About Editing and Writing

Those who spoke to The Washington Post for this report did so on the condition of anonymity, citing the matter’s supreme sensitivity.

—From today’s page one Washington Post story about the release of a redacted version of the Mueller report.

From an April 14 New York Times story, “Cut Out to Play a Media Tycoon,” by Matt Trueman. The story’s deck: “In ‘Ink,’ Bertie Carvel explores the depths of Rupert Murdoch.”

Mr. Carvel comes from a long line of newshounds—another reason he was so right for “Ink.” His great-grandfather wrote for The Star; his grandfather, for the Evening Standard; and he retains a “visceral” childhood memory of The Guardian newsroom where his father, John, worked for 36 years.

“Desks piled high with papers and phones and all sorts of mess,” Mr. Carvel recalled. The play’s set design brought it all rushing back: “I love the smell of newsprint,” he said.

William Zinsser, in his book Writing to Learn, remembers a college professor who asked students in his ethics class to write a paper that would be read aloud in class:

“It gets them to write for their peers and not for the teacher,” he told me, “and what they learned was a revelation to them. They learned by the presence or absence of response to what they had written. The good papers raised all the right questions, and on those days the paper would teach the class. The poor paper was instantly noticeable. There wouldn’t be much in it to discuss—there’d be no place to start, or it was so unclear that we’d have to go back over it and try to figure out what it was about. It made everyone in the class realize that a piece of writing is a piece of thinking.”. . .

As a magazine editor, I probably talked with a dozen aspiring writers every month. The first visit was the equivalent of speed dating: Does this relationship have any potential?

The question that best helped find the answer was “What do you like to read?”

We’d usually started talking about magazines: Which ones do you like? If you say you like the New Yorker, what kind of New Yorker stories? What writers? Also getting lots of mentions were The Atlantic and New York magazine. Liking People magazine wasn’t a deal-breaker—it gets lots of readers, too, more than the New Yorker..

A list of trimmable words—Benjamin Dreyer says these words, shown in italic, are “easily disposed redundancies”— from Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style:

ABM missile

absolutely certain

added bonus

advance planning

advance warning

all-time record

blend together

capitol building

closed fist

close proximity

CNN network

general consensus

continue on

crisis situation

depreciated in value

direct confrontation

disappear from sight

earlier in time

end product

erupt violently

exact same

fall down

few in number

From a New York Times story, “Sex Still Sells, but Data Rules,” about how Jessica Pels, the new editor of Cosmopolitan, hopes to save its print edition in the digital age:

Mr. Young has provided for the company an internal data analyzing product that staffers refer to as Hans (“Hearst answers”). Staffers can enter a question into a Hans Slack channel, asking for sliced-and-diced information as they might a salad at the airy company cafeteria.

Ms. Pels, for example, might message the Hans bot asking what is the day’s best-performing e-commerce item or which print magazine story is drawing the highest numbers online at a particular time of day.

The opening grafs of a New York Times story, “Sex Still Sells, but Data Rules,” about how Jessica Pels, the new editor of Cosmopolitan, hopes to save its print edition in the digital age:

“Bad ideas first!” is how Jessica Pels began a session brainstorming cover lines for the May issue of Cosmopolitan. She was named editor in chief at the Hearst Magazines publication last fall.

Great leaders share two qualities: personal humility and unshakable resolve.

—Jim Collins, author of books about management excellence.

Richard Just, editor of the Washington Post Magazine, wrote in his April 7 issue about reader complaints over an earlier cover that had the headline “Young Guns” and featured a scantily clad woman holding an assault rifle. Just wrote about the complaint of one reader, Diana Wahl, who said she was so offended by the cover that she threw it in her recycling bin. Here’s Just writing about her complaint:

Wahl and I also talked more generally about magazine covers. I argued that a good cover should provoke an emotional response. Later, when we talked about a recent piece in the magazine that hadn’t grabbed her attention, Wahl put the challenge this way: “How do you get somebody to read the articles without … sensationalizing it?” She added, “That’s a real dilemma for you.” I agree. The problem, of course, is that the line between good and bad provocation is both thin and subjective. An image I saw as thought-provoking was, instead, seen by Wahl as inflammatory.

Did you catch that the Obama Presidential Center is going to be all digital?

Yes, I saw that. I don’t want anyone deciding what’s going to be digital. I don’t want anything standing between me and the papers. I think the younger generation doesn’t know what it’s like to hold the actual thing in your hand. Right now in my research I’m looking at the cable traffic that was sent between Military Assistance Command Vietnam, which was the military’s headquarters in Saigon, and the White House. To see that cable traffic, to hold in your hand what Johnson was reading? I can’t even explain it to you.