923. America's writing coach, Roy Peter Clark, shares his wisdom about the five things every writer he's ever taught wants to learn.
923. America's writing coach, Roy Peter Clark, shares his wisdom about the five things every writer he's ever taught wants to learn.
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MIGNON: You're about to hear part of my interview with master writing teacher Roy Peter Clark, but we actually talked for more than an hour. If you'd like to hear the whole unedited interview, you can find it on my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/GrammarGirl.
Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.
We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.
And today we have all of that because we have Roy Peter Clark in the house.
He has a new book out.
Roy is the vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a well-known school for journalists, where he has also taught writing for more than 30 years.
Some people call him America's writing coach because organizations hire him to help their writers actually improve their writing.
He's also the author of a slew of books, including "The Glamour of Grammar," "How to Write Short," yay, "Writing Tools," and he has a new book out now called Tell It Like It Is, a guide to clear and honest writing, which we're going to talk about today.
Welcome, Roy.
ROY: Thank you, Mignon. it's such an honor to be with the most glamorous grammarian in American history.
So cheers to you and all the work that you've done to help demystify something that so many people are afraid of, and that's something that's so essential to learning and to creating meaning and to expressing yourself.
So I feel a deep kinship with you with you and appreciate your invitation and your hospitality.
MIGNON: Yeah, thank you Roy. You're always so generous.
I mean, truly, I love all your books.
You know, I do sort of mechanics and exciting things about language, and you do, like, the bigger picture, how you put together a whole story and tell a good tale and get it right too.
Now, first, you've written so many books, as I said, they're all wonderful.
I want to know what inspired you to write "Tell It Like It Is."
You know, what did you have to say that you hadn't already said in your books before.
ROY: You know, that's a really great place to start because I had, not that I'm counting it every day, but I had 19 books that I had my name on the cover—
sometimes as the author, sometimes as a co-author, sometimes as an editor, some of them are teachers guides, some of them are anthologies of really good journalism.
And I felt that I was done, that I had said what I wanted to say, especially in this last cycle of books, starting with "Writing Tools" that began in, that published in 2008.
And with Little Brown, which was the first time I'd worked with a commercial publisher.
And, you know, there are there are 300,000 copies of "Writing Tools" in print, and it's been translated into seven languages now.
And then now there were six subsequent volumes on different aspects of reading and writing and literature and journalism.
But I really thought that I was done.
And then the last book called--I'm sorry, the last book, so many books--I forget the title-- called "Murder Your Darlings," which was a writing book about writing books that it was published in January of 2020.
And it was published just a month before the pandemic really kicked in.
And suddenly, we were quarantined.
Suddenly, I couldn't go to the office.
Suddenly, we're just restructuring our house.
I'm sitting right now in my quote home office, which for years was the dining room table.
MIGNON: You know, what I had forgotten.
Actually we had an interview scheduled to talk about "Murder Your Darlings," and we had to reschedule it because you couldn't get into your office.
I remember that now.
ROY: Right.
And so I think there's a line in musical "Hamilton," like the world turned upside down.
And it just felt like that.
I had to create a Zoom space.
Suddenly, I was teaching in a completely different way.
But most important, there were going to be more than a million Americans dead from the illness.
And when you add to that the political upheavals, the social upheavals, what I was coming to understand is that if this was going to change, if this was changing so many things, it would affect the way we write, it would affect the way we come to sort of understand the difference between information and disinformation.
It was going to, not just journalists, but all public writers in all different fields of study would be called upon really to embrace their duty to citizens to help people understand, to take responsibility for what readers know and understand about the world.
And there were so many decisions we had to make that many of them were appropriately framed within life and death kind of context.
Should I send my child to school?
Should I get vaccinated?
Should I wear a mask?
And when?
And the news was changing and evolving.
And so I spent two years studying the work of what I thought was some of the best public writers and looking for how they explain things,
looking at the how they told stories and coming to understand their exercise of craft but not in isolation, their exercise of craft in the context of making meaning for the public good.
And yeah and so in a way I've the way I've been describing it is that "Tell It Like It Is" is the first book I've written with the sense of urgency of a breaking news story.
And yeah, and April, I'm holding a copy and one of the first copies in my hand...
Oh, look at you with all your little Post-It notes...
Yeah, it's a great looking book.
By the way, a man named Keith Hayes has designed the covers of all of my books that I did for Little Brown.
So please judge this book by its pretty cover if I may say.
MIGNON: I love it.
It's for people listening to the podcast.
It's white and it has a blue pencil on the front.
ROY: Yeah, the pencil is like a kind of a rocket ship.
It's going up through the clouds of uncertainty to a to a clear sky.
There are no red pens, by the way, in any of my books, just because the red pencil in the mind of so many people who try to write, you know, including ...
MIGNON: I know.
You know, I actually I have this red pen, this inflatable six foot tall red pen in the back of my video.
But I have it as a joke.
Like, I'm not a red-pen-correcting person,
Yeah, fantastic.
ROY: If I can say so, if the people can't see it, is that you're one of the people who seem to organize their books on their bookshelves by color.
Unless that's just a coincidence.
I see the yellow books and the blue books and the white books and the red and orange books.
MIGNON: Yeah, you know, it's funny, I saw someone the other day say that that is sacrilege and they don't trust people who organize their books by color.
But I've moved my books so many times that, and I find myself when I'm looking for a book, I will remember what color it is.
When I was, I was thinking, Oh, I have Roy's book, "Murder Your Darlings," and that's yellow.
So it must be in the yellow section.
And I find that's the fastest way for me to find my books.
ROY: What I've noticed, and I use this, use this as a sort of a writing strategy, especially for, you know, for journalists and nonfiction writers.
So everybody knows about the selfie.
Well, what I'm looking at is the shelfie.
I'm looking at an image of your books.
And if it were not that, if you know people create this Zoom space, this visual background, sometimes intentionally they design it and sometimes no, it's just their nesting place.
And so, you know, I tell ... what's been so interesting is to be able to kind of see details in the background that reflect an individual's history, preferences, their color palette, whether they have a baby Yoda,
MIGNON: Which you have.
ROY: Sitting on top of their piano or not.
And so for young reporters I say whether you're doing this by video or in the living world, keep your eyes open.
If you see it, record it, ask a question about it, and it will invite a person to reveal themselves to you in a way that might be useful to you in your stories.
Yeah, so, Mignon, I'd like to make a distinction between reports and stories.
MIGNON: OK.
ROY: And the book, "Telling Like It Is," has really 25 chapters devoted to clarity and ... in writing reports.
And then there are chapters related to the importance and powers of storytelling.
Okay, so there's a scholar named—She passed away at the age of, I think, 101. Very influential in her day—name was Louise Rosenblatt.
And I was sort of translating her work for journalists where I say, look, most of the time you're either writing reports ,or you're writing stories, or you're writing combinations of reports and stories.
And the purpose of reports are to convey information using and are helped along by a series of questions that are now been sort of sanctified as the five W's: "who," "what," "where," "when," "why," and sometimes "how." The five W's.
Okay, so if vaccines are available, finally, who can get them?
You know, where can you go get them?
When can you get them?
And those kinds of issues emerge as they did in 2020 here in Florida and elsewhere.
Now, when stories are kind of not like that or they ... stories to me, and Louise Rosenblatt introduced this idea to me ... stories are not about information.
They may contain information, right?
But stories are about experience.
They're the rendering of vicarious experience.
They're not about pointing you there, how to get to Elsinore Castle.
It's to put you there, right.
It's to transport you to another time and place, either yesterday or fictionally, sometime in an apocalyptic future or whatever it might be.
But the elements still apply, but they have to be sort of thought out.
They have to be translated so that "who" becomes character as we define it with details.
"What" becomes action divided into scenes and given to readers in that way.
"Where" is no longer just St. Petersburg, Florida.
It's a park in which Roy is walking the mile track and for the first time in his life looks down and he sees a blue medical mask that somebody has discarded.
So you were there with me walking around that track, holding that thing in my hand.
What is that thing.
T.S. Eliot had a name for it.
He called it the "objective correlative," the object that the poet or the storyteller has chosen that signifies the feeling or the impression that we're trying to convey.
"When" is no longer just Monday, March 15th.
"When" is time unfrozen, chronology in action, and "why" is always the hardest thing maybe not in fiction but in nonfiction because it involves human motivation and things like that. So it really seems to help writers to have that distinction in mind what do you have here a report or a story? Well, I have a little bit of both. Okay, so what are you going to begin with?
A piece of news or an anecdote?
Give you an example: Once again, they're giving out vaccinations. You can drive to St. Leo's College. Now when you get there, there are old people lots of old people because they're the first ones to get vaccinated who were sitting in their cars, some of them for hours, waiting to get to the front of the line to get vaccinated.
To say what was it like for that old couple to be sitting in that car for five hours on a warm day, requires not a report, right?
It requires a story.
And you may then report on why does it have to be that way?
How could it be better?
And those are the kinds of things that public writers do, not just journalists in the common interest.
And so my book works both sides of the street in that regard.
MIGNON: You know what, I loved how you mentioned public writers and we're not just talking about journalists here.
You actually talked about the people who wrote the instructions for the home COVID tests and how the ones you used, you thought were well-written.
I mean, talk about all those public writers out there and how the different things they do and why it's so important that they do it well and how they can do it well.
ROY: I don't know if you caught the news that there was, a bank failure, at least one out on the right on the West Coast.
Now, I just happened this morning to have coffee with our family's financial advisor.
So he said to me, "How are you doing today, Roy?"
I said, "Well, tell me about bank failures."
MIGNON: And just for the listeners, this is gonna run in about a month when your book comes out, so this will be, have happened a month ago, but there was a big Silicon Valley bank failure.
ROY: So, you know, in a way, my financial advisor, who's a very clear explainer, He wasn't writing it out in a text, but he was explaining something to me, something that he knew very well as an experienced accountant and fiduciary that I didn't know at all.
And so if there are more bank failures, I hope there won't be.
But I think back to 2008, when we were trying to figure out what caused that Great Recession, you know, we needed not just, you know, expert journalists, but we needed political figures.
We needed economists.
We needed all kinds of people to help us understand.
And I think that's the key.
The other thing that's happened, Mignon, as most people know, is that in the last 20 years, the resources of traditional journalism institutions have—Is it "shrunk" or "shrunken."
MIGNON: "Shrink," "shrank," "shrunk, have, they have shrunk.
ROY: Man, this is awesome.
Like I don't even think you're even better than speed dial. I don't even have to call you up.
You're right, you're present to me.
So as a result of that many journalists were laid off.
MIGNON: Yeah.
ROY: Or retired.
News organizations including local newspapers went out of business.
But one of the things that I always say is that what happened to those, quote, former journalists.
And I make the controversial point that there's no such thing as a former journalist, that those journalists who went to other—went to government agencies, they became spokespeople for nonprofits, for businesses, for airports, for the CDC, that they took their craft and their values, and I know a lot of them, with them, with the same mission, which is to create clear and accurate factual information in the public interest
They're not servile to the financial goals of the businesses that they represent.
And that's why I admire them so much.
That's why I continue to learn from them.
And look, I've worked for the, I've done workshops, sounds for the World Bank, for Disney, for Microsoft, for the United Nations, and for a federal prison that was teaching writing to a class of five prisoners.
Everybody wants to learn the same four or five things.
They wanna learn how to make hard facts easier reading.
They want to learn how to make complicated things interesting enough so that readers will pay attention.
They how to write in an authentic voice that is in harmony with the collective voice of the institution that they belong to.
They want to know what it means to tell stories in the public interest.
And they wanna understand something that I think has become very important in the last two years, is that what's their appropriate distance from neutrality.
But my book kind of creates a sort of a spectrum of responsible to sort of less responsible writing or different styles of writing from neutral to what I call engaged, to advocacy, to partisan, all the way to propaganda.
And because this sounds weird, especially the two of us written books on writing and grammar.
Really, we're writing about things, technologies, if you want to call them that, that are neutral.
That they have no, I want to say they have no inherent value unless they're attached to a purpose, a goal, a mission.
MIGNON: Well, and I want to go back to those instructions for the COVID test because that's a very important purpose is helping people administer those tests properly so the results they get are correct.
And you talked about everything from bold text to short, clear sentences to even the white space and the design layout of the insert.
And you talked about working, if you can, work with a designer, an artist early in the process to make sure that the images that go with your, whether it's an article in a newspaper, an insert in a medicine or a medical device, work well together.
And I thought it was just such a wonderful example that most people wouldn't really think of as, well, I wanna be a writer someday, I wanna write inserts for medical tests, but it's really important work.
ROY: And you make a lot, and you probably make some good money, by the way, which is a great thing for writers.
English majors, English majors, we can make good money.
I'm promising you that.
Okay, so this is a good opportunity for me.
I saw, Mignon, I saw a, I kept seeing one strategy that seemed to shine more brightly than all of the others.
And that strategy, which I'd written about before in other contexts, seemed to become more important during this these last two or three years.
And that strategy was slowing the pace of information.
Now it's a little counterintuitive because you think a good writer, a good reporter picks it up so that you can move through it quickly.
But when I remember being confused in 11th grade math class, I wanted to raise my hand to say, "Could you go a little slower please?"
Or, "Could you repeat that?"
But I was too, you know, I was too, I didn't want to show any weakness.
It was an all-male school, boy school.
But the idea is that sometimes information gets packed into sentences.
And when the sentence is long and packed with information, you actually have to—even if you can't understand it, you have to pick up the pace of reading in order to reach the period, or what the Brits call a full stop, that stop sign.
So Donald Murray, my teacher, says, shorter words, shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity.
So what I do in the book is I'll take a sentence that's, I'll take a description that's one sentence long as one period at the end of it, and I'll break it into six or seven sentences with different lengths and different structures so there's a variety and a kind of a rhythm to it.
But the idea is that you get to stop six times, slows the pace of information, gives you one thing to learn so that you can understand the next thing to learn.
Now, I have to say this is my homage to white space.
This is a trick question for your listeners or viewers.
If the period ends a sentence, what ends a paragraph.
And everybody thinks about that and the class says a period.
MIGNON: (laughs)
ROY: Followed by, huh.
Oh, white space.
Sometimes there's a lot of it and sometimes there's a little teeny bit, but we can look at a text written in, let's say Danish, I love the Danes.
And you look at it and you put it on the wall, and people say, "Well, how many paragraphs are there?"
Well, they can count it by counting the white space.
The other thing I do is I'll put a text on the wall in Danish that has, let's say, six or seven paragraphs and another page which only has one paragraph with this very little white space.
And it doesn't matter what the content is.
I say which of these texts is going to be easier to read.
And everybody points to the one with more white space.
So white space is a kind of a, to mix a metaphor like a visual ventilation, but it's also a kind of a signifier of pace, of how to move it.
And the other thing is it offers these fantastic opportunities for emphasis and emphatic word order.
Because a word, when Shakespeare wrote my favorite example in Macbeth, "The queen, my lord, is dead."
Roy would have written, "The queen is dead, my lord."
But what Shakespeare is teaching us is that, "Listen Roy, come on now, you can do a little bit better.
The queen is important.
My lord is less important.
Dead is really important, which is why I put it at the end of the sentence or the paragraph."
Now, what he did was he taught me that, and I have to, in a book, I'm writing hundreds of sentences where the best word is hiding in the middle, or the best sentence is hiding in the middle of a paragraph.
And in "Strunk and White," the original version written more than 100 years ago, he said something like, "The most important word in a sentence is the last word.
The most important sentence in a paragraph is the last sentence.
The most important paragraph in an essay is the last paragraph."
Now journalists are really front loaded, you know, we're very like getting up front.
But you can do that.
And look, it works in in the way jokes are told, right?
I dropped my toothpaste, he said, crest fallen.
MIGNON: Thomas Swifty.
ROY: Right.
Nice.
Well done.
MIGNON: One thing, I've heard people say that chapters in books are getting shorter, that they're shorter than they used to be.
And the chapters in your book, and "Tell It Like It Is," are quite short.
And I liked that because it gave me a sense accomplishment every few pages.
But also, you know, there are the end of a chapter also has special emphasis and in your book, you, you actually recap the highlights from each chapter two, which is very helpful if you find, I mean, your chapters are so short, I wouldn't say my mind wandered during them.
But if my mind had wandered, you know, just put it right here, these were the important things in that chapter.
And then I'm noticing, and look, there's a lot a white space which sort of helps my brain take a little rest and then absorb those highlights, which is a very nice thing actually.
It helps make the book more digestible and clear, and easy to read, which is exactly what you're trying to do.
ROY: But what's interesting is that many of the things that you're describing, you're praising, came from very strong suggestions from Tracy Behar, who's been the editor of my books.
So the book once had 30 chapters, but then had 50.
The books didn't have those little reminders and lessons at the end, but now they do.
And the version of the manuscript that went from 30 chapters to 50 chapters.
Now, I'm not writing new material.
I'm just redividing the elements and reorganizing them.
I often say I hand or send Tracy Behar a manuscript and she turns it into a book. That I came to her as a writer and she turned me into an author.
So I think we talk about sort of education, among other things, because I've taught writing at many, many different levels.
The idea that, I don't know, students, individual students can write effectively all by themselves and clearly and correctly.
They should just take a look at one of my 300-page manuscripts to realize that it takes a village to create a good work.
And I think when people read your—I know when people read your work, they're not just reading it so that they won't make a mistake or they won't hand in something and get a red penciled correction or underline.
They're using it to build their muscles.
And they're using it to learn how to, not to just have language in them, but to have language as an atmosphere, as an ocean in which they're swimming in their living, to live inside the English language.
MIGNON: Well, to wrap up: The book is called "Tell It Like It Is, A Guide to Clear and Honest Writing" by Roy Peter Clark, who has been here with us today for this wonderful conversation.
Thank you so much, Roy.
ROY: It's been my honor, my pleasure.
I spend a lot of my time as a teacher directing students and aspiring writers to the work, to the Grammar Girl.
And I'm happy to and proud to do that as well.
So take care.
Thank you.