States of America...

Why It Worked: A Rhetorical Analysis of Obama's Speech on Race

Posted on April 11, 2008
More than a century ago, scholar and journalist W.E.B. DuBois wrote a single paragraph about how race is experienced in America. I have learned more from those 112 words than from most book-length studies of the subject: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world...

The View (after Cataract Surgery) from 60

Posted on April 08, 2008
Youth may be wasted on the young, but wisdom can be wasted on the old.The culture of news, communications, media and education is experiencing one of the greatest inversions in memory. More and more, the old turn to the young to understand the world, American culture and, most of all, technology...

Narrative in the Numbers

Posted on March 24, 2008
RELATED "What It Takes: Behind the Scenes with Goldsmith Winners," by Bill Kirtz. I wish I could read fewer stories about Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan and more stories by Anne Hull and Dana Priest...

From Blog to Narrative: Josh Benton Throws Us a Curve

Posted on March 21, 2008
You can imagine how many writing seminars and conferences I've attended since 1977, so you'll excuse me if I confess to an occasional spasm of boredom. "Writing is a process...find a focus...stories are good...nut graph this...blah, blah, blah." Which is why surprising moments of great learning seem so satisfying and joyful...

Roy's Totally Subjective Picks: 85 Wonders of the Journalism World

Posted on March 12, 2008
Contributors: Ellyn Angelotti and Mallary TenoreHere are our lists of finalists for the Wonders of the Journalism World. Our original plan was to have seven wonders in each of seven categories but, like most journalists, we were not slaves to the numbers...

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