Know your audience (Wild card)

We've covered a lot in our crash course in editing. The majority of what we've looked at, though, has dealt with the actual grammar issues involved in writing.

But there's one more important factor we need to look at: audience.

It's of the utmost importance that journalists know their audiences. You don't want to write something that will blatantly offend a large portion of your primary audience.

The Associated Press released a story on Monday about the IRA in Northern Ireland. Having studied abroad in Ireland and traveled to Northern Ireland, specifically to the city mentioned in the story, I cringed a little when I saw what they called the city:

"The queen of England is wanted for war crimes in Ireland and not wanted on Irish soil," a masked Real IRA man told more than 200 supporters rallying in a cemetery in Northern Ireland's second-largest city of Londonderry.

 To anyone who wouldn't otherwise know, there is nothing wrong with the name Londonderry. Technically, it is the "official" name of the city. However, if you go to Northern Ireland and refer to it as Londonderry, you will get countless people glaring at you and telling you that no, it's just Derry. The London part comes from when the British took over-- a fact that most Northern Irish are still very upset about.

This is a case of knowing your audience. When referring to the city, especially in the context of people in the city being angry, it probably would have been more appropriate to call the city by the name its residents do: Derry.

Pogatchnik, Shawn. "Real IRA condemns queen's planned visit to Ireland." Associated Press. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110425/ap_on_re_eu/eu_nireland_ira_dissidents. 25 April 2011.

Punctuation Station (Misused punctuation)

Punctuation can make or break what you're trying to say in writing. It serves the purpose of incorporating "breaths" into sentences by breaking up the sentence a bit. Periods, exclamation points and question marks are the easiest punctuation to figure out. They go at the end of a sentence. Easy peasy.

Punctuation that goes inside the sentence can be more difficult, though. Commas and semicolons also provide a pause in sentences, but without creating a complete rest. Such punctuation is extremely important for setting off parts of a sentence from each other.

One of the best examples of this is the comparison between the sentences "Let's eat Grandma," and "Let's eat, Grandma." An itty bitty comma makes the two sentences have drastically different meanings.

Semicolons are the middle ground between periods and commas. They indicate a longer break than a comma, but not the full stop of a period. Semicolons are particularly useful in connecting independent clauses. Sometimes, though, semicolons are overused.

Take a look:

Trump and other critics said the long form contained information Obama wanted to hide; in fact, both pages of the long form contains essentially the same information; the difference is that one page includes signatures by Obama's mother and an attending physician.

This snippet from a USA Today story titled "Obama releases his Hawaii birth certificate" uses not one, but two semicolons within one chunk of the writing.

In this case, the semicolons don't add much to the overall function of the writing. The clauses would have had the same meaning if written as individual sentences. And the doubling up of semicolons makes the phrase feel cluttered.

A better way to approach this would be:

Trump and other critics said the long form contained information Obama wanted to hide when, in fact, both pages of the long form contains essentially the same information. The difference is that one page includes signatures by Obama's mother and an attending physician.

 Written as such, we get two cohesive sentences instead of just a clump of words. Making the part about the page of signatures a separate sentence also makes that bit of writing stronger that it was when set off by a semicolon.




Jackson, David. "Obama releases his Hawaii birth certificate." USA Today. http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/04/obama-releases-birth-records/1?csp=hf. 27 April 2011.

All you need to say is "He said..." (Poor word choice)

Journalistic writing is about facts. We don't exaggerate, we avoid flowery language, we get to the point, we don't show bias.

If something was spoken, we say it was "said." Terms such as "declared" or "exclaimed" add an element of bias to stories because they carry with them certain connotations. By saying someone "declared" or "exclaimed," you're making a judgment call about the emotions driving what the person said. And that's not ok.

Clearly, no one informed the writers at The Right Perspective of this. Look at how they wrote about a radio session with Rush Limbaugh:

Rush exclaimed that he would love to see everything Obama has done legislatively while president get erased, but he deals with “‘what is,’ not ‘what ifs’.”

“‘If’ is for children, and we have certain things that are the reality of the day and need to dealt with,” Rush said.

“There is no magic wand that can get Obama un-elected,” Rush declared.

In three sentences, all containing quotes, "said"was only used once. This is poor word choice on the part of the Right Perspective.

In your own writing, make sure to keep it simple. He said, she said, we said, they said. Don't make assumptions about the emotion behind a statement by using words like "declared," "exclaimed," "boasted," etc.

NewsGuy. "Rush: Birthers in a 'Fantasy.'" The Right Perspective. http://www.therightperspective.org/2011/04/07/rush-birthers-in-a-fantasy/. 7 April 2011.

Are you sure this counts as news? (No news peg)

One of the most obvious elements of good journalism is that your story has to have a point. It has to be newsworthy, something that people care about.

In celebrity news, it's quite easy to find stories that have no relevance to anyone other than the people the stories are about. Does it really matter to any of us if Sean Penn and Scarlett Johansson are dating or not? No.

But the entertainment is rife with such stories, and the majority of the time they have no real news peg.

Look at this story from E! Online:

Blake Lively is a lady in red.

Just a few weeks after Drew Barrymore went ginger, the Gossip girl debuts a new hue at Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World gala.

So is this for a new role? Or is Blake just showing us how influential Drew is?

Where's the news peg? So she dyed her hair. Is there a reason we should care? Not really. Make sure your stories can always answer the question "So what?" A story about someone dying her hair is nothing but filler.

Riley, Katherine. "Red Alert! Blake Lively Dyes Her Hair." E! Online. http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b238631_red_alert_blake_lively_dyes_her_hair.html?cmpid=sn-000000-twitterfeed-365-topstories&utm_source=eonline&utm_medium=twitterfeed&utm_campaign=twitterfeed_topstories&dlvrit=48939. 26 April 2011.

Whom cares about who? Wait... (Wrong pronoun)

Who, whom, whoever, whomever. I would venture a guess that the figuring out the difference between these words is in the top 5 of most difficult grammar rules. It's certainly one that trips me up on a consistent basis.

Some writers and linguists argue that "whom" is on the way out in usage, with most people defaulting to the less formal seeming "who." Well, that's fine and dandy, but until "whom" is officially out of usage, we need to make sure we know how it properly fits into a sentence.

The simplest breakdown of the who vs. whom dilemma is this: Who functions as the subject of a sentence, whom functions as the object. Sounds easy enough, right?

It can be tricky to determine whether the word is actually being used correctly. Even the pros get it wrong sometimes.

Take the following headline from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Whom will Wilson replace on SF Giants' roster?

What do you think? Correct usage or not?

If you said correct, good job!

The headline's use of "whom" is right on. Wilson is doing the replacing, making him the subject of the headline. What he is replacing a somebody on the SF Giants' roster. Consequently, whom must be used in order to keep the person being replaced objective.

If it was Wilson being replaced rather than doing the replacing, then "who" would have been appropriate. In that case, the headline would have to read: Who will replace Wilson on SF Giants' roster?

In that case, neither Wilson nor the roster is the subject, so a nominative pronoun is needed to be the subject. Thus, who.

In the matter of who vs. whom, one little letter makes all the difference, so make sure you understand the usage of both words to avoid getting thrown off.



Schulman, Henry. "Whom will Wilson replace on SF Giants' roster?" San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/05/SPRE1IPMVU.DTL. 25 April 2011.

Seeking: A verb to go with our noun (Main noun too far from main verb)

 Writing, especially journalistic writing, should be straightforward. It shouldn't require the skills of a detective to find the subject and verb of a sentence.

But alas, every once in a while the main noun and main verb of a sentence end up so far separated from each other that it's hard to determine which verb the main noun is meant to be partnered with.

Luckily, issues with a main noun being too far from a main verb are easily fixed. Most of the time the fix is as simple as cutting out a few unnecessary words in the sentence.

Here's an example from a New York Times article discussing how certain fish eaten in Thailand are host to a parasite that can cause cancer:

The raw fish that is so avidly consumed in the stilt houses that sit among rice paddies and wetlands of the country’s northern provinces contain parasites that can accumulate in the liver and lead to a deadly cancer.

Let's ignore for the moment that the writer switched from referring to fish as singular (fish that is) to plural (The raw fish....contain, rather than contains). A second issue in this sentence is that the main noun, fish, is too far from the main verb, contain. The sentence tries to paint a detailed picture of the environment in which the first is eaten, but in doing so creates a rift between the two most important elements of the sentence.

The sentence can be fixed just by cutting out a few words:

The raw fish that is so avidly consumed in the country's northern provinces contains parasites that can accumulate in the liver and lead to a deadly cancer.

We maintain the point that the fish is eaten frequently throughout the provinces, but without losing the connection between the main noun and the main verb.

While it's good to add in details to make your writing more colorful, make sure that those details don't overshadow the important parts of your sentences. It's crucial that the reader be able to connect the main noun and main verb of a sentence without getting lost in the middle because there's too much separation between the two elements.



Fuller, Thomas. "In Thailand, Love of Food Carries Deadly Risks." The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/world/asia/26iht-thailand.html?ref=world. 25 April 2011.

Don't just sit there, get active! (Passive voice)

 One of the toughest obstacles facing any writer is the challenge of maintaining active voice throughout the writing. Active voice is what keeps a story interesting, yet it's easy to fall into passive voice when writing.

When a story is written in an active voice, it means that the subject of the sentence is the one performing the action. In passive voice, the doer of the action becomes the object rather than the subject. The doer is acted upon, rather than acting itself.

In this example from the New York Times, passive voice is turned to in telling about the deaths of four people.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — At least four people were killed in the southern port city of Karachi on Tuesday in bombings that struck two buses carrying Pakistani naval employees, a senior naval official said. At least 56 people were wounded.

The sentence could be made stronger by using the active voice. In this case, that would mean making the bombings perform the action:

Bombings that struck two buses carrying Pakistani naval employees in the southern port city of Karachi on Tuesday killed at least four people. 

The original sentence had the passive voice construction of "who had what done to it by whom" (four people were killed by bombings). The new sentence follows the active voice construction of "who did what to whom" (bombings killed four people).

It's easy to fall into the trap of passive voice, but for stronger, more engaging writing, you're always better off sticking with active voice.


Masood, Salman. "4 Killed in Bus Bombings in Pakistan." The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/world/asia/27pakistan.html?ref=world. 26 April 2011.