Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking Read Online Free Page B

be depressing to write about and tedious to read. I have found, however, that tenacity does usually pay off in the end, and that frequently an apparent cul de sac will magically open up into a broad highway that makes the excursion all worthwhile.
    ORGANIZATION—all-important; here is where the article does or does not come together. You now have a thick notebook full of interviews, plus your typed versions; a flock of papers with details of other research, manuals, financial reports, newspaper clippings overflowing your desk, or kitchen table, or both. How to put it all together in readable fashion?
    One technique I have found useful in the early stages of an inquiry is to write letters to friends about what I am doing. In that way I perforce start editing the material for fear my correspondent’s eyes will glaze over with boredom if I put in everything I have learned. Also, one’s style is bound to be more relaxed than it will be at the dread moment when one writes “page 1” on a manuscript for an editor.
    When preparing Kind and Usual Punishment , I went to a five-day conference of the American Correctional Association in Miami and filled up several notebooks during the many sessions I attended. Each night I wrote to a friend in California, drawing on my notes to give what I saw as the highlights of the meetings. These letters became the basis for that chapter in the book. Similarly, during the Spock trial I attended court for four weeks, took down what amounted to a longhand transcript of the proceedings, dashed back to the hotel, and wrote a seven- or eight-page single-spaced letter to my husband telling what had happened that day. Eventually I boiled these down to about 110 pages in my book about the trial.
    Having reached this point, one is, of course, only at the beginning of one’s troubles; you have the letters (or carbon copies, if you remembered to insert the carbon paper) and all the other research paraphernalia, but you still have the problem of where and how to start and finish, plus what goes in the middle and in what order. With luck, the subject will suggest the form (see comments on “You-All and Non-You-All” and “Checks and Balances at the Sign of the Dove”).
    Sometimes it helps to draft in haphazard order the most striking, and hence the easiest, sections of the work in progress. At least this is fairly pleasurable; you can juggle these fragments around later, determine the best sequence, string them together with other material, rewrite them as needed. In the course of this a good beginning paragraph may occur to you; good endings are in my opinion far harder, and your editor will not be pleased if you give up the struggle and simply write (as I have done on occasion) THE END, hoping he will not notice your failure to construct an elegant conclusion and a chic final sentence—what a journalist friend of mine calls a “socko ending.” Nor will he welcome a dreary summation of what went before. I can offer no useful guidelines here, as each piece of work will present its own unique problem. One can only hope the solution will occur in a sudden blinding flash of insight.
    STYLE. Most textbooks on writing skirt around this knotty problem and caution against reaching to achieve “style”—be yourself, be natural, they seem to say. In a way I see what they are driving at, yet I am not totally convinced; I should have welcomed a splash of style (and did welcome it, when it occurred) in the student papers I read at San Jose and Yale. Many an important message in book or article is lost, founders on lack of style; unreadable, nobody has read it. Thus a conscious effort to foster style may not be amiss.
    Of the many texts on the writer’s craft, I recommend the following as pleasurable and amusing reading from which I, for one, have learned a great deal about the cultivation of style:
    The Art of Writing , by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the anthologist who compiled the Oxford Book of English