On Writing

#1 Who's your audience?

I learned this one on the job. A wonderful woman tethered me to a telephone line for nearly a year to teach me how to write news reports for CBC radio. Her name was Janice Stein. She was in Windsor. I was somewhere else, trying to eke out a living as a freelancer. She was a difficult person to work for, but her dedication and committment to bring me up to snuff was no less than award winning.

She had a surprising answer for me: my audience was my grandmother. I'm going to tell the story to my grandmother. She even suggested I put a picture of my grandmother by the computer to help me remember.

Writing for radio is writing for the ear. So,
#2 one thought: one sentence.

That's it. Complex compund sentences are not necessary and they are too hard for the ear to follow. Keep it conversational. That was very difficult for me. I'd learned to write in University, worse, I'd learned to write philosophy papers. Folks, it's as you've always expected: that isn't writing. I was in despair until I read what I wrote nearly every night in my journal. That was in words of one syllable. That was clear and concise. All I had to do now was to learn how to tell a story instead of moaning and complaining about my life. Gotcha.

The next bit was the hardest.

#3 The thesis statement.

This was to be the first line of my report. There's a formula of course. Here it is: "Someone is doing something because___________."

Notice that it's about people. I'm not saying "something is happening because....." but "people are protesting." And actually, to say "people are protesting isn't quite good enough. The last bit of excellent advice she taught me was

#5 use vivid verbs.

"People are yelling, marching up and down outside the courthouse."

As countless other writers have urged, paint a picture, she said. Show me the secene in front of you. So, my apologies for the ponderous bits below. My grandmother doesn't have a computer so I sometimes forget that I'm writing for her. Always.

This week I'm teaching the ten year old how to find the topic sentence and make a key word outline. Then we're going to re-write the piece using the outline for guidence. I'm using the free samples I printed off from Imitations in Writing, Aesop from the Logos school. I'm quite excited. It's more than time.

PS. When do you suppose blogger is going to fix spell check? This could get embarrassing!