Writing is thinking

Writing is thinking As journalists, our most important business is to produce writing that is the equivalent of thinking. Fulfilling that purpose has become more and more difficult--and will continue to become more and more difficult.

The concept of writing as thinking is hardly new. It is an axiom with which I have belabored many a young--and not so young--journalist over quite a few years. And I have good company in making the close connection between writing and thinking. In his fine book on writing style, for example, Joseph Williams, of the University of Chicago, points out that writing can be a "fruitfully circular" process: If we write more clearly, we will understand our own ideas better; if we understand our ideas better, we will write more clearly.

Journalists, of course, are more than writers. And I don't want to create the impression that I am riding an academic hobbyhorse. But if we put aside the fancy packaging, what is it that the best of us, as individual journalists, most aspire to do? I believe that we want to produce thoughtful articles.

By a thoughtful article, I mean--in the context of the business press--an article that conveys persuasively to a fair number of readers an idea that helps them do a better job. I do not mean to overly dignify a how-to-article--for example, how to disassemble a truck axle or set a restaurant table. I am talking about the sort of article that gives readers a handle on a concept that is important to their business--the significance of a new product, of new competition, of new legislation, of demographic changes, of a new labor union strategy, and so forth.

To be effective, such an article must be constructed on a framework of ideas that fit together both logically and psychologically. The reader must be able to discern easily the major thesis and to follow easily the flow of subordinate ideas that support it. The structure of a thoughtful piece of journalism, in fact, is not very different from what many of us were taught to produce as far back as junior high school.

To write a persuasive story, of course, you must have thoughtful reporting. That is a whole different topic. But briefly: By thoughtful reporting I mean reporting that reflects a powerful blend of curiosity, enterprise, persistence, skepticism and analysis.

That kind of reporting is all too rare--and not just because of a shortage of qualified people. The staffs of many business publications are too thin to permit that many man-hours per page. And some nervous publishers simply don't want to see in-depth reporting in their publications.

But there is nonetheless a fair amount of good, solid reporting done in our business. And a journalist who does that kind of reporting--without prodding--will sometimes write a thoughtful story.

Not enough of a good thing

Why do I say sometimes? Well, of course, there is the pressure of time. A bigger problem is that reporting and writing are such distinctly different activities. Much of the fun of reporting lies in the interaction with other human beings and in satisfying the competitive urge to be first. Writing, as we all know only too well, is a lonely activity that tends to bring you face to face only with yourself.

And there is a third problem. Many good reporters--and, in fact, too many writers and editors in our business--lack the skills or the discipline needed to turn even thoughtful reporting into a thoughtful article. And because of some very powerful trends in our society, I see that problem growing worse in the years ahead.

Thinking or no thinking, we do keep churning out the stuff. And all too often, we get either regurgitation or sleight of hand.

By regurgitation, I mean an article that, in substance, is essentially a playback of the reporter's notes. As readers, we learn what the reporter was told, sometimes in excruciating detail. It is left to us to weigh the reliability of each source, to derive ideas from apparent facts, and to design and build the edifice of ideas that may, or may not, add up to a useful intellectual construct.

Some news publications in our industry thrive on such content. Their philosophy, as I read it, is that their reporters' job is to gather facts and quotes, and that their readers--being a savvy lot--will know what to make of it all. I do not question their judgment; some of those publications are too successful. But I do say, from personal experience, that it is necessary to retrain such journalists when they join publications that deal with concepts.

A more serious problem may be the glorification of so-called investigative reporting. We can probably thank Woodward and Bernstein for elevating--at least temporarily--the general public's perception of journalists, and for driving some bright kids into the profession. It is not their fault that some journalists, and some editorial managers, came to value investigative reporting for its own sake.

I recall a long article in a major business magazine that consisted entirely of a reconstruction of who said what in a phone call involving a questionable business deal. It was a brilliant demonstration of journalistic enterprise, but there were no ideas and the article did nothing to help readers. The worst part was that the managing editor thought the piece set a standard to be emulated by the rest of the staff.

An article in which the reporting is hardly visible is suspect; certainly, the reporting must shine through. But a thoughtful writer uses reporting to support his framework of ideas, not as a substitute for it.

When it goes down too easy

So much for regurgitation; what about sleight of hand? We all know, and probably envy, journalists who seem to produce smooth copy rapidly and easily. And no doubt there are some rare birds among us--geniuses of a sort--who find it rather easy to produce a thoughtful piece.

I contend, however, that most work produced easily is the work of "wordsmiths" and does not meet the stringent tests of thoughtfulness. Take a close look at the copy produced by your own--or your competitors'--most facile writers. See if you can discern the ideas and their precise relationships. See if there is a solid line of progression, or instead a series of loops, inconsistencies and lapses of logic. Take a special look at the transitions; see if they are logical or, as is often the case, a clever play on words. And see if statements are supported by facts, and if all the facts cited are relevant.

Above all, when you finish the copy, see if you know what the article said. I once knew a business writer whose stuff was so slick it slipped down like sherbet. The trouble is that sherbet does not a dinner make. Lew Young, who was then editor in chief of Business Week, once shook his head over one such article and said, "It reads great, but afterward I can't remember what I read."

Of course, what I have chosen to call regurgitation and sleight of hand are merely two extremes. More often we are afflicted with simpler forms of incompetence or just plain laziness. Or maybe something else: I once had a writer who said he wanted to maintain a certain lack of clarity in his copy so that readers would get more involved with the story. Fortunately, that writer made a killing in the stock market and went off to write novels.

All too often in our business, the real thinking starts--if it does start--when the copy is handed in. That helps senior editors and managing editors earn a living, but that's rather late for us to begin fulfilling our responsibility to the reader.

Thinking it through

Let's consider for a few moments the kind of thinking a good business writer must do when he sits down at his keyboard. We will assume that he has a bundle of excellent reporting. The first task is to decide, and state, the main point of the story. The second task is to decide how to construct support for the point so that it will be clear, credible and interesting.

This is not the place to discuss the writing of leads and the outlining of articles. But recall the last time you wrote a significant piece. Recall how you wrestled with the question of which ideas were dominant and which subordinate, of the order in which these ideas had to be presented for greatest understanding, of how to signal the reader that certain ideas that you had to present serially were to be considered logically in parallel.

Try to recall also how hard you worked to find a simple structure and simple language to deal with a complex topic, how you dealt honorably with questions of fact that your reporting could not resolve, how you achieved forcefulness without being insulting or unfair to those who might not agree with your thesis. Remember how you picked and chose from your reporting and--I hope--discarded that which, no matter how good, was redundant.

If the topic was indeed complex, and if what I have just said rings a lot of bells, see if the following is not also true: The story you wrote was not the story you had originally expected to write. You found some holes in the reporting. You learned some things that you did not know when you started to write.

My point is that most of us never succeed in thinking very effectively about a complex topic except on the keyboard. The very acts of composing, revising, and polishing are what I mean by thinking. And it is only when we can see in front of us a good deal of what we have just written that we can deal effectively with the relationships among our ideas.

Here is the way William Zinsser, a dedicated student of writing, put it in an article in The New York Times some months ago: "Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts; it's how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know--and what we don't know . . . ."

To put it another way, my way, a good journalist--one who is capable of serious, disciplined thought--knows what he really believes only after he has written it.

If I'm right, consider the tremendous potential advantage that we journalists, trained to think on a keyboard, have over most other people. Let me grant that my point is subtle and unprovable--which is why most publishers don't fully understand why and how we do what we do.

Up to now, I've been talking about the need to understand what makes a thoughtful piece. We need to keep facts in their place and we need intellectual integrity. We need a journalist who is a thoughtful individual, working in an environment that encourages and rewards thoughtfulness.

The basic necessity

But unfortunately, that is not enough. Even a person utterly determined to concentrate his or her intellectual resources on the task often cannot produce a thoughtful story. Too often, he or she lacks the language skills needed to develop and support ideas with precision and clarity. By language skills, I mean precision in vocabulary and syntax, as well as a feeling for what I will call the music of the English language--the nuances of rhythm, emphasis and flow.

The shortage of such writers, of course, is a truism in this business. It is why most publications have some sort of superstructure--senior editors or copy editors, or at least a managing editor--that is supposed to bring some of those missing skills to the copy.

The sad fact is that the results--what we see in print today--point to a continuing deterioration of skills, or at least of the determination to apply them. What we see in print, more and more, reflects at best a tin ear and at worst incredible sloppiness.

At this point, I could perhaps amuse you by discussing the debasement of words--for example, the increasing use of the word "fortuitous" when the word that applies is "fortunate," or the use of the word "less" when the word should be "fewer." But I suspect that most of you follow William Safire's column, and I don't want to be totally redundant.

As to syntax, though, if we journalists are truly professionals, how do we explain the hardy existence of the dangling modifier in our columns? How do we defend the overworked comma that should be a semicolon or a period? How do we countenance the roadblocks to logic that we put in the reader's way because--through ignorance or policy--we fail to use the subjunctive mood when it is called for?

More subtly, why do we accept sentences that put the reading emphasis on the wrong words and thus puzzle or mislead the reader?

And where do we look for our models? Not, I fear, to that paragon of journalism, The New York Times. I do respect the Times. But for several years now, the writers, or perhaps the copy editors, of the Times have been doing their unwitting best to confuse readers by ignoring the proper relationship between an independent clause and a dependent clause. Look carefully at any issue and you are likely to see instance after instance of a sentence the meaning of which depends on a dependent clause in the prior sentence.

I cannot think of any better demonstration of a complete absence of thought, or regard, for the reader--unless, perhaps, it is another specialty of our day: the string of two or three sentences each of which begins with the word "but" or its equivalent.

What can we do? I will avoid the obvious exhortation to those of you who are copy producers. But I have three suggestions for editorial managers:

First, get tough. Insist that your writers produce copy that is focused, precise and clear, not just full of facts and not just easy to swallow. Journalists, like other people, try harder if you make it important that they do so. This won't remedy an absence of skills, but it can do a lot to eliminate sloppiness.

Second, upgrade your copy-editing function. That's easier said than done, too. Many business publishers are willing to pay good money to journalists who represent them in the marketplace, but are unwilling to pay copy editors enough to attract the good ones--or to induce good journalists to choose that career. As a result, we have bred a generation of low-paid, semi-skilled, poorly motivated copy editors who often add little value to copy and sometimes make it worse.

There's little glory in copy editing. But the job has other psychological rewards that can be more than adequate if they are supplemented by a living wage.

Third, when you hire journalists, look for thinkers. It's very tempting to grab for young people who have a few years in journalism or who graduated from journalism school. You figure that you don't have to teach them how to do reporting, they know all about story leads and how to handle quotes, they understand deadlines, and they know something about the ethics of journalism. Furthermore, they are committed to the business, and there is a huge pool of such people to choose from.

What you need most, though, is people who have good minds, an excellent command of the English sentence, and, of course, lots of energy. Some journalism graduates fill the bill, but journalism graduates have no monopoly on those attributes. Over the years, I have worked very successfully with business journalists whose educational backgrounds were philosophy or economics or English literature or child psychology or physics or even engineering. They were intelligent people who enjoyed dealing with ideas and could express them with precision and force. Just as important, perhaps, they were active readers, sensitive to the nuances of the English sentence. They had little trouble learning on the job the trade-school aspects of journalism.

More is needed

I'm afraid that these here-and-now suggestions, however, will not be enough down the road. I certainly do not advocate an academic style of writing. But the disciplines of thinking and writing are rooted in our academic experience. Our schools, down to the lowest level, need teachers who have the intellectual capacity to transmit those disciplines--teachers who know, love and can transmit the heritage of the English language. Unless we have such teachers and can provide them with the support they need, we will not have young journalists, from whatever source, who can generate worthwhile ideas or express them with clarity.

There is some basis for optimism, perhaps, in the article by William Zinsser. He documents what appears to be at least a mini-trend in the colleges--expanding the teaching of writing across the entire curriculum. It is possible that integrating writing with the mastery of various academic disciplines will result in better thinkers and better writers emerging from the college campus.

But I do not think that writing and thinking can be divorced from the fundamentals of grammar. And the level of syntactical ability that I have seen on the secondary-school level in recent years is discouraging.

Good writing also requires a sound understanding of how people read. How can we expect this from people who don't read? And yet we know that we will be looking at a hiring pool consisting more and more of "the TV generation"--people who grew up reading only the bare minimum required to get through school.

If I were a cynic, I would say that inasmuch as the TV generation and TV generations to come will also be our readers--or should I say subscribers?--it really won't matter much how good a job we do. But I believe that our younger subscribers, like our older ones, are people who are hungry for achievement and therefore hungry for information and understanding. If we deliver the goods, they will read us--in our periodicals or on printouts--because they will have no alternative.

The question is whether we will be able to deliver the goods. We as individuals, or even as a group, may not be able to do much about the mindlessness some of us see developing in our society. But we can at least try to tighten our own standards, rethink our copy flow, and look for the thinking individuals on whom our future depends.

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