Softness is great for bath towels and toilet paper, but it has no place in a news story. Readers want concrete, verifiable information, and that is only achieved with concrete, verifiable language.
"The Beatles included four musicians" is a better news sentence than "The Beatles included a few musicians." (Credit: UPI)
Purge soft words like “very,” “many,” “various,” “some” and the dreaded “a lot” from your writing vocabulary. Soft language is subjective and open to wide interpretation. That’s the antithesis of good newswriting. When you write “many government officials,” you might mean you interviewed a dozen, but your reader might envision only four.
The best way to ensure soft terms don’t end up in your story: Don’t let them creep into your reporting. Be alert for this kind of language when you’re doing interviews, and push your sources to clarify (and quantify) their meaning.
For example, if a source in a story about union negotiations says that “some” of her colleagues are willing to fight for higher pay, your next question should be: “Who are ‘some’ colleagues?”
You need to clarify who she’s counting on to help her. Colleagues in her department? Three other workers in her office? Fifty other workers who’ve signed a petition?
Another way to crowd out soft terms is to get the documents and data. When you’ve got numbers and clear facts on paper, you’re less likely to rely on soft words and phrases in your writing. I often see reporters reaching for words like “a few” because they didn’t push for a document, a statistic or a report that would have specified exactly “how many.”
For example, one student recently wrote: ”It is very common for motorists to sometimes speed through road work zones…” There are two soft words here: “Very” and “sometimes.”
Later in the story, the student had a stronger sentence: ”According to the Department of Labor’s statistics from 1995 – 2002, about 60 percent of the fatalities at road construction sites are from workers being struck by a vehicle or mobile equipment.”
Think your writing is tough as nails? Search your piece for any of the words mentioned above. You may be surprised at what you find.
