Filling this newspaper with original, accurate, well-reported, readable stories is a weekly scramble. It doesn’t allow much time for writing school — that is, sitting down together to study our craft. Generally speaking, looking back at what we’ve written is a luxury we can’t afford.
Yet almost every member of our editorial team shows up for the “Lunch and Learn” sessions we’ve offered since July 2022. The idea is to gather every few months for a discussion about various aspects of writing and reporting, removed from the deadline pressure of newspaper production.
The editing we do each week is instructive but also rushed; reporters have to glean their own lessons. On top of putting out a good issue, our writers and editors share another common goal: to learn from each other and, hopefully, become better journalists.
Seven Days consulting editors Ken Ellingwood and Candace Page teamed up to design the trainings. Both are hands-on editors at the paper — they have worked with most of the writers — but, as freelance contractors, they enjoy more flexibility than our staffers. In other words, they can say no to certain projects.
Luckily, they said yes to translating their combined 75-plus years of journalism experience into a series of classes that started outdoors at Burlington restaurant the Spot on the Dock. The first topic was “Seeing Stories” — recognizing different types of narratives and establishing a common vocabulary to describe them. At the time, more than two years into the pandemic, just seeing each other was a treat.
The Lunch and Learns have since moved inside our office and covered story structure, interviewing techniques, how to write more effective beginnings and endings, and the importance of the nut graf — aka “the so-what paragraph.”
Last Thursday, our first session of the year was about how to effectively use quotations from sources. Most inexperienced writers tend to overdo them, which can be a drag to the reader; rookie reporters often feel obligated to include some words from everyone who took the time to talk with them. Other common pitfalls include long, explanatory quotes that would be better paraphrased; preempting quotes with summary sentences; and too often relying on a quotation to wrap up a story.
Over takeout from American Flatbread, our resident word nerds chewed over methods for recording interviews, distilling rambling quotes to their essence and capturing colorful scenes with choice snippets of dialogue. At Ken’s prompting, we also looked back at some of our own stories and critiqued the quotations. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Summing up the lesson later, in a quote-worthy email, Ken said: “We quote to reflect the voices, points of view and experiences of people we talk to — and when we couldn’t say it better ourselves.”
Our new visual art editor, Alice Dodge, has only been to a couple of these sessions, “but I have found them to be really helpful, especially since I never trained as a journalist,” she wrote in an email. “Ken and Candy are very focused on clarity and on keeping the stories fun to read.”
“Readers’ attention is finite,” deputy publisher Cathy Resmer added. “We have to convince them that our work is worth their time.”
And finally, from food writer Melissa Pasanen: “We are lucky to have two such seasoned journalists and editors to work with on this series — and in general. It feels like an investment at many levels: in us individually, in Seven Days as an organization and in journalism.”
No, indeed: I couldn’t have said it better myself.
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2025.
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