The Universal Journalist Homepage
Writing
News writing
No story is fair if reporters hide their biases or emotions behind
such subtly pejorative words as 'refused', 'despite' 'admit' and
'massive'.
Ben Bradlee
When you hear something described by a journalist as disturbing,
you know you cannot take it seriously.
Kenneth Robinson
He dropped pejoratives like subliminal seasoning.
Jim Bishop
Describing the style of 'New York Times'
obituary writer Alden Whitman
1980
Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind. Where it all
will end, knows God.
Wolcott Gibbs
Parodying the-then fashionable inverted
sentence structure of 'Time'
1958
Our writers are full of clichés just as old barns are
full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that
anything that you suspect of being a cliché undoubtedly
is one and had better be removed.
Wolcott Gibbs
'Theory and Practice of Editing
New Yorker Articles'
1959
The waste basket is a writer's best friend.
Isaac Singer
US writer
(1904-1991)
The smaller the understanding of the situation, the more pretentious
the form of expression.
John Romano
1994
If I read upcoming in the Wall Street Journal again,
I shall be downcoming and somebody will be outgoing.
Bernard Kilgrove
Signed writing invites exhibitionism.
Sir William Haley
editor of 'The Times' 1952-1966,
defending his no byline rule.
Advice on writing
I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as
I can, because that is the best way to get there.
HG Wells
Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph,
sink your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him
against the wall until the tag line.
Paul O'Neil
American writer
The most essential gift for a writer is a built-in, shock-proof
shit-detector.
Ernest Hemingway
If one wants to be a writer, there is no substitute for writing.
Talking about it, or thinking beautiful thoughts isn't enough.
Writing is a muscle and the more you use it, the more flexible
and useful it becomes.
Paul Gallico
Author and sports columnist for
the 'New York Daily News'.
If you are tempted to use a word because all the smart writers
are using it, change the word, your reading matter or you job.
'The Daily Telegraph Style Book'
If any man was to ask me what I would suppose to be a perfect
style of language, I would answer, that in which a man speaking
to five hundred people of all common and various capacities, idiots
or lunatics excepted, should be understoood by them all.
Daniel Defoe