A series of writers demonstrate a key component: the willingness to take a risk

Last week we examined five different styles of voice by one writer, Kim Murphy. Let’s keep the conversation going this week by focusing on one of the hidden qualities behind a writer’s voice: a dollop of courage.

We established by reviewing Kim’s work that she, like a small number of admired writers, brings a range of voices–not a singular style–to her work. These writers calibrate the tolerance of each story, then push it to that limit.

'Voice' Part II: Profiles in courage

That’s half the struggle to write with “voice,” and it’s the second half. The first half of the struggle is the courage part–taking action when you realize that the simple facts and quotes of your story don’t present a deeper truth. It’s at this moment that you have to take a deep breath and find the additional language to tell the reader what the story’s really about.

Much of the time this involves the possibility of making a fool of yourself, at least on your first draft. Sometimes you choose a subtle path, other times a more jolting one, but the intent is always the same: to add just a bit more meaning to the story. Write the equation on the blackboard: Voice = Style + Courage.

Here are some examples of everyday journalism that required only a few extra moments of concentration to make a difference in tone:

1. The running news story gets a pinch of parallelism to underscore the story’s outrage factor:

SAN FRANCISCO–A San Jose judge on Friday threw the book at the man who threw Leo the bichon frise into traffic, sentencing him to the maximum three years in state prison for a road rage incident that left the dog dead and animal lovers outraged.

The writer, Maria La Ganga, made a calculated judgment that this story–the focus of public attention for a year–was familiar enough to the public to tolerate her synthesis in the lead. From thereon out, she played it perfectly straight:

In sentencing Andrew Burnett, 27, Superior Court Judge Kevin J. Murphy ignored a probation report that recommended a lighter sentence and brushed off Burnett’s apology and plea for leniency.

2. Audacious characters can sometimes be best defined by an approach that mirrors the character’s central quality.

This is another La Ganga effort. (The italics in the third graf are the story’s, as Maria breaks into an imitation of the character Dee.)

SAN FRANCISCO–Dee Gray would probably want this story to start with the word “I.” Dee thinks the best stories are told in the first person. Her daughter, Tiny, doesn’t always agree.

This is what it might look like, if Dee had her way:

I first heard from Lisa Gray-Garcia, also known as Tiny, in a long, long message on my voicemail machine about living poor in America’s most expensive city. ” A lot of us are affected by gentrification and poverty and how that translates to having to leave this area,” she said, in a voice somewhere between nasal and squeaky. “Oftentimes, poor families are the ones who are leaving.”

Other mothers and daughters may wrangle over literary license, current events and how the media shape the news, but their ruminations don’t often make it into print. Dee’s and Tiny’s usually do. You can read them online at http://www.poornewsnetwork.org, a weekly news service with the motto: “All the news that doesn’t fit.”

Or in the pages of Poor magazine, where they write under headings like “Editors’ Statement by Dee and Tiny.” You can catch them on the last Monday of every month on the Bay Area’s KPFA radio, if you wake up really early.

Or, if you are on welfare in the San Francisco area and fortunate in your misfortune, you can listen to them in person as part of their New Journalism/Media Studies Program. Many media and public-policy experts believe the program, which receives some funding from San Francisco County, is the only journalism welfare-to-work effort operating today.

Tiny and Dee–30 and “I’d rather not say,” who describe themselves as “formerly homeless, currently at risk”–have a few goals. They want to change how the mainstream media portray poor and homeless people. They want to…

3. Sometimes a story will rest upon images so ingrained in the popular culture that a writer can reduce them to shorthand and foreshadow the entire tale in a few words–24 of them, in this case, again by Maria:

SAN FRANCISCO–The recent saga of Arion Press began in cliche and ended in comeuppance. 1999: Dot-com frenzy threatens historic publisher. 2001: Dot-coms dive; letterpress lives.

The gamble was that you would swallow the contrast whole, allowing Maria to start the story immediately, in 1999. Within five grafs, she encircled the entire chronology:

With roots stretching back to the early years of fine printing in San Francisco, Arion Press was deep into its most ambitious project–a limited-edition pulpit Bible–when the eviction notice arrived in August 1999, endangering the undertaking.

The South of Market neighborhood where Arion shared a building with Driveway.com, an Internet provider of data storage, had gone crazy. Start-ups flush with venture capital were pouring into formerly cheap buildings where artists and light industry had earlier flourished. Rents soared.

Andrew Hoyem, Arion’s founder, scrambled to find a new home for tons of historic equipment, monotype machines and letterpresses, a type foundry, a book bindery and one of the most extensive collections of type fonts surviving today–which alone weighs 40 tons. For a while, it looked as if one of the last integrated foundries and letterpress operations might close.

But 18 months and $1 million in moving costs and lost business later, Arion settled into a new home in the Presidio, a storied former Army base turned national park and some of this city’s most coveted real estate.

There, Arion employees continue to hand-bind the 1,350-page Bibles at a rate of three to four a week. They are about to begin work on Arion’s 62nd book, “Arcadia” by British playwright Tom Stoppard. Arion’s former home at 460 Bryant St. stands vacant. Driveway.com’s old offices are closed. Dot-coms here continue to drop like flies.

4. Kill mediocre quotes in the service of telling the real story yourself, eliminating competition between your narration and secondary characters.

This is the top of a Jill Leovy story that crunched the lead anecdote into 106 words and then presented a double-graf nut graf of 95 words. Characters would enter the story as examples, but none of them would be allowed to open their mouths until the 11th graf (and not again until the 17th graf) because Jill had a better sense of the essence of the story than they did, and she was determined to express it. Sound arrogant? you bet. That’s the voice of a storyteller, not a recording secretary:

SAN YSIDRO, Calif. — This time, it was the driver’s hands that gave him away.

They shook so badly that when he handed his passport to Customs Inspector Mark Laven, the booklet fluttered like a bird’s wing. Laven all but rolled his eyes: Nothing subtle about this one.

Within minutes, the driver, a Mexican citizen, had been hustled into a holding cell and inspectors were ripping his blue pickup apart with an electric saw. They found what they expected–74 pounds of marijuana packed in cellophane, coated in motor oil to throw off drug-sniffing dogs and fitted neatly into a compartment in the roof.

Laven shrugged. Just another small-fry courier.

Think about how often you would see–or would, yourself–insert a meaningless, average quote here to justify Customs Inspector Laven’s presence in the anecdotal lead. Jill knows her own voice is stronger:

This is the most common kind of drug bust at the nation’s busiest port of entry. Although the giant container loads grab headlines, a huge quantity of illegal drugs moves across the border in a more mundane way–namely, in a stream of small loads hidden in cars and driven under inspectors’ noses by people reckless enough to play the odds.

Day in and day out, a good deal of the U.S. drug interdiction effort on the southern border consists of simply trying to sort out the regular people from the smugglers at border crossings.

San Ysidro is an especially intense smuggling corridor. So many drug couriers try to sneak into the country that the busts sometimes come every hour, and inspectors say it’s like playing a giant, endless game of cat and mouse across 24 lanes of asphalt–the wide stretch of Interstate 5 where cars from Mexico enter the United States.

Larry R. Latocki, customs assistant special agent in charge, estimates that 95% of all drug cases handled by U.S. customs in California are busts of small carloads. More than half of the marijuana–by far the most commonly seized drug–confiscated along the border in the last year came in small carloads, customs officials say. The average load is 120 pounds.

Think about how often you would see–or would, yourself, insert–a meaningless, aveage quote here to justify Special Agent Latocki’s presence in the story.

Such busts are so routine at the ports of entry that agents’ work takes on an assembly-line quality. Cars are dismantled, drugs measured and forms filled out with mechanical efficiency. On busy days, agents say they feel like doctors in a busy ER: There’s hardly time to process one 70- or 80-pound load before the next comes in.

There are variations, of course. One week the smugglers use middle-aged white women in nice cars. Then it’s deaf students from Mexico, or families, or elderly men in RVs, or college girls in convertibles.

Only now does anyone else to speak onstage, and only because he has an unusual and insightful way of putting it–Jill recognizes he has more color than she does, so she defers:

“You get all gas-tank loads sometimes,” said Special Agent Ransom Avilla. “Then, it’s weird–the last five days it’s all been tire loads. . . . It’s like when every girl is suddenly named Chelsea.”

When drug traffickers’ cars are torn up, however, the results all look the same–the same professionally wrapped bags, the same hidden…

5. Have the courage to consider a technique that grabs the reader by the shirt, pulls him close and reduces complexity to the most elemental human qualities.

Look at what Jenifer Warren did when she and colleague Dan Morain wrote about the degrading relationship between Gov. Davis and Senate leader John Burton:

SACRAMENTO — You knew it would come to this. You knew their uneasy union was bound to crack.

One politician is pure volcanic emotion, the other a public portrait of cool control. One man is blunt and uncensored, prone to spouting expletives. The other picks his words cautiously, ever wary of political faux pas.

They are the oddest of odd couples, united by circumstance and party affiliation but little else. And this month the shaky detente between California’s two most powerful leaders–Democrats Gov. ray Davis and Senate leader John Burton–shattered in full view. As their relationship tatters, it threatens a host of initiatives, from the proposed rescue of Southern California Edison to a state park bond measure and any number of upcoming gubernatorial appointments.

The break occurred in the final moments of the legislative session, past midnight, with only fellow lawmakers, media and a covey of lobbyists on hand. Tempers were frayed, bodies sleep-starved.

Davis was making a last-gasp drive to pass a plan to keep Edison out of bankruptcy. Failure would mean an ugly smudge on his record one year before reelection time. What’s more, the governor feared the bankruptcy of a company employing 12,000 would jolt the state on the heels of terrorist attacks and amid signs of a looming recession.

Burton, however, saw the Edison deal as a corporate bailout that unfairly socked consumers with the bill. He was not alone. The package lacked enough support to pass, so Burton refused to bring it up for a vote.

That’s when the gloves came off. In an unusual act, the governor breached protocol by chastising the Senate and firing off a news release calling for a special session to reconsider the deal–before informing legislative leaders.

Burton hit the roof. In a profanity-laced tirade that drew bipartisan cheers on the Senate floor, he denounced the governor and said Davis had “damn near doomed” any chance for an Edison rescue bill. As for the special session, the Senate president said he would be on jury duty that week.

What becomes of Edison’s bid for economic salvation in the Legislature is unclear. Davis insists he remains intent on winning legislative approval of the rescue plan, but unless it gets a radical make-over, Burton is unlikely to budge.

Far more obvious is this: The state’s top two Democrats have a problem, and it is spilling into the policy arena.

“Squabbling like this–even among members of the same political family–is not new,” said Barbara O’Connor, director of…

After two more grafs, the story continued:

For those who know the two men, the standoff is not surprising. Beyond the stylistic distinctions, they have fundamentally different senses of political purpose that naturally put them at odds.

Phil Trounstine, Davis’ former communications director and now a communications consultant, sums it up this way: “It is a titanic clash of worldviews.”

While the two agree on issues such as support for abortion rights, the mutual interests don’t stretch far beyond that.

Burton is an old-guard Democrat who first and foremost wants to use government to help the less fortunate. He opposes the death penalty and favors more spending on the mentally ill. Pro-labor, he wants the state to boost workers’ compensation benefits for people hurt on the job, a cost borne by business. He also believes unemployment benefits should be increased.

Davis, meanwhile, is a moderate Democrat through and through. He supports capital punishment and, after signing some early bills…

Jenifer said her goal was to quickly sketch the radical differences and conflict between California’s two most powerful politicians and to do it in a context that told readers why they should care. She continues:

That’s why we used the Edison rescue bill scene. For Southern Californians, in particular, the fate of the utility is a big deal, and the last-minute demise of the bailout was the blow that finally, publicly cleaved the relationship between Davis and Burton.

But the scene over Edison in the Legislature was a bit long and unwieldy, and as a reformed anectdotal leadist I refused to rely strictly on the back-and-forth of that night.

At first I thought of just doing the ”one is, the other is” structure, but that seemed a bit cliche and I thought it needed some sort of set up. The line ”you knew it would come to this”–first uttered by my husband during a midnight brainstorming session, incidentally–seemed perfect because their break had seemed inevitable to anyone who knows anything about the Capitol. It worked for the rest of the readers, too, by effectively foreshadowing what they’d learn later–that tensions had been building ever since Davis was elected governor.

Dan Morain had remarked earlier in the week that this was ”an odd couple story,” so I grabbed that, amped it up and used it to sum up the relationship in the third graf.

The nut graf is real Spartan–and, I figured, could be so because we’d already proved our point above. It read, ”Far more obvious is this: The state’s top two Democrats have a problem, and it is spilling into the policy arena.”

The quote just below that, I hoped, added a little authority to the conclusions we’d already drawn.

Next, I thought it was important to point out that their differences are not just stylistic, ”you say toe-may-toe, I say toe-mah-toe” kind of stuff, but rooted in their political philosophies. The ”world views” quote backed that up well. Then it was off to the races.

I think one reason we were able to write the top with confidence is that both Dan and I have observed these guys for quite awhile, and did a lot of reporting (much of it on background and thus, not in the story) to assure us we had the right take.

Another note: I wasn’t sure the first graf would survive. In the past, I’ve used ”you” or a collective ”we” and had editors take it out. I think it’s a great way to make a story feel familiar/accessible.

6. Pay attention to those desperate blurts.

Teresa Watanabe was writing a “primer” on Islam the second week after the terrorist attacks. It was supposed to help readers understand the contradictions of a religion that advocated peace yet had been exploited as a rationale for mass destruction. As you can see, my description of the story wouldn’t make much of a lead. What would make this distinctive? As we talked over the story, Teresa asked a rhetorical question: “What kind of religion is this?” It became the introductory sentence, a single shot of audacity to break down resistence to a complex story by framing it in the most fundamental terms:

What kind of religion is this? How can Islam be used to justify both peace and war?

The recent terrorist attacks, which authorities have blamed on Islamic extremists, have highlighted the tensions and contradictions in the practices of the world’s 1 billion Muslims. Muslim leaders quote Koranic verses against aggression, while Osama bin Laden ignores such commands and cites other exhortations in the book to slay the infidels. Muslim women have ruled countries like Pakistan, while the Taliban of Afghanistan denies them the right to work or attend school.

The religion has produced world empires, a civilization of stunning beauty and a theology of peace and submission to God. But it is also plagued with images of ruthless jihadi warriors, chopped-off hands, forced conversions–and now, hijacked airplanes blasting into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Since the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, diverse Islamic practices have flourished in the absence of a central religious authority. Extremist ideology has flourished as well.

“The crumbling of the Islamic civilization has removed the established institutions to seriously challenge the extremists,” said Khaled Abou El Fadl, UCLA acting professor of Islamic law. “Extremists have always been there in the Islamic tradition, but they tend to be very powerful when the institutions of society weaken and crumble.”

Most Muslims–and non-Muslim experts on Islam–are quick to say that extremists are distorting the faith and…

Cliché watch

Consider this a potential-cliché advisory: After the Sept. 11 attacks, as Americans reevaluated What it All Meant, writers at my newspaper used the expression “represents a sea change” on Sept. 18, 23 and 26:

Whether all of this represents a sea change in popular culture or merely a passing tic of heightened concern will depend in part on how events play out from here forward. The arc of popular culture has bounced upward–or been driven downward–by major events before. (Calendar)

All of this represents a sea change for travelers. Before Sept. 11, the public outcry over airline delays and airport congestion threatened the aviation industry with re-regulation, namely a bill of rights proposed to reduce the hassles and keep passengers better informed. (Business)

The new calculations represent a sea change for a region that just weeks ago was grappling with how to accommodate an expected doubling of passengers by 2025. (Metro)

The August-September total newspaperwide was 13. Expect to see it a lot more in print. Do your best to avoid being drowned by it.

Quote of the week

From Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum: I shall see to it that in my copy no opponent will “torch” another, nor will I allow anyone to speak of a particularly horrible defeat as Black Sunday. I’m extending my ban on war, holy war and war room to border skirmish. I’m going to leave suicide squeeze alone, but suicide squad is permanently on the bench in favor of special team. As for the two large and skilled members of the [San Antonio] Spurs, they are no longer the Twin Towers; they’re Tim Duncan and David Robinson.

Above all, I pledge to recognize that a golfer who delicately scrapes a shot from the fringe onto a steeply inclined green and into a small hole is not courageous, fearless or heroic. We know who those people are.

RECOMMENDED READING: “The Onion” returned last week after a respectful period of silence, providing desperately needed humor. No other news organization seemed able to match The Onion’s report that the hijackers were stunned to wake up in hell instead of paradise. On a more serious note, Seattle Times investigative reporter Duff Wilson has created a terrific all-purpose reporting website, “Reporter’s Desktop.” Both sites are available at the “Favorite Links” section of this site.

A quintet of Kim Murphy leads shows you the importance of calibrating

I want stories with voice,” your editor is saying. “And discipline. And detail. I want stories that evoke a sense of place.” And here’s the kicker: Your editor wants all those qualities in the same story.

'Voice' Part I: One writer's catalog of versatile styles

If you’re looking for a textbook on this kind of versatility, here are the tops of five clips by one of my favorite reporters and writers, Kim Murphy of the L.A. Times’ Seattle bureau.

Many Times reporters claim Kim as a hero, but when you ask them why, they’re hard-pressed to express a single technique that makes her work so consistently good. And they’re right. Study the following fragments, published during a two-month period last year. They’re testimony to a two-pronged intellectual feat: (1) reducing the material to elemental simplicity, and then (2) filtering it through a voice that appreciates human sophistication and foibles. The result is a story that both beckons you and holds your hand as you move through it. It’s the work of a writer who is always in control. Five examples:

I: A nuanced labor campaign is both explained and put into perspective.

PORTLAND, Ore. — There were the child care subsidies, true. The tuition assistance and profit sharing. A median wage of $8.42 an hour, not bad for a bookstore, in an industry whose here-today, gone-tomorrow work force hovers perpetually at the minimum wage.

The booksellers at Powell’s wanted something more. More money, to be sure, but just as important, recognition that there is not so marvelous a salesperson on Earth as the one who can take a reader’s halting, fumbling inquiry, walk confidently through the stacks, climb a stepladder and produce just the volume needed–plus a couple of recommended alternatives.

The sales staff at Powell’s City of Books–the nation’s largest independent bookstore, an American literary institution and, in an age of chain superstores and Internet giants like Amazon.com, an independent bookstore that’s making money–think that’s worth something.

So it is that Powell’s 408-strong sales and warehouse staff finds itself locked in an unusual labor battle with an employer widely seen as one of the most progressive in the industry. Powell’s employees walked off the job again Saturday, climaxing a week of job actions and street demonstrations that produced the surreal specter of riot-geared police guarding the cash registers of the venerable old establishment.

The push for a labor contract at Powell’s is part of a growing move to unionize the nation’s struggling independent booksellers. Half a dozen bookshops across the country already have union labor. Here in Portland, a new generation of bottom-rung service industry workers is bringing to the table not only issues like higher wages but also a voice in management that will allow them to maintain professional pride in their work.

II: An exotic challenge is described visually and industrially–and, again, placed into perspective–all within three grafs. Notice how the short sentences underscore the drama and make it easier to communicate the complexity. Notice, too, the amount of detail that has been compressed without a hint of cramming.

BEAUFORT SEA, Alaska — Six miles out on the polar ice pack–rising out of the silent, frozen sea–stands a 5-acre island and an army of backhoes gouging a massive trench into the ocean floor. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, workers race to complete the first undersea oil pipeline ever attempted in the formidable moonscape of the Arctic Ocean.

Delay a few weeks and the ice supporting the heavy cranes will give way to the spring thaw. Hurry and the pipeline won’t get buried properly. In this region of midwinter darkness and shifting ice, an oil spill could turn the fragile ocean into a dead sea.

This is America’s last oil frontier. Until now, Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay oil fields had been considered the end of the Earth. That was before Prudhoe’s vast reserves began to dwindle, before technology redefined the limits of the possible. Now the boundary has shifted into this wilderness of water and ice, polar bears and bowhead whales, into which mankind always has ventured at his peril.

III. An elegant one-sentence interjection–the third graf–gives power and mystery to the saga of enviro-terrorists. That interjection prepares you for two more grafs detailing the group’s mischief elsewhere. After five grafs you’re deep into the story without a “nut graf” but it doesn’t matter. The sense of mystery is still pulling you along. Technically, the nut is in the eighth graf, which is against the rules, but the rules don’t matter here because the writer has created a charming hybrid–the news yarn–with its own logic.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Boise Cascade Corp.’s regional headquarters burned to the ground the night before Christmas. When the smoke cleared, the only thing left was a communique from the “elves” of the Earth Liberation Front, who chortled that they had “left coal in Boise Cascade’s stocking.”

“Boise Cascade has been very naughty after ravaging the forests of the Pacific Northwest . . . [and] now looks toward the virgin forests of Chile,” the message said. “Let this be a lesson to all greedy multinational corporations who don’t respect ecosystems. The elves are watching.”

Actually, the elves were just catching their breath.

A week later, they torched Michigan State University’s agricultural research department, destroying years of work on genetically engineered crops. Then they burned down a house in a new Indiana housing tract that purportedly threatened a local water supply.

More recently, the ELF claimed responsibility for vandalism at the University of Minnesota, where 800 genetically engineered oat plants were overturned. Then they sabotaged construction vehicles–”large yellow machines of death,” in ELF parlance–and sifted salt into piles of dry cement destined for a controversial highway project in Minneapolis.

They have left no fingerprints, no identifiable tire tracks, no shoe prints likely to match anyone’s feet. The gasoline mixture they use cannot be identified. Pipe bomb components have been traced to the stores where they were purchased, but no one can remember who bought them.

Their only public presence is a tall, stone-faced vegan baker in Portland, Ore., who has been called to appear before a federal grand jury Wednesday to either name the people who keep sending communiques to his ELF press office or risk 18 months in prison on contempt charges. Craig Rosebraugh, 27, already knows what he’s going to say: He has no idea who they are. And if he did, “I’d sit in jail for 18 months before I told them.”

This is the new face of radical environmentalism, which has moved beyond the simple monkey-wrenching and tree-spiking techniques of the timber wars of the 1990s. By adopting tactics of the Animal Liberation Front, known for its clandestine releases of research animals and fur-farm minks, the ELF’s intent now is to inflict as much financial harm as possible on corporations whose interests are deemed at odds with the environment.

And in that they have been very successful.

“They pick times and places where no one expects them to be,” said…

IV. Like Example III, we are again taken to the dark side of society, but this time the writer brings us closer so we can watch evil unfold. The voice is dispassionate. Like Example II, the sentences are short for observational detail and drama. Each graf brings us slightly closer, which is why we don’t mind waiting until the fifth graf for the narrator to explain what we’re watching. She gives it partly to us in the fifth graf, then with both barrels in the sixth, stacking parallel clauses atop each other to emphasize how far-afield this music is.

DETROIT — The meeting point is a gas station 20 miles north of Detroit. As carloads of people from across the Midwest cruise in, a young man in a blue flannel shirt quietly signals them to follow him.

They drive past a line of watchful police cars, through suburbs dotted with strip malls and fast-food restaurants. Finally, they reach working-class Shelby Township and turn left down a country road, where a Disabled American Veterans assembly hall advertises free admission to a flea market.

Car after car pulls in, and a parade of young men–many with the trademark shaved heads, Doc Martens boots and swastika tattoos of neo-Nazi skinheads–file into the hall. The front door closes, and the trouble starts.

Thundering guitars strike up an infernal rhythm. A call–it might be a human shriek or the growl of a bear–rises with the music: Victory or Valhalla . . . We will never surrender. And then the crowd strikes up a chant that can be heard out on the street: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

Of the many underground music scenes in America, few are so forbidden that patrons arrive not knowing where the concert is. Then again, few rock ‘n’ roll bands sing anthems like “If you ain’t white, you’ll be dead.”

White power music is virtually the only kind that no radio station will play, no club will book, few record stores will stock. In an industry that seeks profits in outrageousness, it is the music that goes too far.

Even the old guard of the white supremacy movement viewed the violent skinhead culture with dismay. But now they have begun to embrace white power music, realizing that a single compact disk can be infinitely more powerful a recruiting tool than a parking lot full of fliers.

National Alliance leader William Pierce–whom human rights groups have identified as the most powerful and dangerous white supremacist in America–recently purchased Resistance Records and its accompanying magazine, setting up a warehouse and distribution center on his 350-acre compound in West Virginia.

Resistance expects to generate at least $750,000 in CD sales this year. That money, Pierce says, can be funneled into the National Alliance’s expanding political network…

V: A feature off the news: Here the voice has more emotion to emphasize the unusualness. Details in the first graf give us a sense of place. Details in the second graf give us a sense of contrast. (Note the use of three separate sentences in that second graf to clearly separate the thoughts; how many reporters routinely write three-sentence grafs?) The third graf gives us a cultural background so that the fourth and fifth grafs can reinforce the contrast between the once-true believers and the awful truth they now grapple with.

RICHLAND, Wash. — No one ever thought they’d see it happen. Not in this town, home of the Atomic Foods supermarket, the Bombers football team (with the tiny mushroom cloud over the school sign) and streets with names like Proton Court.

But then no one in this company town ever thought the company would admit it had hurt them. The company, in this case, is the U.S. Department of Energy, operator of the Hanford plutonium-making complex in central Washington. Last week, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson ended decades of official denials by conceding that workers in 14 nuclear weapon plants had been exposed to harmful levels of radioactive and chemical contamination.

For years, people who talked about radioactive illnesses and safety hazards at Hanford–the backbone employer in Richland for more than 50 years–were dismissed as troublemakers or, worse yet, unpatriotic.

So when the government invited people to come to the federal building here Thursday night to talk about how Hanford had made them sick, the result was astounding: a room full–no, more than a room full, they spilled out into the atrium and an adjoining conference room–of men and women who had spent their lives measuring and transporting and mixing some of the deadliest known radionuclides.

These were not young nuclear activists, or even industry whistle-blowers. They were men in their 50s, 60s and 70s, wearing work shirts and billed caps. They were women who’d worked as secretaries and chemical process technicians. Or widows of onetime employees who’d buried husbands long before they thought they ought to have.

The government’s reversal–a move that could cost tens of millions of dollars in compensation costs–was based on a preliminary report that…

These stories are evocative and stylish, yet deceptively simple: The Flesch reading ease program, which evaluates sentence length and syllables per word, measured them at 6.6 grade level. (Most L.A. Times stories read at the 12th-grade level or higher.) The average sentence length in the examples you read was 20.3 words. (Most of us average significantly more.) Beyond the numbers is a commitment to hard-eyed storytelling without a shred of self-indulgence.

“WHAT’S THAT MEAN?” THE READER SAID, REFERRING TO…

If you have grown tired of littering up your copy with mediocre quotes, and have pledged to trim fat by using only those quotes that matter, here’s a little check you can make. Check each story for the term “referring to.” What you’ll often find is that you have used that term to explain the meaning of a quote.

Think about what an obnoxious habit that is.

You want the reader to absorb, not to think. You want the information presented fluidly, logically, as sequentially as possible. So why would you throw a piece of language at him that he didn’t understand?

Like these examples from my newspaper’s pages of 2000, with the sins underlined:

“Everybody was expecting a crash,” said Scott Bleier, chief investment strategist at Prime Charter Ltd. a New York investment bank. But “the ‘new world order’ is very powerful” as an investment lure, he said, referring to the growth prospects of technology. “It doesn’t end just because we’ve had a corrective process” in stocks.

Or:

“It is clear that there are various interests and all sorts of requests made by different interest groups, including the oligarchs,” he said, referring to the powerful moguls who wielded hefty political clout during the Boris N. Yeltsin era.

Or:

To make matters worse, Ron Iden, FBI special agent in charge of Los Angeles, said the region is the telemarketing scam capital of the nation. “The bulk of the problem comes from boiler rooms in Southern California,” he said, referring to the makeshift offices from which teams of scam artists make calls.

My newspaper used “referring to” about once every other day last year to compensate for that kind of of poor quote usage. Most of the time, “referring to” should warn you that your quote isn’t worth keeping. It would be cleaner if the three examples above were rewritten like this:

(1) “Everybody was expecting a crash,” said Scott Bleier, chief investment strategist at Prime Charter Ltd. a New York investment bank. But the growth prospects of technology are an investment lure, he said. “It doesn’t end just because we’ve had a corrective process” in stocks.” (We eliminated the “new world order” expression.)

(2) “It is clear that there are various interests and all sorts of requests made by different interest groups,” including the powerful moguls who wielded hefty political clout during the Boris N. Yeltsin era, he said. (We shortened the quote to eliminate the expression “oligarchs.”

(3) To make matters worse, the region is the telemarketing scam capital of the nation, said Ron Iden, FBI special agent in charge of Los Angeles. The bulk of the problem, he said, is rooted in Southern California “boiler rooms,” makeshift offices in which teams of scam artists make calls. (We paraphrased Iden’s quote–how often do law enforcement officers use memorable language?–and shoved him to the back of the first sentence.)

Occasionally the quote will be interesting enough to make the explanation worthwhile, like:

Hyundai’s sales philosophy was “us or the bus” before 1990, he said, referring to the positioning of its new cars as an alternative to used cars or public transportation.

Or this one, in which an ex-manager was asked if a recent poor season dimmed the chances of him returning to the big leagues:

“No, not after five good ones,” he said, referring to his having led the Houston Astros to three consecutive second-place finishes before leading the Angels to two more.

Remember what it feels like being in a conversation where somebody uses a piece of jargon you don’t understand, and what a pain in the ass it is when you have to make that person back up and explain it. That’s the conversational equivalent of “referring to.”

“ASK YOURSELF WHERE YOU’RE STANDING.”

A feature last year about two men who died in an Alaska Air crash off Ventura County, Calif., had an uncomfortable lead. The writer seemed to insert himself into the action-in this case, a memorial service-and bring the reader almost too close:

SACRAMENTO–In a way, you were fortunate, weren’t you?

Lois Rosele looks up, as if the question hangs there in the air. A spark of anger has been lit. She looks down.

Fortunate that you had him for as long as you did?

Lois Rosele is a mother. She composes herself and looks back up.

“Yes, I was lucky,” she says. She is the mother of a son. “But I expected to be luckier.”

She is the mother of a son who died in the suddenness of the sunny afternoon two weeks ago when Alaska Airlines Flight 261 plunged, spun and tumbled nose first into 700 feet of cold ocean. Given the speed of the aircraft, the water might as well have been stone. The impact obliterated much of the airplane and its 88 passengers.

Rosele’s son, Brad Long, was among them. He was eulogized here Sunday along with his longtime partner, Bill Knudson. A memorial service drew 1,300 people, many of them prepped, as one friend said, for the biggest party Sacramento had ever seen.

The size of the crowd surprised only those who didn’t know Knudson and Long, who didn’t know about the intersecting circles of friends that Long and Knudson sat in the center of, circles that spun out from Northern California to Central Mexico, circles that included…

Did the lead have to stick you in the face of a grieving mother? Yes, says the writer, Terry McDermott:

I hate these sorts of stories. They’re cliches waiting to be written. I was stuck writing a story about two guys who died in a plane crash that wasn’t going to be published until two weeks after the crash. As a reader, anytime I see a story like this, I ask myself: Why [is the paper writing about] these guys? Why now?

These are questions without good answers. You can’t say, we’re doing the story because some editor wants it. Instead, you write something in maybe the third of fourth graf explaining that lots of people died and we picked these guys as stand-ins for the whole plane load and don’t ask us why cuz we don’t have a clue.

I wanted to find a way to avoid all that, to not give readers a chance to even ask the questions. One way to do this is to plunge them right into the middle of the story from the start–no build-up, no explanation, just bam, here you are, either read it or not, but don’t wonder why.

How do you do that?

The best purely mechanical writing tip I ever got was on how to start stories when you don’t know how to start them. It’s this:

Ask yourself where you’re standing.

You can think of it physically. Most stories are told from a distance, a thousand feet up, surveying the entire landscape, or a little closer–from across the street, maybe, in a car parked in a neighbor’s driveway. But stories don’t have to be told from that distance. If you can’t get the story to work, change the location. Look at what you have from a different distance. It’s cinematic; move the camera. (You can also change locations during a story. This can be a good substitute for writing transitions.)

Death of a loved one is an extraordinarily intimate event. So I tried to indicate that intimacy by bringing the reader very close to the action, bringing the camera in tight.

The best single thing to emerge in the reporting was the mother’s answer to the rather lame question: Do you feel fortunate to have had him as long as you did?

Since I wanted to start in the middle of this story and didn’t want the reader to be asking universal questions, I gave them this question in its place and asked it immediately and a point-blank range.

KEYS TO CHARACTER

The next time you’re profiling, sketching or simply trying to capture a character in print, consider this checklist. It comes from a late Oregon novelist named Con Sellers and was reprinted last year on WriterL, a ” literary journalism” listserv.
Age
Height
Weight
Birth date
Birthplace
Color hair
Color eyes
Scars or handicaps (physical, mental, emotional)
Other distinguishing traits (smells, voice, skin, hair, etc.)
Educational background
Work experience
Military service
Marital status
Best friend
Men/women friends
Enemies
Parents
Current problem
Greatest fear
How will problem get worse?
Strongest character traits
Weakest character traits
Sees self as
Is seen by others as
Sense of humor
Basic nature
Ambitions
Philosophy of life
Hobbies
Preferred type of music, art, reading material
Idioms used in dialog
Dress
Favorite colors
Pastimes
Description of home
Most important things to know about this character
One-line characterization

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From NYT columnist Thomas Friedman on Sept. 25: “It is hard to trust anything after such an attack because trust is based on a certain presumptive morality, a sense that certain actions are simply outside the bounds of human behavior or imagination. That 19 people would take over four civliian airliners and then steer three of them into buildings loaded with thousands of innocent people was, I confess, outside the boundary of my imagination. The World Trade Center is not the place where our intelligence agencies failed. It is the place where our imaginations failed.

“What we know of these terrorists is that they were evil, educated and suicidal. That is a combination I have never seen before in a large group of people. People who are evil and educated don’t tend to be suicidal (they get other people to kill themselves). People who are evil and suicidal don’t tend to be educated.”

How make sure the anecdote doesn’t cause more problems than it solves

Nothing winks more seductively at a reporter with a complex news-feature than an anecdotal lead–the promise of a way to quickly personalize the abstract and set the stage for a broader proclamation of the story theme.

And nothing falls apart more quickly.

The reason is the problem that sent you to the Anecdote Solution in the first place: life is so damned complicated. Too often, the anecdote requires too many grafs to make it work. Still other times, even when the anecdote can be compressed into a couple of grafs, it may simply be a trick to hide from the awful truth: You’ve got a news story on your hands, and you ought to tell it like one.

Six questions to ask yourself before you type that anecdotal lead

What follows are six considerations you ought to apply every time you are toying with using an anecdotal lead: Should I delay it? Should I distill it? Should I reject it? Do I really need that quote inside the anecdotal lead? What would the Wall Street Journal do? (I’m serious.) And, Am I using the right language to stitch my anecdote to my nut graf?

Question 1: Should I delay my anecdote?

Consider a story my newspaper published last October, at the height of the Ford Explorer/Firestone scandal. Until about 9 p.m., the top of the story read like this:

(First, the anecdote)

On the day Christy McKinney turned 21, she was running an errand with her 7-month-old son, Conner, in her Ford Explorer when the tread on her left rear tire peeled loose, causing her car to sail off an embankment on Interstate 40 near Alma, Ark.

The sport-utility vehicle rolled over twice. Conner was ejected from his baby seat, suffering cuts and bruises to his face. He was the lucky one. His mother was thrown from the vehicle–even though she was wearing her seatbelt, according to her attorney–and landed on the highway’s grassy shoulder. McKinney and her son were rushed to a hospital in nearby Fort Smith, where doctors declared her a quadriplegic.

(Then the news)

The toll from defective Firestone tires mounted on Ford Explorers has largely been measured by the 101 deaths compiled so far by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But as investigators delve into about 400 injury cases, story after horrific story emerges, some involving people who have become paraplegics or quadriplegics.

These victims will have to cope with the fact that their life expectancies have been shortened as they face the prospect of raising enough money–sometimes millions of dollars–to pay looming medical bills. The costs also include an emotional toll, changing the lives of these victims’ families who must now grapple with caring for their loved ones.

(Then back to the anecdote)

In McKinney’s case, her mother, Sheri, was recently forced to give up her job, leave her own 13-year-old son behind, and borrow money from friends and relatives so that she could watch over Christy, who has been transferred to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

Christy cannot speak, but her mother can read her lips.

“Everyday I dry her tears [that] roll down her cheeks when she says, ‘I miss my baby,’ ” said Sheri, 39. “I try to hold myself together. I can’t let her see me fall apart. But she is my baby and her crying makes me cry.”

(Then back to the news)

NHTSA officials said they don’t know how many people have ended up like Christy–seriously injured as a result of an accident involving defective Firestone tires.

The 101 reported deaths and 400 injuries over several years are a small fraction of the 41,611 deaths and 3.2 million injuries caused by traffic collisions last year alone. About 8,000 of those injured are people who will never walk again, according to officials with the National Spinal Cord Injury Assn., who say the numbers of people left paralyzed in Firestone-related crashes has shed new light on the financial and emotional costs associated with such debilitating injuries.

The rising toll of casualties is also bringing fresh attention to the tendency of some vehicles’ roofs to cave in during rollover accidents, which can cause fatal or crippling head and neck injuries. Consumer safety advocates…

And so it went until an hour or so before the home-edition deadline, when Deputy Managing Editor Leo Wolinsky decided that the back-and-forth shuffle between poignancy and news should be replaced by a more direct, clearer approach. Leo felt we had published so many stories about the human tragedy of the Firestone/Ford controversy that this story would unfairly suffer from a feeling of sameness.

So the published story proclaimed the news first:

The toll from defective Firestone tires mounted on Ford Explorers has largely been measured by the 101 deaths counted so far, but as investigators delve into about 400 injury cases they are finding horrific tragedies that have left some victims paraplegics or quadriplegics.

These victims will have to cope with shortened life expectancies as they face the prospect of raising enough money–sometimes millions of dollars–to pay looming medical bills. The costs also include an emotional toll, changing the lives of these victims’ families who must now grapple with caring for their loved ones.

The focus on the news allowed a third graf that explained the causes of the maiming more fully, giving the piece more immediate perspective:

The number of people left paralyzed in these crashes is also bringing fresh attention to the tendency of some vehicles’ roofs to cave in during rollover accidents, which can cause fatal or crippling head and neck injuries. Consumer safety advocates have criticized the auto makers for not strengthening roofs and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for not toughening the roof-crush standard.

A close look at some of these tragedies, alongside an analysis of government crash data, shows that in many cases the human cost was raised by occupants simply not wearing their seat belts. But in others, the violence of the crash–and the damage to the vehicle–was so extreme that wearing a seat belt was not enough to save passengers or drivers from death or crippling injuries.

Then, in the fifth graf, having established the institutional context, the story gave us the Christy McKinney story in five consecutive grafs:

Consider the case of Christy McKinney.

On the day she turned 21, McKinney was running an errand with her 7-month-old son, Conner, in her Ford Explorer when the tread on her left rear tire peeled loose, causing her car to sail off an embankment on Interstate 40 near Alma, Ark.

The sport-utility vehicle rolled over twice. Conner was ejected from his baby seat, suffering…

From there, the story returned to the macrocosm.

The lesson is that if you have real news, use real news. As the writer, Davan Maharaj, puts it:

Although the anecdote was gripping and maybe powerful, it still couldn’t cut to the chase fast enough. My humble feeling is that we often try to play on readers’ emotions to draw them into stories. They would read on if you were honest with them from the start, and if they were interested in the topic. I’m now a convert to the belief that any time you can use a straight lede instead of an anecdotal one, go with the straight one. Reader reaction to this piece also confirmed that it worked.

Question 2: Can I do a better job of distilling my lead anecdote?

Bill Rempel and Rick Serrano’s investigation of Texas’ concealed-handgun law, published shortly before the 2000 presidential election, was another example of balancing news and color. No one anecdote could serve this story, because it was about the cumulative effect of the law. And yet the key to understanding the impact was the litany of what various individuals did with their gun permits. So the story hit you hard, with the essential contrast between goal and result, for two grafs…

AUSTIN, Texas — In 1995, four months into his first term as governor, George W. Bush signed a bill ending a 125-year ban on concealed handguns in Texas. The new law, he vowed, would make the state “a safer place,” and he promised Texans that license applicants would undergo rigorous background checks.

But since the law took effect, the state has licensed hundreds of people with prior criminal convictions–including rape and armed robbery–and histories of violence, psychological disorders and drug or alcohol problems, a Times investigation has found.

…and then, for the next two grafs, distilled the bare-bones details about six cases that would be detailed later on:

James W. Washington got a license to carry a concealed weapon despite having done prison time in Texas for armed robbery. So did Terry Ross Gist, who left a trail of threats and violence in court records from North Carolina to California. A license also went to an elderly Dallas man with Alzheimer’s disease.

Still others committed crimes, ranging from double murder to drunk driving, after they were licensed. A frustrated commuter, Paul W. Lueders, shot and severely wounded a Houston bus driver. Audi Phong Nguyen ran with a Houston home invasion ring. Diane Brown James helped her husband kidnap a San Antonio woman to be their sex slave.

Then back to the macro to continue establishing the sweep of the problem:

About 215,000 Texans are currently licensed to carry concealed weapons. The state concedes that…

Question 3: Should I reject the anedcote entirely?

Jennifer Oldham’s first draft of her scoop about the danger of certain home furnaces employed a semi-featurized lead because the concept was unfamiliar to most readers. She graciously shares the draft with us:

On chilly nights this fall, tens of thousands of unsuspecting California homeowners will turn on attic furnaces similar to those that fire investigators say sparked numerous catastrophic blazes across the state over the last 10 years.

Federal safety experts and furnace makers and distributors have known for years that horizontal attic furnaces manufactured by Consolidated Industries ignited dozens of fires in single-family residences, townhomes and condominiums from San Jose to San Diego.

Yet the government, the manufacturer, and the 30 distributors who sold these attic furnaces under various brand names in the state from 1984 to 1992, have never issued a recall or a formal warning urging homeowners to get these units inspected and replaced.

”These things are latent time bombs in peoples’ attics and they don’t know about them,” said Dan Mogin, a San Diego attorney who this summer filed a class action lawsuit against Sears, a Consolidated distributor. ”The Consumer Products Safety Commission has absolutely dropped the ball on this.”

But Jennifer switched to a hard-news approach after recognizing the quality of her material. Notice that in the published version that follows, she used five grafs of news before a quote (rather than three in the first draft), and that she found a better quote–one that provided a more satisfying transition from the news. You’ll also notice that by the time the story was published, Jennifer’s inquiries had pushed the product safety commission into action, reflected in the third graf:

Defective attic furnaces manufactured by a now-bankrupt firm have caused scores of residential fires in California in the last decade, fire inspectors and federal investigators said.

Hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting homeowners may be at risk from these furnaces, made by Indiana-based Consolidated Industries and sold under various brand names in California from 1984 to 1992, these sources said.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the independent federal agency responsible for warning citizens about defective products, has known about the problem since the mid-1990s. It said Tuesday it will issue a warning today about the furnaces.

The commission’s staff said it didn’t issue a warning earlier because federal law prohibits it from doing so while it is in negotiations seeking a product recall. The agency said it had hoped to issue a recall, but was unable to do so when Consolidated-which would have been required to finance this action–went out of business.

The lack of a recall or warning to date had created a sense of foreboding among many fire-prevention officials.

“Every time we have a cold snap we have a furnace fire,” said Michael Freige, a senior fire inspector for the Torrance Fire Department, who said Consolidated furnaces have caused seven residential fires there since 1994.

The issuance of a warning without a recall means that homeowners probably will have to foot the bill…

Similarly, Greg Miller eschewed the temptation for an anecdote when writing about the frighteningly sophisticated ways companies are snooping on employee computer use. The trend was important enough to be recognized directly. So Greg gave it to you like this:

Moving beyond merely monitoring employees’ Internet use, many of the nation’s largest companies are quietly assembling teams of computer investigators who specialize in covertly copying employees’ hard drives and combing them for evidence of workplace wrongdoing.

These high-tech investigators employ tools and techniques that originally were devised for law enforcement to catch criminals but that are now spreading rapidly in the private sector at Microsoft, Disney, Boeing, Motorola, Fluor, Caterpillar and dozens of other major companies.

The development, little known outside the narrow community of corporate security experts, is sure to raise tensions over workplace privacy in an age when the lives of millions of workers are inextricably tied to their office computers.

Employers say that their rush into the field known as “computer forensics” is a matter of self-defense, that being able to retrieve computer evidence is essential to their ability to catch employees engaged in everything from spending too much time surfing the Internet to stealing company secrets.

One basic test is: Does the anecdote actually represent the greater truth of the story? Watch the problems you get into when that doesn’t happen:

LAS VEGAS–This was the end of Martina Bauhaus’ job interview for one of the most sought-after positions in town:

She put on black velvet high-cut briefs and a tight, low-cut bustier. When her name was called, she walked out of the fitting room to pose in front of a mirror-and half a dozen silent, staring men who measured her up like cattlemen at a livestock auction.

She didn’t get the job. ”Maybe,” said the slender 28-year-old, ”they didn’t like my body in their outfit.”

Know what the story’s about yet? You’ll have to keep reading.

Bauhaus, a law student with a master’s degree in public administration, wasn’t seeking a job as a model, but as a cocktail waitress at the new Suncoast Casino. Nobody asked her the difference between a screwdriver and a rusty nail. She just had to have the right look.

Indeed, despite the supposed ”Disneyfication” of Las Vegas, widespread unionization and the arrival of politically correct corporate casino owners, the image of the sexy cocktail waitress remains as vital here as a one-armed bandit.

Here comes the point:

But while young drink servers are still willing to don revealing outfits, there’s something of a rebellion afoot–literally: growing discontent over the use of high heels.

Led by a cocktail waitress named Kricket Martinez, members of an impromptu labor organization dubbed the Kiss My Foot Coalition are campaigning against shoes that they say can rack their bodies. After a rally in May, several casinos in Reno agreed to allow lower heels, and the loose-knit group now hopes to…

It’s not just that the story requires 168 words to get to the point (the 6th graf). It’s that most of those words (the first four grafs) don’t lead you to the point. The story is about discontent over the use of high heels, but the anecdote doesn’t contain a single reference to footwear. Thus, the story virtually starts over at the 5th graf by building a contrast so that the 6th graf will have something to bounce off. In other words, we wind up with two leads: an anecdotal lead, and a contrast lead. That’s one lead too many.

Why not dump Martina Barhaus, exploit the central contrast–the (shortened) fifth and sixth grafs–and start the story this way:

LAS VEGAS–Despite this city’s supposed ”Disneyfication,” the image of the sexy cocktail waitress remains as vital here as a one-armed bandit.

But there’s something of a rebellion afoot–literally: growing discontent over the use of high heels.

Led by a cocktail waitress named Kricket Martinez…

Question 4: Do I really need that quote inside my anecdote?

One indulgence that frequently sabotages anecdotal leads is the quote. By trying to give the anecdote a “voice,” the writer pushes down the key grafs that define the story. Consider this New York Times story from last year, with the questionable quote grafs underlined:

Kevin Heebner, owner of a building supply store in Temple, Pa., got a call four years ago from his longtime stockbroker recommending an investment in short-term bonds. Assured the bonds were safe, Mr. Heebner invested $100,000.

Three months later, Mr. Heebner received a stunning phone call. The broker told him the money he had put into the bonds was gone. The president of the broker’s firm, Old Naples Securities, had stolen it.

With his wife about to deliver their third child, Mr. Heebner, 36, reeled at the thought of a $100,000 loss. Then he remembered with relief that his account was insured by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, created by Congress in 1970 to protect investors’ brokerage accounts from just the sort of theft he had been a victim of.

“I knew that if they didn’t find the money from Old Naples Securities, I was insured through S.I.P.C.,” Mr. Heebner recalled. The broker’s “business card and letterhead all had S.I.P.C. logos on them; I figured S.I.P.C. would cover it.”

Mr. Heebner figured wrong. For more than four years, the corporation maintained he was entitled to nothing — even though three federal courts ruled that S.I.P.C. should pay him $87,000. Only last week, days after a reporter interviewed the lawyer representing the corporation about Mr. Heebner, did the investor receive a check in the amount of $87,000.

“I never got the sense that S.I.P.C. was in any way trying to help my client,” said William P. Thornton Jr., a lawyer at Stevens & Lee in Reading Pa., representing Mr. Heebner against the corporation. “They are very aggressive in attempting to prove that investors’ claims do not come within certain legal definitions within the S.I.P.C. statute. And the loser is the investor.”

At a time when millions of United States citizens have taken their money out of federally insured banks and put it into brokerage firms, the Securities Investor Protection Corporation’s charge of protecting the investing public has never been more important. Officials of the S.I.P.C. defend the corporation’s record and say they must be vigilant in protecting against invalid claims by investors.

But a close look at this little-understood organization shows that the safety net that investors believe the corporation offers is in fact full of holes.

Industry-financed but not government-backed, the corporation is a far cry from the agency on which it was loosely modeled, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which protects bank customers against losses.

Created three decades ago…

You can see why the writer used the first quote: It allowed him to move seamlessly from the end of the quote to the third graf, playing off “figured” with “figured wrong.” But was it worth it? It ate up 39 words, delaying us from understanding what the hell the story was about.

Even less functional was the second quote, which ate up 64 words to underscore a thesis that the writer had yet to introduce: the S.I.P.C. is full of holes. It took 351 words before you got to that proclamation graf–a trip made 29% longer by the two quotes.

Even without the quotes, the story used an unusual amount of length–248 words–to make its general point. If you think you don’t lose a proportion of your readers by that kind of dawdling, you’re kidding yourself. Make your point first, then let your characters talk.

It’s not that quotes can’t be used before the story gets to the point, but they tend to work better with a simpler story. Read this one, which also used parallel language to link quote and syntax. The difference was, this story linked the quote to the point of the story, not just to a less crucial passage in the anecdote:

SAN LUIS OBISPO–Amy Hutchcraft, 18, and her dormmates set up housekeeping in a lounge next to a laundry room. Ashleigh Boslet, a freshman from Pennsylvania, was crammed into a conference room with five others.

They were luckier than Birgitte Marthinsen, who arrived at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo two weeks ago from Norway and still had not found a place to live when school started Monday.

“My mother was crying on the phone last night,” Marthinsen said as she dejectedly scanned the housing bulletin board in the campus union. “She said, ‘What’s happening to you?”

What’s happening is that students here and at other coastal universities in California have been caught in the jaws of a serious housing crunch. From Berkeley to Santa Barbara, stories of students employing desperate strategies to find places to sleep have become the stuff of local legend.

The crunch reflects the same conditions, if aggravated, that have afflicted the broader housing market across California. Too many people are chasing too few beds, especially in desirable coastal areas where slow and no-growth pledges have become as much a litmus test for political office as a hatred of taxes.

Words used to get to the point (the third graf): 93.

Question 5: What would the Wall Street Journal do?

The Journal offers cheap eight-week introductory subscriptions. Get one. Look at the front page news features for a week. You will notice that the Journal seems to virtually command its writers to bring anecdotal leads into focus by the fourth paragraph.

The Journal is mocked in some quarters for a formulaic approach to its anecdotal leads, but that’s about as valid as complaining that Sam Phillips used a formula because all those Sun Records rockabilly hits of the ’50s were between 2:25 and 2:50. In both cases, the trick was letting great ideas unfold creatively within a disciplined setting.

You can almost set your watch by the efficiency of the Journal’s anecdotal leads. By the fourth paragraph you have sampled great density of detail, or a scene, or a quote–or possibly all three. You know quickly whether you want to go along for the ride.

Like this 1999 Journal piece, an e-commerce story which needed only 122 words to get to the point (paragraph 4, sentence 2):

Toby Lenk, founder of eToys Inc., is sure he knows the secret behind e-commerce: Build a single-focus Internet site, laser in on one swath of the marketplace, and don’t let customers get confused by clutter from other goods or services.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc., is just as confident about his strategy: Build the world’s biggest online department store, then offer everything from Milton to modems, so shoppers can get whatever they want with one click on their Web browsers.

Messrs. Lenk and Bezos are true pioneers, Internet innovators with astonishing net worths. So if they’re both so shrewd, how could they take such widely disparate gambles?

That question, in one form or another, is on the minds of executives everywhere. In businesses ranging from aerospace to telecommunications, CEOs are making big strategic bets, trying to position their companies to take advantage of productivity and technology trends that they are only beginning to understand. And very often, major players are making completely divergent bets within the same industry.

Or this from the Journal, which needed only 114 words to do both the set-up and the nut in three graphs:

BERLIN–As Nick Jackson hawks tickets for his morning walking tour of the city, a Chilean woman approaches, her parents in tow, and spits out three questions in a single breath: “How long is the tour? Do you have senior-citizen discounts? Do you go to see the Wall?”

“Three-and-a-half hours. It’s 15 marks [$8] for everyone. And, yes, I’ll take you to the Wall,” the guide replies. “Not that there’s much left,” he confides to someone else.

As the Chileans will discover, the Berlin Wall is hard to find in Berlin today. In fact, its remnants are more prominently displayed at Honolulu Community College than in the heart of the city it once divided.

Of the roughly 28 miles of wall that bisected Berlin, less than a mile remains standing, and most of that is in an out-of-the-way…

You are also likely to find a stronger writer’s voice in many of the Journal’s anecdotal leads than other papers, because the Journal’s devotion to compression forces the writer to employ his own devices rather than the journalese of standard anecdotal leads. Like this one, which took 133 words to get to the point (graph 4, sentence 2):

SAN FRANCISCO–There was romance in the resumes: She, a computer consultant turned fashion model; he, an Apple Computer engineer turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. They were young, beautiful, wired for love.

But caution fell between them. During a yearlong courtship, Alfred Tom held back, wary of revealing too much. Then it happened. After an afternoon with friends, Mr. Tom took Angela Fu back to his car. There, on the front seat of his 1994 Integra, he went for it.

“Naturally, I flinched a bit,” Ms. Fu says. But in a stroke it was done: a signed nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, in the parlance of the Net set. Henceforth, Ms. Fu would be sworn to silence about her boyfriend’s trade secrets.

DNA, meet NDA, your twisted, alphabetical cousin in the world of baser instincts. Long the province of lawyers, investment bankers and other traffickers in corporate secrets, nondisclosure agreements have gone mainstream.

Propelled by Internet frenzy, an epidemic of secrecy pacts is…

Former Journal editor and writer Bill Blundell puts it this way in “The Art & Craft of Feature Writing,” a wonderful book based on the Journal’s in-house writing guide: “We do try to engage the reader’s attention immediately. We do try to give him a clear idea of what we’re up to early on. And we do try to prove our assertions in detail throughout. If these add up to a formula then I suppose we have one. But it offers the reporter enormous latitude, and it’s the same one successful storytellers have used for centuries.”

So beat yourself up a little more. Be more purposeful, more unforgiving of your tangents. Play a game with yourself: Draw the line at four graphs per anecdotal lead–and that includes the graph that tells the reader what the story’s about. See whether it forces you into some positive habits–better distillation, better use of your own voice as a writer, a stronger sense of urgency in your work, and greater clarity.

Question 6: Am I effectively connecting my anecdote to the nut?

Does the anecdote flow seamlessly into the grafs that proclaim the story? Too often, writers use anecdotes to evade that responsibility.

In the three examples that follow, the writers achieved a precise fit. The underlined language illustrates the glue between the anecdote and the proclamation.

First, a news story–almost a consumer expose–that used the anecdote to give you a picture:

The letter from Ralphs Grocery Co. to its fruit and vegetable suppliers began cordially enough. Addressed ”Dear Valued Supplier,” it laid out Ralphs’ plans to add 44 stores in Northern California and build a warehouse to service them.

Then came the hard sell: To help pay for Ralphs’ growth, suppliers would have to pony up thousands of dollars in shelf fees, either in cash or by surrendering dozens of cases of free products. The implication was that if they didn’t, there would be no space on the chains’ shelves for their goods.

Ralphs’ letter is one demonstration of a dramatic escalation in the grocery industry’s demands for so- called slotting fees, which food companies pay to get supermarket shelf space for new products. Manufacturers shell out $9 billion a year in shelf fees, representing more than half of the supermarket industry’s total profits, analysts estimate.

Mergers have sharply consolidated supermarket ownership in recent years. Five giant companies account for 40% of U.S. grocery sales, and the mega-chain share of the Southland market is even higher.

With grocers using their newfound clout to expand the ”pay for space” system to the produce aisle, and to charge $25,000 or more to place new products, small suppliers say they can’t compete.

Regulators are watching with concern. Three federal investigations…

The second example is a feature, written during the 2000 New Hampshire primary, about how that state’s citizens have become spoiled by the disproportionate attention presidential candidates pay them:

MANCHESTER, N.H.–John McCain is sweating. He has just downed an entire bowl of three- alarm chili and half a bottle of fizzy water.

Twenty Manchester firefighters are lunching with the Republican presidential hopeful at a long table in the central station’s glassed kitchen, called the fishbowl. It would be a cozy respite from the freezing cold if not for 100 reporters crammed in a corner, staring.

With the nation’s first primary on Tuesday drawing ever closer, McCain is shopping for votes the New Hampshire way-one at a time. The senator from Arizona puts down his spoon and asks in a low purr, any questions?

”I’ve got one,” Firefighter Mike Lawrence pipes up. ”How do you like…”

The room falls silent. The cameras zoom in for tonight’s sound bite. How does he like-what? The flat tax? Russia’s new president? The threatened deportation of the little Cuban boy?

”How do you like…the chili?”

Therein lies the essence of New Hampshire, where a citizen’s sway is off the scales and the ratio of people to political clout is wildly out of proportion. With the Iowa caucuses out of the way and less than a week to go before New Hampshire’s all-important contest, this tiny state of 1.2 million-one- thirtieth the population of California and roughly the size of San Diego proper-has assumed its place at the center of U.S. politics.

No candidate since 1952 has won the White House without first winning his party’s primary in the Granite State–except in 1992, when next-door-neighbor Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts beat Bill Clinton. (”An aberration,” one local insisted, ”and everyone should just forget it.”)

It is here that working-class people have regularly humbled political aristocrats, creating a searing photo album of electoral gaffes: Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar…

Finally, an example of connective language that links the right kind of quote to the right kind of generality:

SEOUL–Han Mi Sook, a 37-year-old company worker in Seoul, has owned a Daewoo sedan for several years. But riding around town with ”Daewoo” on your hood has become a lot less prestigious since last August, when the entire industrial group was brought to its knees financially.

”It’s still running,” she said with a laugh. ”But it’s a bit noisy.”

The same might be said for the entire South Korean auto industry these days. Headlines blare daily every step and misstep of an intricate ownership dance that promises to reshape this once-proud South Korean industry for decades to come.

General Motors and Ford have already declared their interest in buying Daewoo Motor, a subsidiary of Daewoo Group, amid reports that Volkswagen…

RECOMMENDED READING:“Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina,” by David Hajdu (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A brilliantly reported and written description of where so-called “Sixties Music” comes from. Hajdu uses the intersecting lives of four icons (two still-remembered, two forgotten)to break down the way ’50s folk music evolved into “protest music” and then into “folk rock” and finally into modern “rock” music. Great as biography, great as a music book, great as a piece of social history. I read it in two days, then loaned it to a friend who also read it in two days.

A continuation of last week’s jihad against inflated sentences

In an effort to create a debate on a significant grammatical issue that appears to bedevil many newspaper writers, I would like to undertake a discussion of overwritten dependent clauses.

We’ve all been forced to wade through leads like that, in which the writer–determined to simultaneously proclaim the news and put it into perspective–creates one big fat impenetrable sentence. The previous paragraph, for example, was a sentence in which 19 of the 31 words–59%–consisted of the dependent clause.

Curb your dependence on dependent clauses

Newspapers, like parking lots, do not have a lot of rules that work consistently, and dependent clauses are no exception. But we clearly publish too many that put too much weight on the remainder of the sentence and crush its meaning.

Consider this a continuation of last week’s discussion about how to cut down sentence length for greater clarity. The pledge I want you to make this week is: Stop using dependent clauses that have the effect of overloading your writing. Instead, favor a more disciplined, leaner style that concentrates on moving the reader from one reasoned, shorter sentence to the next.

The biggest reason you keep seeing monster dependent clauses choking off sentence logic is the writer’s (or his editor’s) insecurity: Rather than wait until the second or third paragraph to explain perspective, the writer fears you’ll abandon him unless he shoves it down your throat right now. Think about it: If you don’t trust the reader to follow a straight-forward, one- or two-sentence lead to the second or third paragraph, you’ve got bigger problems.

Evaluate your own habits and standards as you read these examples. The length of the dependent clause increases with each one.

11 words, 34% of the sentence: Here’s an acceptable and necessary use of a dependent clause. The contrast between the information in the dependent clause and the independent clause is a moral hub of the investigation:

At a time when improving America’s schools is a government priority, Congress has increasingly been raiding the money set aside for education reform to pay for pet projects, records and interviews show.

In the current federal budget, lawmakers have dipped into national education money to finance perks for their home districts, honor retired colleagues and help well-connected constituents.

Congress ”went hog wild” bestowing such benefits, said…

13 words, 31% of the sentence: The ratio is acceptable but it makes too long a sentence. More importantly, how genuinely important is the contrast the writer tries to illustrate? He doesn’t immediately return to it, so why jam it so high?

Even as they searched for a speedy, bipartisan resolution to the impeachment crisis, senators from both parties urged President Clinton on Sunday to postpone his Jan. 19 State of the Union address because the Senate may be debating whether to remove him from office.

The extraordinary suggestion, made by several participants in televised talk shows, signals a growing recognition that the impeachment trial will inevitably slow, if not stop, Washington from conducting the public’s routine business. In his annual State of the Union address, which is delivered to a joint session of Congress, the president traditionally….

Now go back and draw a line through the dependent clause and read the lead without it. See what you think.

19 words, 42% of the sentence: The story stacks a dependent clause on top of an already long independent clause, draining the meaning out of both halves:

Attempting to duplicate last year’s legislation that required any San Fernando Valley secession effort to go before voters citywide, a state lawmaker plans to introduce a bill that would require a districtwide vote for any effort to carve up the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The bill–to be carried by Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (D-Sylmar) at the request of the teachers’ union–would significantly hamper the efforts of San Fernando Valley groups trying to break away from the giant LAUSD.

Cardenas said his proposal ”would apply…

The lesson here is that you have to choose between news and perspective when the perspective is complex. Let’s just make it the new third graph (underlined):

A state lawmaker plans to introduce a bill that would require a districtwide vote for any effort to carve up the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The bill–to be carried by Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (D-Sylmar) at the request of the teachers union–would significantly hamper the efforts of San Fernando Valley groups trying to break away from the giant LAUSD.

The bill echoes legislation passed last year in which lawmakers required a citywide vote in order for the San Fernando Valley to seceed from the City of Los Angeles.

Cardenas said his proposal ”would apply…

20 words, 54% of the sentence: This story succeeds in cramming the two key developments into one sentence. But it’s confusing when you hit the word “his” before you figure out who the protagonist is:

Minutes after filing a federal civil-rights complaint demanding a review of the fatal police shooting of his 19-year-old cousin, a Riverside pastor Monday implored several hundred protesters to seek justice peacefully.

The boisterous, incident-free rally was led by local ministers and community activists–including members of the victim’s family. Some of the placards waved by protesters read ”Murdered by the Riverside Police,” ”Guns don’t kill, Cops do,” and ”Help! 911 Killed Me.”

”We’re not seeking the path of violence,” shouted the Rev. DeWayne Butler, a cousin and father-figure of the victim, Tyisha Miler.

It would be clearer (albeit still long-winded) to say:

A Riverside pastor on Monday filed a federal civil-rights complaint demanding a review of the fatal police shooting of his 19-year-old cousin, then implored several hundred protesters to seek justice peacefully.

The boisterous, incident-free rally…

22 words, 54% of the sentence: In this story the technology is esoteric, so the factors that have propelled its rise should have taken second place to the rise itself. The story tried to have it both ways:

Propelled by the introduction of broadcast digital television in the top U.S. markets last fall and the coming of digital cable systems, interactive TV is poised to move from regional experiments into living rooms across the nation this year.

Products and services that allow consumers to personalize their TV experience will provide much of the buzz at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. CES will see a raft of announcements by software and hardware suppliers racing to form partnerships and release interactive-TV products.

Interactive-TV services allow viewers to use their remote controls or wireless keyboards to get more information during a broadcast or to treat their TVs somewhat like a substitute computer monitor to get e-mail and surf the Web. For example, a viewer might be able to get profiles of players while watching a soccer match by pressing a button on the remote.

Set to debut this year are TVs with software built in that allow viewers to interact with….

Suggestion: Lower the perspective. Make it the fourth paragraph (shown underlined) or, if you think the perspective is more important than the definition, the third:

Interactive TV is poised to move from regional experiments into living rooms across the nation this year.

Products and services that allow consumers to personalize their TV experience will provide much of the buzz at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. CES will see a raft of announcements by software and hardware suppliers racing to form partnerships and release interactive-TV products.

Interactive-TV services allow viewers to use their remote controls or wireless keyboards to get more information during a broadcast or to treat their TVs somewhat like a substitute computer monitor to get e-mail and surf the Web. For example, a viewer might be able to get profiles of players while watching a soccer match by pressing a button on the remote.

The technology’s popularity has been propelled by the introduction of broadcast digital television in the top U.S. markets last fall and the coming of digital cable systems.

Set to debut this year are TVs with software built in that allow viewers to interact with…

RECOMMENDED READING: None. If your newsroom is like mine you’re gonna be too busy moving pre-packaged stories to fill the Thursday-through-Monday gap. This is one of journalism’s great, unspoken trade-offs: We’ll give you the Fourth of July off but you’ll work yourselves to death in the days leading up to it.

Make sure to tune in next Monday, when we’ll offer you the six questions you need to ask yourself every time you consider writing an anecdotal lead.

How to stop cramming and start cutting

We do it because there is so much perspective to inject.

We do it because we’re convinced nobody reads past the first graf.

We do it because we think the extra clause or phrase or observation will push our story onto A-1.

We do it even when we know better.

We make our sentences too long.

Those long sentences are sabotaging you

The most common writing misjudgment we make as reporters and editors is the inflated sentence. We do it as though the material we hide in dependent clauses and between dashes doesn’t really count as an obstacle.

Every day we routinely run stories with words-per-sentence averages in the high 20s or worse. It’s not that these stories are flawed grammatically; it’s that getting through them requires too much work. The reader tires of the effort and goes elsewhere. And the shame is, you could have kept him around with just one more read of your copy and just a bit more self discipline.

One way to spot this problem is by looking for those damned dashes.

When God created dashes for newspaper writing, he did it to allow you a quick, holy-shit observation–to slam on the brakes for an instant. We too often break that commandment. We use dashes to cram in contextual material that we can’t fit into a more logical place. We also misuse dashes in place of commas, calling more attention to a conventional clause–like this one–than was warranted.

Check out the first five grafs of a recent front-page feature from my newspaper and focus on the language between the dashes, which is underlined:

In her flowing crimson cape, thigh-high leather boots and metal-studded red leather bustier, Cardinal is a bow-and-arrow-toting femme fatale.

But not only is Cardinal not real–she’s a character in the popular computer game “Ultima Online”–she’s not really female. Cardinal is the alter-ego of Kenn Gold, a 33-year-old former Army sergeant with thorny green-and-black tattoos covering both of his muscular arms.

As one of the thousands of online gamers who play characters of the opposite gender, Gold created Cardinal as a tactical move: Female characters generally get treated better in the male-dominated world of virtual adventuring. Yet he was unprepared for the shock of seeing the world through a woman’s eyes.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how funny it is to watch guys trip all over themselves and be dumb,” Gold said. “It’s very amusing to see them try to be really sophisticated and cool, when they’re turning out to be just the opposite.”

Changing genders has long been a piece of online role-playing games–part juvenile mischievousness, part theatrical posing and part psychological release. But as the genre explodes–online games now attract hundreds of thousands of players–it’s prompted a blossoming of cross-gender experimentation and created sexually amorphous virtual worlds that some revel in and others curse.

The first and third times the story used dashes (in the second and fifth grafs), it was good-naturedly trying to keep you on track. But the material created overload: The first sentence that used a dash had 10 words within the dashes and 11 words outside them. The third time the story used dashes, it expanded a 26-word sentence to a pudgy 35 words.

The second (middle) time the story used dashes was technically more acceptable. But that point soon became moot because the next sentence also employed dashed material. It created enough of an imposition to make me wonder: What am I supposed to be concentrating on? The sentence I was reading or the interjection?

The problem here was that the story tackled a subculture within a subculture. That’s great but challenging territory; you have to bring the reader along more deliberately.

Commas can be another warning sign, although some writers can mix and match three or four clauses within a sentence beautifully. (Stay tuned for a cool example at the end of today’s screed.)Too, often, though, that much complexity breaks down the sentence. Here’s an extreme example that everyone can deny he or she has ever duplicated, but which was published in the L.A. Times nonetheless. It’s from the top section of a June 10 profile of a “Sopranos” cast member. It employed seven clauses (i.e. six commas) and a parenthetical reference to boot:

Like the Academy Award-winning Jolie, De Matteo, who stars as Christopher’s (Michael Imperioli) Mafioso moll, Adriana, in HBO’s “The Sopranos,” came out of nowhere, with an attitude that insists she belongs in this business, but the confidence not to care if she’s not accepted.

We know, editors and reporters alike, that it is often the editors who are responsible for more routine cramming. Consider this 56-word lead, a classic attempt to cover all the bases that got the story thrown out at home:

The issue of crime took center stage in the race for mayor of Los Angeles on Thursday, a day of nasty charges and countercharges that emphasized both the philosophical differences between City Atty. James K. Hahn and former legislator Antonio Villaraigosa and the importance both their campaigns attach to the politically volatile issue of public safety.

Or this 48-word lead from the ’96 Democratic convention, which to this day infuriates one of my colleagues, who called it to my attention last week:

CHICAGO–Seeking to strengthen their hold over the nation’s political center, Democrats opened their national convention Monday with emotional appeals from former Ronald Reagan aide James S. Brady and wheelchair-bound actor Christopher Reeve that cast President Clinton as a leader who reaches across party lines to help ordinary Americans.

Most of the time, adjustment in sentence length can be as simple as recognizing that you have stretched one sentence beyond its capacity, and then constructing a second sentence.

Before:

The survey found that, when volunteers called LAPD stations to ask–in Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, Thai and Japanese–how to file a police complaint, barely a third of callers were provided with appropriate translators.

And after:

The survey tested the LAPD’s ability to respond to callers who spoke Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, Thai or Japanese. It said when volunteers called police stations to ask how to file a police complaint, barely a third were connected with appropriate translators.

The price of clarity was seven additional words. Here’s another everyday example:

Before:

Prompted by Vatican objections to what were seen as loopholes in cooperative agreements with former non-Catholic hospitals, the new ethical and religious directives put sterilization, including tubal ligation, on the same footing with abortion and euthanasia, both of which have long been condemned by the church.

And after:

The ethical and religious directives were prompted by Vatican objections to what were seen as loopholes in cooperative agreements with the many non-Catholic hospitals that have been purchased by Catholic health care chains.

The rules put sterilization, including tubal ligation, on the same footing with abortion and euthanasia, both of which have long been condemned by the church.

The price of clarity was 12 additional words (explaining what would make a hospital a “non-Catholic” hospital) and an extra line to create a second graf.

Simplifying the pace of our language sometimes involves difficult trade-offs, but we need to think about it more. The more complex your subject, the more deliberate you need to be about the length of your sentences and the amount of clauses within each one. To use the baseball metaphor, become the hitter with two strikes who chokes up an inch on the bat and takes a shorter, more controlled swing. Save your longer sentences for the easier concepts. Here are a trio of examples of how you can sound when you bring your words-per-sentence average down:

18.8 words per sentence

From the top of Mark Barabak’s analysis of demographic change and the shrinking political power of African Americans in California.

OAKLAND–In the heart of downtown, at the corner of 14th and Clay, stands the Elihu Harris state office building, a high-rise monument to the city’s former Sacramento representative and mayor.

On the 22nd floor of the stone-and-glass tower sits the office of Wilma Chan, the freshman lawmaker who helped thwart Harris’ bid to reclaim his old Assembly seat in November.

Harris is black, a symbol of California’s political past. Chan is Asian American and an embodiment of California’s future–a political future that looks increasing bleak for African Americans.

At a time when Latino power is exploding across the state and a swelling Asian population is gaining clout, blacks are losing political ground from Sacramento to South-Central Los Angeles.

Almost 20 years ago, California nearly elected the nation’s first black governor. Today, there are just four blacks serving in the 80-member Assembly–the same as the number of Latino Republicans. There are only two African Americans in the 40-member state Senate. Not a single black legislator serves a district north of Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard.

Few are ready to declare blacks endangered as a political species in California–not when African Americans remain so vital to the Democratic Party.

But many are alarmed by the dramatic erosion of black clout. They fear that the political system will grow less responsive to the state’s roughly 2.5 million African Americans and fret that African Americans, in turn, will grow increasingly alienated from the political system.

“You have a population that feels very disenfranchised to begin with,” said Darry Sragow, a Democratic. strategist. “And this… is a trend that’s getting worse, not better.”

Much of the decline stems from sweeping shifts in population. Here, truly, demography is political destiny.

California’s black population stayed about the same over the past decade, the last census showed, while the number of Latinos and Asian/Pacific Islanders ….

The relatively short sentences gave the piece a feeling of exactness. It helped me stay on track. And yet there was a range. The shortest sentence was 9 words. The longest was 34. The rhythm looked like this:

31/32/32/9/20/31/12/20/12/14/24/11/34/16/10

There were five sentences in the 30s, three in the 20s, six in the 10-19 range and one below 10. There was plenty of room for clauses (and dashes) but only when they were truly needed.

Mark explains how he compensated for complexity with simplicity:

The lead was one of those metaphors that was like a gift from God. I mean, what better way to explain a story about the shifting of power between minority groups: here’s a literal stone monument to a guy who served as the city’s mayor and Sacramento representative for 12 years, who has a building named after him, and sitting in that building is the woman, an Asian-American, who thwarted his political career. It was just too perfect an illustration not to use. But I knew I had to get to the point quickly. I felt I just had so much information to cram in, there wasn’t the luxury of a lot of long sentences or fancy footwork.

Also, the nature of the story was more fact-based than, say, narrative or colorful. To me the most stunning thing was the numbers, which are incontrovertible. (And believe me, writing about something as sensitive as race, I was conscious of being absolutely certain I could back up some rather sweeping statements.)

So I really pared it back, to distill it to the bare essence. It was one of those stories where it was almost my job to garner the facts, then stand back and lay it out, without a lot of ruffles and flourishes.

I knew I wanted to start out with the building and what that said, but I left a lot of color out: little things like the panoramic view of the port and the Victorian houses in West Oakland, all visible from Wilma Chan’s office. I had stuff like that in early drafts, but it just seemed to clutter things up.

I gave myself the first two grafs to basically set the scene and left it pretty unadorned, throwing in just a bit of description, like the 22nd floor instead of “the top” floor, and “stone-and-glass” instead of stuff like all the architectural detail I got from walking around the building taking copious notes and even going to the architecture-design firm’s website. (”Landscape and streetscape plans have been designed to reinforce continuous linearity of the primary axes… and to extend the project into its surroundings.”)

By the third graf, I figured it was time to get to the point, or at least strongly signal what the point was about. I sort of split the nut between the 3rd and 4th grafs, making the point about how Harris and Chan embody the essential point of the story (Blacks on the way out, other minority groups on the way in), then underlining it in the fourth graf and offering a bit of breadth (losing political ground from Sacramento to South-Central L.A.).

Then the first batch of stats. Again, so many facts to cram, so little space!

I applied a lot of the principles I’ve picked up from “Nuts & Bolts,” and from teaching several writing workshops this year for the California Newspaper Publishers Assn., which has forced me to think harder than I ever have about newswriting. Rule No. 1 in all this is that you have to really have a command of the material before you sit down and write. And after 50-odd interviews (only nine of whom I quoted, but that’s a whole other discussion) and reams and reams of research, I felt on really solid ground once I sat down to write.

13.3 words per sentence

Rene Tawa had a similar concern when she undertook a feature story about an ailing concentration-camp survivor and his musical relationship with a group of school kids. We’ve all had this dilemma: You come upon a poignant story and feel compelled to find emotional language to compliment it. Years go by and it finally dawns on you that the trick here is to show the beauty, not tell it.

Rene realized she had “a very delicate balancing act,” and vowed to keep her syntax from overwhelming the story. She did not consciously tell herself to keep her sentences short, but when you read these excerpts you’ll see what happened: (1) devotion to simplicity leads to (2) shorter sentences which leads to (3) a more controlled, and often a more powerful voice. Here’s the first graf, foreshadowing the tale:

Another night lost to searing back pain. Henry Rosmarin, 75, managed only three hours of sleep. How will he muster the breath for these kids this morning? The teenagers have burst into his life at a time in which he expects no joy, in which days are tracked by doctors’ appointments. He could not go back to their classroom and wheeze a few token bars from his harmonica–his instrument still. Four months earlier, he had told the students about a cold night in Nazi Germany, when he was their age. On that evening, during the Holocaust, a harmonica saved his life. On this spring morning, he has a piece that he must play for the kids, his means of passing on what he knows.

Later, the middle of the story takes us to Henry’s survival and his relationship with music:

The commandant, who heard that Henry played the harmonica, was in the mood for a command performance. From an easy chair, he tossed Henry his harmonica, a glass of schnapps or something in his other hand, a German shepherd by his side. “What should it be, commandant?” Henry ventured and then wanted to snatch the words back. What if the commandant requested something he didn’t know? Why hadn’t he launched into something simple, a German march or “Lili Marleen,” a song he knew the Germans loved? “Play something from Schubert, you miserable dog,” the commandant snapped. Schubert was difficult to play. Henry would try Schubert’s “Serenade” and pray that he would remember every note.

What were the odds, Henry marvels now, that the commandant would love the harmonica and love the same composer that Henry did? When Henry finished playing, the commandant said nothing. But he threw a loaf of bread at Henry and had him reassigned to kitchen duty. The assignment included playing dinner music in the guards’ mess hall. In his new job, Henry could sneak pieces of steak or a swallow of pudding. He put on weight that strengthened him for the days ahead.

Then, later, we’re told how Henry came to find these children:

Ten years ago, he retired and hooked up with Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, as a volunteer and part-time staff member in the research department. The Los Angeles-based foundation is chronicling the accounts of survivors and other eyewitnesses of the Holocaust in the largest undertaking of its kind.

Through the foundation, Henry took on more speaking engagements, and he found himself leaning on his harmonica again. “To really tell the story [with music],” he says, “you transform yourself in time. . . . Just by playing a little harmonica, I move [people] somehow. I found out I could do this–something I love most–to touch people. It became part of my life, especially when I could move a beast like the commandant.” Sometimes, people tell him of survivors who remember a whisper of harmonica music from the officers’ quarters, a stolen fragment of beauty. Henry likes to think that they heard him, that he played for the prisoners, too.

12.8 words per sentence

Less dramatic features can also benefit. Here is a passage from a Mike Anton profile:

He is among the last of his breed, a survivor who has hung on to a slice of Orange County’s past, even as bulldozers have carved the future out from under him.

He looks out at what he has now: 500 leased acres, an island of rolling green hills amid a sea of rooftops less than a mile from a county landfill.

“You’ve got to be crazy . . . to do this,” says Fred Love, one of Orange County’s last ranchers. “But it’s something that just gets in your blood.”

At 57, Love is a cattleman in a place where cows once outnumbered people on vast Spanish land grants. It is now a place where the ranch exists mostly in the imagination, a name given to developments by marketing pros who sell their lots like cuts of steak wrapped in cellophane.

In 1959, more than 100,000 cattle still roamed Orange County. The ranching….

The middle offers us a scene:

He wades into a corral, and his boots disappear in the muck. He moves toward the quarter horse that was to be inseminated. Two years ago, this horse aborted. Last year, she had an infection that prevented her from breeding. It is time to try again.

Love inches closer, slogging through the mud with that left knee that got caught by a calf a decade ago and has never been the same.

The horse runs, showering him with mud.

“I came to get you, not chase you,” Love shouts.

He tries again and is peppered some more. His Wranglers are coated in mud. His hat and face are flecked with gray.

The quality that Mark’s news feature and Rene’s and Mike’s pure features shared was that both writers knew exactly what they wanted to say. When you use shorter sentences, it forces you to think ahead, to plot the flow better. By limiting the capacity of your sentences, you make yourself come to grips with the language. You’re less likely to cram–and I’m less likely to grow impatient and quit reading.

Take all this with a grain of salt. I’m not here to set a words-per-sentence limit. I just think many of you out there are writing or editing sentences that are 10% to 20% fatter than they ought to be. If you’d be tougher on yourself about how many clauses you can cram into a sentence, and about breaking one monster sentence into two, your stories would read faster, shorter. Readers would have an easier time getting all the way through them. Remember that 15 extra minutes a day you promised yourself you’d spend getting better? (See “The 15-Minute Workout,” posted April 30, in the “Nuts & Bolts Archives.”) This week why not devote your 15 minutes a day to one more self-edit simply on sentence length?

As you discipline yourself, you’ll make a discovery: The better you get at figuring when to cut your sentences, the better you get at discovering those rarer circumstances when you can stretch out. You’ll improve your mechanical skills. Your ear will refine its appreciation for the rhythm of clauses, and for the need to establish a contextual base in the story before you elongate your phrases.

I’ll give you an extreme (and for me humbling) example, written by a colleague, Terry McDermott. A couple years ago I was editing a feature story of his and I ran across a 142-word sentence. My accomplishment was reducing it to only 135 words. Even though the sentence seemed to work, I was ashamed: Here I was, editing a newsletter in my spare time that preached restraint!

Guiltily, I asked Terry to explain what the hell he was doing. The structural analysis that follows shows you how important it is for writers to develop a sophisticated structural vocabulary like Terry’s so they can argue successfully with their editors when they decide to try to stretch the form.

First, here’s the sentence in question, as published. It comes from a daily story about a cheesy attempt to sell corporate sponsorship rights to the famed “Hollywood” sign in the hills above L.A. All you have to know about the context is that the pitchwoman was aging actress Debbie Reynolds, that the sentence came fairly high in the story, and that Terry had already established a tone of irreverence:

So it might have happened anywhere–anywhere, at least, where a celebrity who is, as Reynolds immodestly put it, “on the down side of the wheel,” would be willing to perch on a pillow on a tall chair on a lip of land high on a hill above the Hollywood Reservoir and conduct what is known in the business as a satellite media tour and serial interviews with 22 television and radio stations scattered from here to hereafter, and in the course of those 22 interviews smile and make jokes about everything from multiple marriages to her makeup and then ask for some well-meaning corporation to come forward with good will in one hand and a check for $100,000 in the other and donate both to maintain a sign that doesn’t need to be maintained.

Let’s let Terry tell the rest of it:

I get this note from Baker.

Could you, he asks, “write something . . . to explain how/why a guy writes a 100-word sentence…in the context of how/why to break rules.”

Typical editor talk, huh?

Rules, he says.

What rules? I want to know. Writing rules exist purely to shield people from their insecurities. They’re fallback positions.

I have only one rule about sentences: Do they work?

Sentences are like publishers’ brains: size doesn’t matter. I’ve written lots of sentences of lots of lengths. This one was nowhere near the longest. I once wrote a 199-word lead. Without a verb.

Obviously, the sentence had a lot of work to do. Let’s take a look at it. First, though, allow me a bit of self-inoculation. Spending any amount of energy analyzing something as ridiculous as this story is pretty ridiculous in and of itself. But I think it illustrates some broader concepts, so, onward.

The sentence has seven distinct sections, each with its own task:

1) So it might have happened anywhere

2) –anywhere, at least, where a celebrity who is, as Reynolds immodestly put it, “on the down side of the wheel,”

3) would be willing to perch on a pillow on a tall chair on a lip of land high on a hill above the Hollywood Reservoir

4) and conduct what is known in the business as a satellite media tour and serial interviews with 22 television and radio stations scattered from here to hereafter,

5) and in the course of those 22 interviews smile and make jokes about everything from multiple marriages to her makeup

6) and then ask for some well-meaning corporation to come forward with good will in one hand and a check for $100,000 in the other and donate both

7) to maintain a sign that doesn’t need to be maintained.

Section 1 is a transition and, by repeating an earlier phrase, builds recognition in the reader that story is at least as much about context as about facts, a point that will be made at the end of the story.

Section 2 hints at the nature of celebrity culture and adds some lightness.

Section 3 is purely textural.

Section 4 is a central fact of the story.

Section 5 is more self-deprecating Debbie Reynolds humor.

Section 6 is the news of the story, what otherwise might be called the lead.

Section 7 is foreshadowing and is supposed to raise questions, and hence some small suspense.

Let’s say you wanted to include all that information but didn’t want a 135-word sentence. You could write seven separate sentences or any combination thereof. You could do it completely straight:

Debbie Reynolds on Thursday solicited a $100,000 donation to pay for maintenance of the world-famous Hollywood sign in the Hollywood Hills. And so on.

This would have made the story longer and slower, I think. And let’s face it, this story is lighter than air. It doesn’t deserve to be longer and slower. It’s silly. And to me it deals with a specific sort of media silliness that is emblematic of L.A. celebrity culture. I wanted to make those points, to place the story in that context, but not suck any thumbs while doing so.

So I took a lighter approach I thought matched the content. The 135-word sentence is a part of that. A run-on sentence of that length is silly on the face of it and I think in some small way communicates its silliness to the reader.

That was my motive. What about the means? Does the sentence meet my one rule? Does it work?

To me, working means: First, does it make sense; second, can you read it. Sense is largely derived from grammar and vocabulary. Does it track? Could you diagram it? Does it mean what it intends to mean? I think so.

The second test, can you read it, is trickier. I read my sentences aloud to myself and the most important thing I look for is whether you can breathe while reading them. Sentences, long or short, have to have places for readers to breathe. Subscribers are precious, remember, we don’t want them choking to death on our stories.

You give sentences breathing room by controlling rhythm with word length and punctuation. Lots of polysyllabic words strung together could wipe out a whole nursing home. On the other hand, stings of monosyllables provide rest stops.

Look at Section 3.

“. . . would be willing to perch on a pillow on a tall chair on a lip of land high on a hill above the Hollywood Reservoir . . .”

There’s one stretch in there of 13 consecutive one-syllable words. Overall, 95 of the 135 words are monosyllables.

Similarly, lots of clauses strung together without any punctuating stop signs are tough to read. For example, the one real hitch in the sentence comes with the second “and” in Section 4. As written, that “and” was a comma. Somebody in the editing chain thought they’d help by changing it. They added a word. In so doing, a stop sign was knocked down with predictable results:

Uncontrolled intersection. Head-on crash. Bam. Another dead reader.

Please, protect your readers. Give them room to breathe.

RECOMMENDED READING #1: Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” is now in paperback ($10.46 at amazon.com) and you could not find more wisdom for your buck. It’s half about King’s evolution as a writer and half his day-to-day work and attitudinal habits. He’s talking about fiction but you can glean gobs of insight for journalism simply from King’s unvarnished work ethic.

Listen to him describe the process of re-reading a manuscript:

The top part of my mind is concentrating on story and toolbox concerns: knocking out pronouns with unclear antecedents (I hate and mistrust pronouns, every one of them as slippery as a fly-by-night personal-injury lawyer), adding clarifying phrases where they seem necessary, and of course, deleting all the adverbs I can bear to part with (never all of them, never enough).

Underneath, however, I’m asking myself the Big Questions. The biggest: Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song? What are the recurring elements? Do they entwine and make a theme? I’m asking myself, “What’s it all about, Stevie?” in other words, and what I can do to make those underlying concerns ever clearer.

How reporters grappled with the first month of California’s electricity crisis

Here’s a nightmare: You’re assigned to write about a phenomenon so arcane that only a small group of policy nerds and engineers understand it—and yet so potentially devastating that it threatens every reader. You’ve got to cover it with the urgency of a natural disaster whose potential changes hour by hour. And on top of that you have to analyze every development through three prisms of significance: financial, political and social.

If you’re still making good on your pledge to devote 15 minutes a day purely to getting better, review some of The Times’ coverage of the electrical power crisis as it peaked in January. You’ll see the results of hard choices that reporters and editors made to explain a series of developments that were routinely described as extraordinary—for once, with good reason.

Lessons from covering the extraordinary

Beyond sheer physical effort, covering the extraordinary requires additional attention to an explanatory sensibility, the construction of perspective phrases, sentences or paragraphs framing each new development. Integrating that language with the actual events often creates dense, unwieldy sentences. Our editing process has tended to make that worse as often as it made it better. But in an impressive percentage of our power-crisis stories, many painful improvements were made or demanded: The dependent clauses that too often consume our lead paragraphs were shrunk; overwritten sentences were broken into two; mediocre quotes were pushed down a few grafs so that the complete context of the day’s news could be explained first. Would we have liked fewer references to “keeping the lights on” and a few less superlatives? Sure, but that pales to the lessons of clarity and directness.

The edition of Jan. 19—covering both the Legislature’s approval of bailout legislation and the second day of blackouts in Northern and Central California—illustrates a number of techniques you can steal the next time you’re thrown into the pit:

1. The mainbar:
The first graf makes sure you understand the stakes–that it’s public money, and that this action will quickly sap the state’s surplus.

SACRAMENTO–The state Legislature on Thursday approved spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to keep power flowing in California, eating into the state’s multibillion-dollar surplus to purchase only days worth of electricity.

More important was the decision to end the lead there, choosing not to overburden you with perspective that is every bit as important but must simply become the second graf. The second graf gives you three clauses that are packed to the brim with interpretation (underlined):

With top state leaders acknowledging for the first time that they might never recover the money from the battered and nearly bankrupt utilities, lawmakers reluctantly authorized the governor to spend $400 million, a grim admission that the state faces a social, economic and public safety disaster.

The dependent clause in the 2nd graf strains conventional patience at 23 words, but give it the benefit of the doubt because this is a running story and the language is kept simple, making the clause relatively easy to grasp.

The third graf is a quote, relatively high but effective because the story worked so hard to establish context, and because this quote goes to the heart of the Legislature’s insistence that, appearances be damned, this deal had to be done. It’s a reminder that you want to push down banal quotes, not great ones:

“People are going to say it’s a bailout for the utilities. It isn’t,” said state Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco). “All [utilities] do is serve as a conduit for providing this service. They say it’s a bailout for the generators who profit from this and are making more money than God. . . . What this does is guarantee that the lights in the state of California” stay on.

Then an artful transition to what would normally have been the lead—blackouts! Aware that the reader has been forced to gulp multi-clause sentences, the story now moves more deliberately, with a four-sentence graf:

On Thursday, when the lights did go out for several hours in Northern and Central California, people again coped with annoying but not life-threatening circumstances. State energy regulators were optimistic that they could keep the lights on for the next several days, as new sources of supply become available. But they were far from jubilant. California paid as much as $800 per megawatt-hour, compared with $30 a year ago.

And now to the bullets:

Among the developments in the power crisis Thursday:

–President-elect Bush told interviewers that he opposes federal price caps on wholesale power and suggested that California relax its…

2. The institutional sidebar:

In 20 inches, the paper answered the silent question of a million readers, many of whom were paying attention only this week as talk of blackouts and higher prices suddenly seemed real: How the hell did this happen? The answers are presented simply and conversationally, a reminder that sometimes you have to slow down, and that short sentences are the easiest way:

SACRAMENTO–Where are the megawatts?

The answers are financial, mechanical, political and natural.

As blackouts have hopscotched across Northern and Central California the past two days, plants with enough capacity to supply 11 million homes sat idle or broken, double the usual amount for this time of year.

Some sellers avoided the state for fear of getting stiffed by California’s biggest power buyers, two utilities on the verge of bankruptcy.

Some small plant owners, not having been paid for three months by Southern California Edison, shut down.

Nature hasn’t helped. Storms haven’t filled the Pacific Northwest reservoirs that spin turbines. That region–source of more than 10% of the state’s power–is looking to buy electricity, not sell.

“We have to meet the needs of our customers first,” said Steve Becker, a spokesman for Avista Corp. in Spokane.

That was 9 sentences in 137 words—less than 12 words per sentence. Now, having familiarized you with the dynamics, the story begins to stretch out:

The factors that pushed California to the brink of blackouts for the last several months strengthened and converged this week–most potently the financial free-fall of Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric.

And only now, in the ninth graf, do the writers’ voices stop and an outsider enters:

“The general concern of all market participants has been, one, will I get paid at all for providing energy? And two, what will I get paid?” said Kellan Fluckiger, chief operating officer of the California Independent System Operator, the agency that regulates power flow on the grid serving three-quarters of California.

3. The mood piece:

The idea was to do a man-on-the-street story about the evolving mood as a second day of blackouts made the crisis disturbingly real. The reporters had sensed on the first day that there was no pattern to the anger; on the second day they made that the story: This would be a story about finger-pointing.

Three staccato grafs give us the human impact in 115 words at a pace of 6.2 words per sentence:

SAN FRANCISCO — Ever try selling black leather jackets in a blackout-blackened store? John Ma of USA Leathers doesn’t recommend it. His mood Thursday morning? The color of his wares.

Ever hawk Chinese soapstone carvings by flashlight? On Day 2 of California’s rolling power outages, Ken Chan did his very best. Sad to say, it wasn’t good enough. His view of Pacific Gas & Electric? As dim as the lightless Kee Fung Ng Gallery.

And don’t even ask how Nicholas J. Toth, 84, feels about the outages that have rolled through Northern California this week. Not unless you want an earful from a guy who’s trying to sell insurance but couldn’t even get into his office Thursday.

The fourth graf sets the table…

The Golden State? Not hardly. Not Thursday. More like the Grumpy State, the Suspicious State, the Conspiracy-Theory State. With hundreds of thousands in the dark two days in a row, normally sunny Californians are finally acknowledging that the festering energy crisis is a reality.

…so that the fifth graf can proclaim the thesis:

Which means it’s time to find someone to blame.

And away the story goes, letting another eight people grind their axes in short bursts:

Shelley McDonough, a mother of two in the Sacramento suburb of Orangevale, said she thought “they were all crying wolf” about the energy crisis until the outages hit in her neck of the woods this week. Now that it’s for real, she said, she’s “horrified that the politicians did not anticipate this problem.”

4. The day-in-the-life story:

It was a general-assignment reporter’s toughest but most delicious challenge: Leave your scheduled assignment and drive two hours to the place where they make the blackout decisions and find the guy in charge and show us how he decides whether there will be a second day of blackouts today—the fact that you have zero expertise in this subject notwithstanding. Oh, and file by 5 p.m., please. The technique—a day-in-the-life—is one of journalism’s most effective devices, a mini-narrative.

The story captured the protagonist and his challenge in three grafs—(1) Who he is, (2) Who he works for, (3) The multi-faceted stress of his challenge–so that we were launched into the chronology by the fourth:

FOLSOM — Tim Van Blaricom is a soft-spoken man with his finger on the pulse of California’s daily struggle to eke out enough electricity to keep the lights on.

The 34-year-old former Navy aircraft engineer is the shift manager for the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit agency that controls the state’s surging power grid.

It is a stressful, sometimes thankless job, he says, one that can fray your nerves like an old electrical wire. The windowless room where he works crackles with the tension of Houston Control, the buying frenzy of the New York Stock Exchange and the surreal atmosphere of “Doctor Strangelove.”

At 9:50 a.m. Thursday came one of its worst moments. As Van Blaricom monitored his bank of computers in the bowels of Cal-ISO headquarters, he suddenly sensed that the state’s supply of megawatts was plummeting.

The early part of the day had to be reconstructed, so the quote was useful here. And it sets up a transition that fulfills the other mission of the story—showing us how the world works:

“What I saw made my blood pressure rise. I knew that we weren’t going to have enough juice to get by.”

What he saw was that just as residents were running through the last of several thousand megawatts Cal-ISO had purchased from the Pacific Northwest, the state was plunging into another emergency. The technicians call it “Path 15″: The electrical lines feeding Northern California from the southern part of the state were bottlenecked at Bakersfield.

Van Blaricom picked up the phone and summoned a conference call with managers from the state’s three largest utilities. Trying hard to maintain his composure, he ordered Pacific Gas & Electric to…

What followed were alternating passages about the events of the day and the nature of the system. Within 13 grafs, the story was able to place us at five different moments between 10 a.m. and mid-afternoon, creating that unlikely hybrid, an institutional action story.

If you read those four stories on Jan. 19, you walked away not only with knowledge, but insight, thanks to four distinct types of storytelling—and a lot of sweat behind the scenes.

Deputy Metro Editor Joel Sappell, who has coordinated coverage of the power crisis, says his initial organizing principal was “Dereg for Dummies.” Another mantra that evolved was, “Only the economists need to know all the numbers.” Both were born out of the concept that this was, at its heart, a consumer story. That’s an overstatement—it was clearly a business, consumer and political story—but the more Joel repeated it, the more it helped him to push harder on what the crisis, and proposed solutions, meant to readers. It also put a higher premium on lively writing to compensate for the often impenetrable jargon.

Henry Fuhrmann, a business editor who works with Joel on the universal Energy Desk, favors the usually facetious mantra, ‘‘It is rocket science.’’ He explains: ‘‘Every day seems to present some new daunting task: sort out the arcana of utility financing, tell readers how electricity really works, track all the moving political and legislative pieces coming out of Sacramento. But by the end of the shift, we usually find a way put the lie to our little slogan. It’s not rocket science, just good, old-fashioned explanatory journalism as applied to a complicated topic.’’

Mitchell Landsberg, who has done rewrite on most of the mainbars, was one of a number of staffers who entered the story with no background in electrical power. What was he silently shouting at himself as he pulled together daily files from as many as a dozen reporters? “Organization, distillation, transition–trying to put yourself in the mind of a reader who doesn’t know anything. You’re trying to make a judgment about what they know, and what they can absorb. You’ve got an extraordinarily complex story and people are only focusing on it intermittently.”

The rewrite job Mitchell did on the Jan. 12 mainbar was typical of how he responded to the challenge. That story–the product of 11 contributors—tied together a chaotic day a week before the first blackouts, capturing the minute-by-minute drama.

The story is a triumph of purposefulness and pacing. It recognizes it cannot cram everything into a single graf, so it often relies on a series of cuplets—two-graf segments—to communicate the complexity of the day. I’ve carved it into segments to illustrate the purposefulness Mitchell employed:

Segment I: The lead

Pushed to the wall by a rampaging winter storm and the refusal of some large generators to provide power to California’s cash-strapped utilities, energy officials begged, pleaded and borrowed Thursday to avoid the first mandatory statewide power blackouts since World War II.

Once again, and by a filament’s breadth, the lights stayed on in California.

Segment II: The essential contrast

As late as midafternoon, the operators of the state’s electrical power system were warning that rolling blackouts were almost certain throughout most of the state except for Los Angeles and a few other cities with independent municipal utilities.

Then, shortly before 6 p.m., officials with the California Independent System Operator, which channels power to utilities throughout the state, announced that they had driven the state to the rim of darkness without taking the plunge.

Segment III: Reaction quote that provides transition to how blackouts were avoided

“It looks like we dodged it,” said Patrick Dorinson, a spokesman for Cal-ISO. “I don’t know how we keep doing it.”

On Thursday they did it by persuading consumers to go on an electricity crash diet and by working a series of 11th-hour deals with energy suppliers in the Pacific Northwest and Canada.

Segment IV: More detail on the essential contrast—how California prepared for the worst, and then celebrated.

Throughout the state, utility officials, police and firefighters, business managers and ordinary residents were spared the inconvenience–and potential danger–of blackouts, which would have cast widely scattered chunks of the state into darkness for about an hour at a time, knocking out traffic lights, stopping elevators and switching off computers, burglar alarms, heaters and many other products of a power-driven age.

Inside Southern California Edison’s control room in Alhambra, a group of dispatchers, whose tired eyes had been trained for hours on a giant screen charting the energy situation, let out a collective sigh of relief when they got the good news that they would not have to interrupt service.

Segment V: Expanding on Segment IV with color

“Yes! I’m going home,” one of them yipped.

“Wow. Someone must have went to church last Sunday,” yelled out another.

Segment VI: Expanding on Segment IV with more detail and reaction

A number of the weary workers had arrived at 6 a.m. and thought they’d be staying all night. All but two were sent home after the call came saying the state had received enough electricity to meet the demand that peaks in the early evening when people turn on stoves, lights and televisions.

“It’s our job to serve the customers,” said Gary Tarplee, grid manager. “The fact that we didn’t have to cut off power is a huge relief for all of us.”

Segment VII: Perspective

While power outages are fairly common–in fact, more than 150,000 customers were without power Thursday because of storm damage–the state has resorted to intentional blackouts only once in recent years, and then only in the San Francisco Bay Area. Localized supply and voltage problems there led to rolling blackouts last June 14 involving about 90,000 customers and lasting three hours. But the rest of the state had sufficient power to avoid outages that day.

The last truly statewide outage, other than accidental outages, was during World War II, when the state intentionally shrouded itself in darkness to ward off attacks by Japanese bombers.

Segment VIII: Transition from perspective to the daily chronology:

Defining the enemy then was simple; today it is not.

On Thursday, the culprits included power shortages, weather-caused generation failures, transmission bottlenecks and controversial wholesale price spikes that some say can be blamed on the failures of deregulating the state’s electricity market.

While grid operators scrambled to avoid blackouts, political leaders in Washington, Sacramento and Los Angeles kept up their efforts to cobble together a longer-term solution to the energy crisis.

And into the chronology:

The day began ominously, when Cal-ISO…