“Like a cigarette should”

Dissecting the grammar in advertising is like shooting fish in a barrel, as the saying goes (though I’ve never understood why one would shoot fish in a barrel). From an edited publication, you should expect editing. From a bunch of Mad Men, maybe you shouldn’t even expect writing. Creativity, of a specialized sort, yes. But not necessarily writing.

Poorly written ads have been around far longer than I have. The first such controversy I remember was over a brand of cigarettes, which at the time were advertised in print publications and maybe even on TV. “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” the slogan went. I was incredulous: Those things taste good? But adults were taking sides over “like” versus “as.” The “like” people said the ad sounded like people talk, and “as” would sound stilted. The “as” people said proper grammar was worth something, and standards were going to hell in a handbasket (whatever that meant), and if we didn’t use the language properly, who knew what atrocities would follow. (Must be something about cigarettes — there were also magazine ads with the line “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!”)

This was my first exposure to prescriptivists and descriptivists — or, to put it in legal terms, strict constructionists and loose constructionists. Should we do things they way they’ve always been done because it’s “right”? Or should we change the rules to reflect the reality of how people use language, even if they’re “wrong”? I tend to lean prescriptivist, but it’s only a lean; both sides have a point, and though enforcing rules is often the role of an editor, so is making things readable and clear. So an editor has ample opportunity to experience everyone’s wrath.

But back to ads. Every once in a while one or more lines will jump out at me. On the radio, they’re like a dog whistle that most people don’t notice or don’t find bothersome. On paper, they make me want to get out the red pen. Here are some examples.

•     “If you need to lose up to 30 pounds or more ….” Okay, I sort of get why Madison Avenue wrote it that way. It’s still stupid. Do you need to lose up to 30 pounds? Or do you need to lose 30 pounds or more? It’s not both. I’d like the makers of this weight-loss product to lose this sentence.

•     “The detail and beauty is amazing.” “The number-one issue in patents are patent trolls.” The first example is from a jewelry chain. As for the second, I am delighted to imagine what a patent troll looks like. Not so delighted to imagine how the educated people at this law firm managed to forget one of the most elementary(-school) rules of English grammar: The verb can’t be plural when the noun is singular. And vice versa, jewelry chain.

•     “See everything — like restaurants, shopping, and more.” My colleagues know I find redundancy annoying, irritating, aggravating, vexing, and exasperating. This line from an ad for a vacation destination is just the sort to which I’d take the red pen. It’s similar to the “30 pounds” line: If you must give an example of “everything,” say either “like [or ‘such as’] X and Y” or “X, Y, and more.” Not both. (Same with “et al.,” by the way, which is a Latin abbreviation for “and others” or “and other things.”)

•     “Dentures are very different to real teeth.” What? If you’ve seen this ad for a dental product, you know that some dentist supposedly says this, though he may well be an actor saying lines. But who would say or write that? Every time I hear it, I talk back to the TV: “From! From real teeth!”

“Your audience has grammar snobs and regular people. Whichever way you write your slogan it’s going to look natural to one group and un-natural to the other,” according to a writer for a blog called Cheap Talk. The writer sides with offending the “grammar snobs” because that’s the slogan that will get at least part of the audience “to turn it over, diagram it and correct it…. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

Is anyone surprised?

Copyright 2013 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.

A good “call” for home workers

Remember the fuss when the National Do Not Call Registry debuted almost 10 years ago? No more telemarketing calls! No more dinnertime distractions! Take that, aluminum-siding salesmen! But there were exceptions … for charities, surveys, political calls, businesses we’ve done business with, and of course bill collectors. And, it turns out, for sneaky telemarketers who find ways around the list—by disguising their numbers and names and just plain daring the Federal Trade Commission to come get them.

I spend most of my working life in employers’ offices, but there are plenty of days at my home desk. It’s amazing how often the phone rings. Amvets wants to collect clothing. Senior Medical Advisory (on several scam lists) wants to protect me from falls. “Card Services” wants to lower my credit-card rate. It lies about having sent two notices by mail and lies again about this being our last chance (if only). It or them I have reported to the FTC at least 10 times, but the number keeps changing. FTC, are you listening? Show a little “interest” and shut them down!

One thing Congress and President Bush did for us was the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act, a practical law that allowed us to register a phone number only once rather than every five years. According to the 2009 Economic Report of the President by the Council of Economic Advisors, “The program has proved quite popular: as of 2007, according to one survey, 72 percent of Americans had registered on the list, and 77 percent of those say that it made a large difference in the number of telemarketing calls that they receive (another 14 percent report a small reduction in calls). Another survey, conducted less than a year after the Do Not Call list was implemented, found that people who registered for the list saw a reduction in telemarketing calls from an average of 30 calls per month to an average of 6 per month.”

(Surveys, huh? Were they done by phone?)

One statement that often discombobulates telemarketers is “You’ve reached a business line.” If I can get a word in edgewise, that usually stops them. “Oh,” they say, “uh, okay, sorry.” The Do Not Call Registry applies only to residential lines, but telemarketers aren’t going to get far calling businesspeople, so they hang up—and possibly cross out the number. Sometimes people are particularly dense, though. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which claimed to be on a recorded line and not fundraising, blew right past the first time, so I had to repeat myself. Then, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t understand when you said that before. That’s okay, we can call businesses too. Today we want to—”

“Excuse me,” I said, politely, “I’m at work. Thank you.” Click.

Earlier this month the FTC announced the winners of its contest for ways to block robocalls. One invention routes calls to a second line, which identifies bad calls and cuts them off (the way an email filter handles spam). The other simply blocks unwanted calls after checking a list of “good and bad phone numbers,” according to news reports. These don’t sound all that effective as described, especially the second one, but maybe the problem is with the description. In any case, hooray for trying.

Because the person on the other end of the phone might be a source calling back or my editor with an assignment. Even with Caller ID, it’s hard to tell. When it turns out to be some recording offering to lower my credit-card rate, it stops my train of thought and also stops that source or editor from getting through. Calls I don’t want are a drain on commerce and specifically on the work the boss wants finished today. If it wouldn’t take so much time, I’d start call-bombing the FTC to say so.

Copyright 2013 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.

The postscript to Petraeus’s biography

When the news broke Friday that General David Petraeus has suddenly resigned as head of the CIA because of an extramarital affair, I immediately pasted the Washington Post head and deck into an email to my Army brother with this subject line: “Oh no!”

It wasn’t yet public who his partner had been in this affair – or that some of his closest aides in the Middle East had noticed the general’s growing intimacy with the woman and had had the same thought.

Already we’ve seen, and will more in the coming days, several lessons from this mess. 1. As my brother hinted in his response (or maybe I’m just reading into it), men – will they ever learn? Nope. (Or in a variation learned from my college roommate, the smartest people can be really, really stupid.) 2. You can never know another person’s marriage. Maybe you can never fully know your own, either. 3. In this technological age, it’s harder and harder to keep a secret. 4. True, but as usual, this one was blown open by human frailty (chutzpah, hubris, jealousy, etc.) before the machines got involved. 5. Deployments threaten families and marriages – one of the issues Holly Petraeus had long worked on as an advocate for military families. 6. Geez Louise, what can possibly be worth the risk of your job, your marriage, your personal and professional reputation, and the pleasure of having your private life not splashed across every front page and news broadcast in America?

But the “who” is what I found intriguing here. The pretty, much younger woman involved is the lead author of Petraeus’s bestselling biography. They had quite a lot in common, which is surely what led to the strength of their acquaintance. Of course you want chemistry – at least a strong working relationship – with your biographer, but that may not be the best reason to choose a particular person.

From the Post’s article about her: “The woman, Paula Broadwell, then 37, had never written a book and had almost no journalistic experience. … [Petraeus] had until then been extraordinarily careful in managing his public image, allowing limited access to a handful of journalists, former aides say. … Peter Mansoor, a former executive officer on Petraeus’s staff, said he thought the general’s uncharacteristic confidence in an untested writer was ‘strange.’ ‘My gosh, if you are going to have someone interview everyone who has ever touched you in your life, choose someone who has written a biography or at least a history book,’ he said in an interview Saturday.”

(Not to mention that she regularly wore “unusually tight” clothing in an Islamic war zone and spilled “sensitive operational details” in Facebook posts from the same war zone. But see Lessons 1 and 1a above.)

Yes, the second coauthor is Vernon Loeb, a Post and Philly Inquirer editor who has overseen DoD coverage. Still, celebrities and their publishers aren’t focused on the second coauthor. If you are arguably the preeminent general of a generation, so concerned with your image for posterity, do you follow your ego (or worse) and choose a newbie with whom you have a lot in common and a ton of chemistry? Or do you pick an experienced biographer or reporter, someone who may not be as flattering, as deferential? It’s a serious question, what kind of biography you want for the ages. And what does each member of the team realistically contribute to that end?

You could say the proof is in the pudding; the book garnered strong but mixed reviews and became a bestseller. Or you could look at the fact that this untested writer used seriously questionable judgment on several occasions – including in sending threatening emails to a perceived rival, which is what got the FBI on her trail and led to a scandal that made headlines around the world.

It’s easy to come up with another lesson: Choose a biographer with a track record, one at least with a background as a reporter/writer/editor etc. Would that have avoided trouble, though? Has a professional biographer never, ever begun an affair with the subject? Has a professional, experienced writer never been known to go off the deep end and do something really dumb, even borderline criminal?

I’m going to have to fall back on Lesson 2 here: I can’t see inside either one’s marriage, and unless they spill to the press (this is contrary to my professional interest, but honestly, more people would be smart to keep their mouths shut!), we’re not going to know much. I would, however, like to know what Vernon Loeb thinks. He might write a column for the Post; I’ll keep an eye out for that. His view of this mess would be both unique and enlightening.

Addendum, Monday night. There it is! “Petraeus ghostwriter ‘clueless’ to affair.” By Vernon Loeb. First sentence: “My wife says I’m the most clueless person in America.” Heh. In the photo, he looks like an older version of Sean Penn in Milk. Turns out he and Broadwell were paired up by their mutual agent – he to be the ghostwriter at home in Maryland, she to be the researcher with unfettered access in the field. “An incredible opportunity,” he thought. When people raised eyebrows about the researcher and the general, he says, he always gave her the benefit of the doubt.

As for the biography and its authors, “the editors at Penguin Press were quite clear about what they wanted: a book on the rigors of command told from an inside point of view,” he says. “I had no say over the book’s ultimate take on Petraeus, which some have found excessively laudatory. Broadwell was free to make whatever revision or modifications she desired to the text, and did so liberally.”

Copyright 2012 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.

Going Forward, Part 1

Otherwise known as the Department of Redundancy Bureau.

It’s rare that this pointless phrase is ever useful. Ninety-some percent of the time, you can slice it out of a sentence and never know it was there. To prove this, let’s take some random headlines and other lines from the Internet:

“Greek economy faces challenges going forward”

“Biggest positional needs going forward for Steelers”

“Sony reveals business plan going forward for 2012”

“We recently announced that, going forward, Windows Phone will be ….”

“Celtics going forward with a familiar core”

Okay, that last one is a legitimate use. The others? Well, I could cross my eyes every time I heard such nonsense, but as Mom used to warn, “Your face will freeze like that.”

An editor risks frostbite at all the redundancies in newspapers, on billboards, in junk mail, on TV, on radio, online, on banners behind small airplanes, etc. etc. For example:

* free gift                                                                                  * 9 am in the morning

* added bonus                                                                         * continue on

* unexpected surprise                                                           * true fact

* PIN number, VIN number, ATM machine,                   * armed gunman

SAT test, HIV virus                                                               * unconfirmed rumor

* surrounded on all sides                                                     * past history

Piece of cake, as they say, to edit such phrases as “a variety of different things” and “a potential hazard.” That’s why I can pretty much promise an ability to shorten any piece of prose — there are always cliches, redundancies, multiple words and phrases where one or two will do, and so on.

In most cases, I guess, people just aren’t paying attention. Most people don’t give any more thought to language than they do to their route to work or what they had for breakfast Monday. More important, they never learned grammar in the first place, never had the benefit of reading literature, didn’t learn a foreign language and analyze the differences with English, didn’t do crosswords, or didn’t have teachers who pointed out illogic with red pens and led class discussions on, say, “9 am in the morning,” a term I keep hearing on WTOP around 7 am. In the morning.

I expect that of Everyman at this point. I don’t expect it from President Obama and his speechwriters, who allowed “going forward” a few days ago. Ugh! Speaking only about grammar and language, we had eight years of an inane president. This one was a constitutional law professor known for his erudite speeches and a couple of well-reviewed bestsellers he wrote himself. Et tu?

Of course, spoken language has something of an excuse for redundancy. You need to be understood both literally and figuratively. Advertisers want to get that magic word “free” into your head. “PIN” is one syllable, so “PIN number” is clearer on the phone and in recorded instructions. Presidents, perhaps, want to sounds like your average Joe (Biden? Plumber?), though the wisdom of that varies by what they say. If studies show that people need to hear a message eight times before it sticks, maybe a bit of redundancy is forgivable when life has so many distractions.

But there’s no excuse for “future plans” or “true fact” (do people really say that unironically?). Aggravating as it is to hear terms like this, the best approach may be a dual one: as an editor, to strike them whenever possible, and as a listener, to laugh. It’s better than raising my blood pressure or crossing my eyes. But more on that in the next chapter — Going Forward, Part 2 — about cliches.

Copyright 2012 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.

Posterity

A memoir is a tricky thing. It’s the world according to you. Pretty much everyone else is bound to bicker with your interpretation of the facts, let alone with your opinions and impressions. But do you care? Probably not! It’s your book, and besides, by the time others read it, you’re quite possibly dead.

Now let’s consider the editor of this memoir. On the rare occasions I’d given any thought to such a person, I’d assumed a few things: (1) He or she must be a diplomat at the very least. (2) He or she must be patient and great with detail. (3) Some percentage of editors don’t last at this because they can’t put up with subjects who (a) have poor memories or (b) have enormous egos or (c) throw things at them. Or some combination thereof.

That was from imagining the editor/ghostwriter sitting with the subject much as in the film The Ghost Writer (see my post of December 15). However, this week’s project ….

Who am I kidding? This year’s project is editing the memoir of a fellow who was an Air Force JAG officer, CODEL escort officer, and Beltway bandit lawyer, among other things. A friend spent seven years interviewing him and transcribing the tapes. Late last year I picked it up from there. I’ve met the subject once, but this is a solo project – me at the home computer, the electronic transcript on one side of the screen, the edited version of the current chapter on the other side, and the boxes of transcripts on a chair beside me. That’s because my predecessor made handwritten notes on the typed pages, and all those have to be put in as well. It’s like I need three eyes.

I haven’t read Caro’s biographies of Lyndon Johnson, but I have considered how immersed the guy’s gotten in the minutia of someone else’s life. I’m getting a taste of that now. My subject has an uncommon memory, and it’s a bit uncomfortable to realize that I know him more intimately than almost anyone. More uncomfortable than that is realizing that for all these details over all these years, I have a perspective on him that he doesn’t have on himself.

I’m the editor, not a ghostwriter. But like a ghost, I am of course keeping that perspective private. His story is the world according to him. That’s what he’s paying for, and that’s what he’s going to get.

Copyright 2012 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.

You like me! You really like me!

Writers always have something to gripe about. Their story got bumped; it was edited badly; someone put a typo in it; it was killed (and for a crappy kill fee); the headline was stupid; the editor insisted on more unnecessary research; the editor stuck her own byline next to theirs after adding four paragraphs, and some of the new copy was simply wrong (not that that’s ever happened to me, ahem) … and so on.

Today is the rare day when all editors and subjects went out of their way to be nice. All in one day! This has never happened before.

This weekend I turned in the article about school principals. I was wary of what the editor would think – I’d balked at the four-page (!) contract – but here’s what she wrote:

“Thank you! The article is exactly what I was anticipating. It is engaging and easy to read as well as informative.”

Yay!

But wait, there’s more. Back in December I interviewed three Washingtonians about their collections. I’d complained about that contract, too (it insisted that writers promise the unpromisable), to the point where they changed it – but only for me. The article is now out. I haven’t seen it, but the editor forwarded emails from all three people interviewed for it:

“My daughter sent me a copy of the Fashion Issue and I was thrilled with the extraordinary care you took in making my story and the photographs turn out so perfectly.”

“I’ve finally spied a copy of the new Capitol File and I love the piece! Thanks again for thinking of me and doing such a knockout job all the way around!”

“I just saw the digital version of the new issue and it looks stunning! I’m so happy with my article, so well written and photographed. Congratulations!”

As the editor wrote when forwarding the last comment, “Trifecta!”

So let me have my Sally Field moment. It’s fleeting. Tomorrow we gripe anew. But tonight – woohoo!

Copyright 2012 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.

Car insurance

When my classes get to the section on contracts, I explain kill fees this way: They’re like car insurance. You don’t like it, but if your car crashes and you don’t have insurance, you’re out all the money. If you do have insurance, at least you get something for your trouble. It’s not enough to make you whole, not by a long shot, but it’s better than nothing.

Metaphor aside, here’s how a kill fee works: You write an article and do everything right. You follow instructions or your query letter, you write the agreed-on number of words, you turn it in on time, it’s the expected professional quality. The editor has no quibble with all that but kills the article for some other reason. Maybe something in the news got ahead of your story. Maybe the subject died. Maybe the story got held long enough that the season changed, and the topic (food, fashion, etc.) is no longer timely. Maybe the magazine or newspaper got sold, and the new publisher doesn’t want to run a story on your topic.

If your contract – assuming you have one – includes a kill fee, this is when it kicks in. If your story gets killed in circumstances like these, no one sees it, so you get no glory. No byline. No clip. No full payment. What you do get is 25 percent or 33 percent or some other token of “go away and don’t sue us.” I’ve seen kill fees as low as 15 percent and as high as 50 percent.

If you have no kill fee, you get nothing. No byline, no clip, no payment. Zilch. I sure dislike kill fees, but I like zilch less.

So. Here’s a note I got from the managing editor of a magazine I wrote two articles for recently:

“Hi Ellen,

“I regret to inform you that the piece on [Article 1] was cut from our May/June issue and you will be receiving a kill fee of $67.50. The [Article 2], however, turned out well. Thank you for your understanding.

“Kindest regards,”

In the cartoon of the moment I read this email, you would see narrowed eyes and a dark cloud over my head.

Thank goodness they killed the small article and not the large one. But still. I was supposed to have two articles in the March/April issue, not one in who knows when. I was supposed to get paid the full amount. And all the people I interviewed were supposed to be quoted for all to see. All the time they gave me, their expertise, and poof. No article.

The kill fee in this case was about the smallest I’ve seen. Of course, just as with car insurance, we always hope we’ll never have to use it. It’s not something writers tend to negotiate; it feels like discussing a prenup when you’re swoonily in love. Preparing for things to go wrong when you’re shaking hands on an article both of you want and expect to turn out great.

So I gambled. But at least they killed the small article and not the large one. (And they’d better not!)

Copyright 2012 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.

Where there’s smoke, there’s ire

The Post’s real-estate editor surprised me by putting my condos/smoking article online late Tuesday afternoon, ahead of Saturday’s print publication date. (See mini-rant three posts ago about this self-destructive practice.) The next day, other editors surprised me more. Just after lunch, I wrote a friend, “My next story (in print Saturday) was buried deep on the real-estate page … suddenly it’s on the front page online, with my name! Being of a private inclination, I’m not sure this is necessarily good, but it’s getting a lot of comments ….”

A lot of comments indeed. Within hours, the number had climbed to more than 200. Then it was 340. Then it plummeted to 280 or 290. Comments police at the Post removed some, and all of the many by one person have disappeared. In any case, by late Wednesday, the story (and my name) were off the front page, and the pace slowed to nearly nothing until the story appeared in print yesterday. Right now there are 365.

Thursday night I mentioned all this to another friend, who said something about the attention. “They’re not talking about the story,” I said with a wry smile. “They’re bashing each other.”

Commenters at the Washington Post are a bit more civilized than at the New York Post, but these are too often ad hominem attacks. One commenter on my story wrote of another, “You are stupid.” Another put up a tirade against every major racial and ethnic group. (Eventually that one got removed. “Gotta love the diversity in that post,” someone wrote, which made me snort.) A few dozen comments attacked “libs” or Obama even though the article has nothing to do with politics. People on one side called people on the other side “whiny,” “selfish,” “idiotic,” “crazy,” “disgusting,” “neurotic,” “brainless,” and “bigots,” among other things, and one wrote, ” … if you did die, I am sure the rest of us would appreciate the peace and quiet.” Whew!

Should newspapers and other media police their comments sections? It’s an ongoing debate in newsrooms. The Washington Post’s ombudsman has weighed in, and I think there was an online chat about the issue. The New York Post seems to be a free-for-all. The New York Times is either well regulated or has more thoughtful and polite readers – probably both. Our Post surely feels like it’s dealing with a moving target.

Consider, for example, not this story, which quoted several people but focused on an issue, but the one two weeks ago in the Post Magazine about Page Melton Ivie – a story that focused on a person and secondarily on other people and issues. Big issues: After a notable reporting career, Page’s first husband is permanently in a childlike state due to medical calamity, and Page was resigned to caring for their children at home and him at an assisted-living facility. Years later she reconnected with an old friend, and they eventually married, which necessitated divorcing Robert, though he now lives close to the new family in the Midwest, where all of them visit frequently, and Allan has his own real friendship with his new wife’s first husband. (I was stunned to realize, when the article mentioned Page’s birth name, that I’d known her, and even Allan slightly, in college, though we were a few years apart.) A lot of readers, including me, found the article moving, a testament to open hearts and open minds and the tremendous power of love.

It was disheartening to learn that other readers – many – were horrified. They called Page terrible names, accusing her of not taking her wedding vows seriously and tearing apart her family for selfish, carnal whims. They said she was an example of a throw-away society and deserved to go to hell for bailing on Robert when the going got tough. Never mind that she didn’t do anything of the sort and in fact spent years finding ways to keep her family together and even expand it through a painful and draining ordeal.

Poor Page – or anyone – to be on the receiving end of so many hateful, ad feminam comments. A column a week later blasted those commenters, noting how easy it is to lob firebombs from behind the shield of anonymity and wondering how many people would say the same things if they had to attach their real names. Those of us who naturally shy away from public fora (a sexist old saying was that a woman’s name should appear in print only upon birth, marriage, and death; I amended that for myself to add three-point bylines) will hesitate even more to toss a personal opinion into the lions’ den, leaving it inevitably to the lions and the blowhards. Or, wait … is that too insulting? Leave a comment. Good thing this blog is purely an academic exercise for which no one has the address.

Copyright 2012 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.

A new stage in journalism

Tomorrow my new story was published in the Washington Post. No, wait – on Saturday, my Wednesday story will debut in the Washington Post. No, wait – on Wednesday, Saturday’s story ran in (on) the Washington Post.

This multiplatform journalism is so confusing.

Put it this way: Wednesday, the real-estate editor sent me a link to my first story for her, which had just been posted online. The story, about staging one’s home for better sale, is scheduled to appear in tomorrow’s print edition. (Why the Post keeps undercutting its own material, from features to op-eds to Toles cartoons, by running it online days ahead of time is a mystery. Won’t people continue to drop their subscriptions when their weekend papers are filled with material they’ve already seen online?)

This story is my first direct experience with what I described in the Express article about the NPR producer who puts together slideshows, video interviews, interactive maps, and so on. The editor wanted not only a reported article but a gallery of before-and-after photos and a video of one of my stagers discussing what she does and then doing it over a period of hours (speeded up, with a crew involved – pretty cool effect). I collected the photos from all over, many more than were actually used; discussed options for houses we might use for the video; and arranged for the chosen stager and the Post people to converge to make it all happen.

With this article, I’ve now appeared in at least six sections of the Post: Style, Travel, Food, Sunday Source, the Magazine, and now Real Estate. (Weekend, too, though not sure that counts because Escapes is there only after migrating from its former home in the Style section. And five years of my column in Express, of course.)

Copyright 2011 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.

The joy of teaching

I teach amateurs. That’s the point: “Getting Published” is a course for beginners, and most people who take it have never been published, at least not for pay. Maybe they’ve had just a short item in a company newsletter or a letter to the editor in the newspaper, but they have dreams and ambitions and questions, and they bring those to class to explore the options.

In the very first minutes, I tell them that some writers have an abundance of talent but never get published because they lack confidence or the basic knowledge and skills to connect with an editor correctly to sell an idea to the right market. On the other hand, some writers don’t have talent but get published regularly because they do have confidence and know just how to get the right editors’ attention with the right information. My aim, I say, is to draw out of these students their natural talent and add to it the nuts-and-bolts skills they need to research a story idea, write a terrific query letter, find and connect with the right editor at the right market, and construct an article that works so well that the clip helps win the next assignment in an even better market and for a bigger paycheck.

As you might expect, in addition to dreams and questions, students bring a range of talent. Most, frankly, aren’t very good. They can’t write, or they don’t grasp the concept of a query, or their style clashes with the markets they choose to pursue. Maybe they’ll develop after finishing the class. Many or most won’t stick with it, which is okay; I’ve taken enough classes (ballet and pottery come to mind) that were interesting and worthwhile but for which my modicum of talent wasn’t enough to propel me to continue. Taking classes pushes our boundaries a bit, tests our abilities and inclinations, makes us a little better at something, and that’s all to the good.

Every once in a while, through – every couple of years – a student comes along who’s a natural. Reading the first paper by such a student, a teacher’s eyebrows go up: Two paragraphs in, and I’ve used the red pen only to fix punctuation! The lead is a grabber, one sentence follows from another, use of similes and metaphors is sophisticated, vocabulary is a match for the market, quotes are appropriate, and attention does not wander from beginning to end. Wow, I think, we’ve got a live one.

One of my first classes at Montgomery College had such a student. He wrote about motorcycles. I know nothing about motorcycles, but his query and article were so good that I found them riveting. Something similar happened this semester. My only male student wrote about the pros and cons of a particular model of boat, then about a dangerous sailing adventure. I know nothing about boats, either, but these were so well written that I wanted to read more. The only red marks I made were to fix spelling, subject-verb agreement, and the occasional run-on sentence.

On the last day, I tell students I’ll look for their bylines. I always hope to see them, and sometimes I have. I never saw the motorcycle guy’s byline, but surely that’s only because I wasn’t looking in the right magazines; I have no doubt he’s been published somewhere. Same with the sailor: An editor will say yes soon, and he’ll know the joy of a bylined article. To a writer and editor, that is part of the joy of teaching.

Copyright 2011 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.