Reading response: How to make a profile?
What Mark Kramer says in Telling True Stories about setting the scene in pieces was really relevant and helpful for me: “Scenes can convey and authenticate irrational, emotional, and nuanced information more efficiently than can explanation.” Conveying is the key. Recreating scenes, feelings, emotions, giving meaningful details are all elements that guide the reader and pull him in the piece with the character. Being able to show instead of telling seems to be a determining element of a good piece. That’s why details are so important. Paying attention to details also guides the journalist who is doing the piece, and helps him to know better the character he is talking about. Sometimes they reveal the truth of the character and have meaning as Harrington shows it: “Everything in the house related to deeds they had done for others”. “Such details make the subject’s interior world clearer to us.”
In this regards, the piece about Cohen is a great example. The journalist, Strauss, makes a great job recreating Cohen s’ world, showing how he is physically and in his mind. He also makes him talk through dialogs. In the end, the effect is that we get a chance to meet the character and not only read about him.
Clark and Scanlan emphasize the importance of details too: “Good writers use telling details to help us see, hear and understand”. Gorney’s work on Seuss’ life is an example of this extensive use of details. For example, Gorney knows that “on occasion San Diego children will pack up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and set out for the summit” of the hill where Dr Seuss lives. She makes a great description of Seuss and the environment in which he lives.
Details are an important tool for good pieces.
4 comments:
I totally agree with you about the details. The details of the license plate and the dog from the Seuss article totally stuck with me after I had read the piece. I tried to keep the idea of detail in the back of my mind when I wrote my Index article for this week and it really changed the way I wrote the piece, it kind of amazed me.
Excellent. Yes details are important, but they must be carefully chosen details toward a particular end. They're inextricable from structure in that sense.
I agree about the details and recreating scenes also. After reading this I felt really inspired as I went to do some preliminary reporting for my profile. I had a closer attention to detail and conscious thought process to notice the little things instead of simply staring at a blurred bigger picture.
You obviously put this to good use in the first draft of your profile. I love that you open the piece with a scene that makes it clear what the angle of the piece is going to be.
Great work!
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