What writers and others say
“Jumping to conclusions is not half as good an exercise as digging for facts.”
— Anonymous
“You can observe a lot just by watching.”
— Yogi Berra, National Baseball Hall of Famer, known for his “Yogi-isms”
“Get good at getting the goods.”
— Nancy Collins, celebrity interviewer and author
“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
— Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize-winning physicist
“It is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.”
— Harold Evans, British-born journalist and writer
“Researching online is like being dropped into Lake Michigan and trying to find a drop of water.”
— Jeff Hadfield, vice president, Fawcette Technical Publications
“‘Googling,’ as people call it, is like fishing for trout in a landfill. Your chance of catching a trout is slim. It’s more likely you’ll come up with 6 million beer cans. ‘Google’ comes from the word googol-plex, which is the number 10 raised to the power of 100, which is the number of irrelevant entries you pull up every time you ‘google.’”
— Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian, on “Prairie Home Companion”
“Without great reporting, a story is like one big comb-over. You can see it from the third paragraph.”
— Anne Hull, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, The Washington Post
“He couldn’t cover a fire if it started in his pants.”
— Irish city editor
“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
— Samuel Johnson, 18th-century English writer
“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.”
— Naguib Mahfouz, Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning novelist
“Beginning reporters think it’s all about writing fancy sentences. And it’s not. It’s about reporting.”
— Susan Orlean, writer, The New Yorker
“It was while making newspaper deliveries, trying to miss the bushes and hit the porch, that I first learned the importance of accuracy in journalism.”
— Charles Osgood, author, Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack
“You should write not what you know, but what you can find out about.”
— Robert J. Sawyer, author, The Terminal Experiment
“Think for 10 seconds before you touch the keyboard. You will save yourself 10 minutes of wandering around the web.”
— Sree Sreenivasan, journalism professor, Columbia University
“Librarians weren’t born. They descended from heaven.”
— Paul Wenske, investigative reporter, The Kansas City Star
Work with — not against — your brain
While we talk a lot about what to write — More stories! Fewer words! Shorter sentences! — we don’t focus so much on how.
Writing is hard because we weren’t taught how to write. Instead, we were taught how to edit: how to spell, punctuate and use the right grammar.
But there is a how to writing. Learn a few simple steps that will make your writing time more effective and efficient at Write Better, Easier & Faster — our writing-process workshops.
You’ll learn to invest your time where it’ll do you the most good … stop committing creative incest … even save time by editing before writing.
