#writing.techniques

[prempanix]

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your reader will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an ego maniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

Kurt Vonnegut on the art of writing is much goodness. Consider this other bit of advice, seemingly simple, yet the hardest to follow:

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

[prempanix]

"Political reporting" is, most times, reduced to a template. A para on an "issue"; a quote from a politician; some 'statistics' culled from who knows where; a soupcon of faux insight.

And then there is the 'innovative' story -- where we ask the 'man on the street' for his 'opinion', and try to collate random quotes into a meaningful string.

When done with thought, though, 'political reporting' can be gripping. As with this story by Eli Saslow -- who pegs an entire national debate on one person.

Clarence Cammers of Wisconsin is a Republican, as is his representative in Congress.

Cammers knows his rep is fighting a budget battle in Congress -- but he is not sure he is fighting the right one. Living on disability thanks to a knee injury that forced him out of work, Cammers is forced to calculate the mechanics of existence in pennies. So he understands the budget, he understands that 'deficit spending' is just flat out wrong; he gets that Republicans are right in asking for cutbacks in government spending.

But? he has a son, 32, who suffers from attention deficit disorder. And so he confronts the basic conundrum: how to reconcile his party's opposition to taxes and 'big government' with the face that lesser taxes will lead to cutbacks in programs designed to help his son, and people like him?

It is the story of a national political debate -- perhaps the most important differentiator between the two parties. And it is told through the eyes of one voter. 

Neiman's analysis nails why this story is so good (Emphasis mine):

"Saslow has not written a policy piece. Instead, he brings forward one constituent without trying to make him represent the entire country. It is the vividness of these people and their dialogue that makes them lovely and sad: the father forced onto disability after four decades of work, the son, who does not come across as an entirely sympathetic character yet seems incapable of living on his own. With this portrait of quiet anxiety, Saslow shows how what we know about people from the outside fails to represent even the smallest part of their full lives, and in bringing a father and son to life, he sidesteps entrenched ways of talking about the budget and gets to the heart of pondering what kind of country we want to be."