3

Being Perfectly Clear

What You’ll Learn_________________________

The lesson of the last chapter was make your story easy to read. The lesson of this one is make it easy to understand. You’d think that would make this the longest chapter in the book. But if you follow all the lessons you learn here, you’ll see why it can be the shortest. As you’ve already learned, your story will be easy if you stick to simple words, use language people can understand, and prepare a script that can be read smoothly, accurately, convincingly.

However, a few common qualities tend to get in the way in a lot of writing, and they are the themes of the three sections in this chapter: too much information, raising questions but not answering them, and generalizing. (Everyone generalizes. Okay, that’s a joke, but if you didn’t get it, you’d better read that section twice.)

What you’ll learn in this chapter is the difference between too much information and just the right amount; why to avoid raising questions if you don’t answer them too; and the irrevocable pitfalls of generalizations (there I go again!).

Oh, and one more thing. The title of the chapter is “Being Perfectly Clear.” The best way to do that is to keep your sentences short. One sentence, one idea. Unlike the print media, listeners and viewers don’t get to go back and read something again.

TMI (Too Much Information)

Generally I have taught my own broadcast newswriting courses in a computer lab equipped with Macintosh computers. As you probably know, Macs have a little icon at the bottom labeled “Trash.” When correcting students’ papers, I use the word a lot, to send a signal that the writer should have dragged a word or two into the trash. Sometimes it’s because of a simple phrase like, “The man climbed the ladder in order to fix the rain gutter,” and I strike out the words “in order” because they are unnecessary—meaning, they are “trash.” But sometimes I use the word “trash” to say something else: TMI (Too Much Information).

For example, take a brief story about airlines’ financial problems after the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. The chiefs of virtually all the U.S. airlines told Congress they needed a government bailout to survive. In a short story, that’s all the public really needed to know. We didn’t need to know every detail of the solution they proposed: part tax relief, part loan guarantees, part financial grants. That was TMI. If I were editing a script that gave all those details, I’d have thrown them out. TMI.

Sometimes it’s not a long list of details, but just a single short detail, like someone’s age. If you’re covering a crime and the police officer tells you, “We have booked Greg Dobbs, age 42, on suspicion of armed robbery,” does the public need or want to know the suspect’s age (which in that example, by the way, is a lie)? Nope. TMI. In print, where there’s a little more latitude, someone’s age (and, as you’ll read in a moment, someone’s middle initial) can help the public more definitively identify the subject of a story. But in broadcasting, where being succinct is a necessary goal, they just get in the way. Yes, the age of a newsmaker can matter, as it did when I covered the story of an 11-year-old boy who had just enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In that case, his age was the story. And of course if you’re writing about someone who has just died, the age is pertinent. But most of the time it just clutters the script.

Or what if a police officer you’re talking to includes a suspect’s middle initial, “We have booked Greg A. Dobbs on suspicion of armed robbery.” Do you need that middle initial “A” in your script? Of course not. Sure, sometimes a middle initial is relevant, such as “President George W. Bush,” to distinguish him from a previous president, his father. But most of the time, like someone’s age, it’s just clutter.

And sometimes the whole name is irrelevant. If a fire department spokesman gives you an estimate of property damage after a small store burns down, you don’t have to write it this way:

Fire Department spokesman Walter Russell estimates property damage at more than two-million dollars.

The sentence is about the size of the loss, not the name of the spokesman. Remove it, and see how much simpler the whole sentence is:

A Fire Department spokesman estimates property damage at more than two-million dollars.

What’s the Point?

If the public doesn’t need to know it to understand the story, don’t write it.

If It’s a Question, Answer It

Don’t raise questions you cannot answer. Sure, that seems like a strange thing to teach to budding broadcast journalists, but it doesn’t suggest what you think it does. By all means, in the course of covering a story, ask and ask and ask until the answers come. But when writing a story, if you raise a question but don’t answer it, you leave your audience wondering why, perhaps distracting them long enough that they lose the thread of the whole piece. Here’s a simple example from a newspaper piece written shortly after the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001:

Although every military base in the state is locked down, base officials say they aren’t as vulnerable as civilian institutions.

Huh? Why aren’t they as vulnerable? The reporter raised a question but didn’t answer it. The reader—that was me—stopped in his tracks. But at least the rest of the story wasn’t going by on the printed page while I was trying to figure out that question. However, as you know by now, it’s different in broadcasting. If people hear something that makes them stop and wonder, it means they’re no longer hearing what follows, and they miss the rest of the story. (By the way, I got my answer from a competing paper. Terrorists are more likely to strike civilians than a place where professional opposition is likely.)

Raising questions but not answering them is a big issue. And it’s easy to overlook, unless when you’re proofreading, you think and think hard. In a paragraph midway into a feature story I wrote about the oldest postal carrier in the United States, I didn’t.

Taylor got this job when the regular carrier on the route was drafted during the war. Since then he has worked on contract. This one’s in force for four more years.

Do you see what question I raised but didn’t answer? This question: what war? World War II? World War I? Korea? Vietnam? In this case it wasn’t a matter of missing the question; it was a matter of assuming there would be no question in anyone’s mind, because Don Taylor was ninety-five years old at the time. I figured that anyone could figure it out. What I didn’t realize was that no one would be “figuring” while they were listening. Thankfully, an editor caught the problem before we ran the story.

What’s the Point?

It’s easy to raise questions without answering them, whether you fail to think hard enough about your words or you assume the audience knows what you know. Keep that in mind when proofreading, so you can avoid losing your audience.

Generalizing Is Always Wrong

Let me present another example: this one comes from the usually excellent former NBC News correspondent Jim Avila. Covering massive fires dotting the map of the western United States in the summer of 2000, Avila began one report, “The West is on fire tonight.” That must have come as quite a surprise to people sitting comfortably in their homes in Seattle, or heading for a mall in Denver, or driving through a car wash in Los Angeles. Were there flames just around the corner?

No, because “The West” was not on fire, not that night or any other. Avila’s phrase was dramatic and, yes, it probably conveyed its point to some people quite nicely, but jour-nalism is about fact, not fiction. Sometimes nifty literary tools must give way to straight factual reporting. How might it have been written differently? Here are just a few ideas:

There are fires tonight all over the West.
Throughout the West tonight, fires are burning.
The map of the entire West is dotted with fires.

The same point applies when you are asked to characterize the sentiment of a population. You often will hear something like, “Most people here say …,” but unless the reporter has actually interviewed everybody, or at least seen a reliable poll, it’s just a guess. Maybe such a sweeping statement could be made about the population in a town of 50 people, but you’ll hear the same kind of generalization about the people of New York. It’s wrong. It’s dishonest. Again, journalism is about facts, not guesswork.

What’s more, I have challenged reporters on such generalizations, and what I’ve heard more than anything else is, “Well, I talked to 30 people at that intersection, and almost all of them felt the same way.” Big deal. Does the population found at any one intersection—or bus stop, or bar—represent the demographics of the population as a whole? Not likely. Does the population found at the hour the reporter spent interviewing people represent the population found there at a different hour of the day or night? Not likely. If your assignment is to get the “pulse” of the public, the best you can do is talk to a few dozen people, then write it so the audience knows your limitations: “Of the 40 people we interviewed across from City Hall, 80-percent were against….”

What’s the Point?

One should never generalize. It’s always wrong. (I hope you see the humor in that!)

Exercises to Hone Those Skills Even Sharper____________