Writers’ Coaching Corner (February 2024): Put Readers There
““Good writing puts readers there.””
This month is the next installment in the third season of the Writers’ Coaching Corner (S3:E2). Each month I take one paragraph from a GCD article to highlight some aspect of what makes for good writing. I’ll point out what made the writing work so well and how we can incorporate more of that writerly goodness into our craft.
This month I use an article by GCD staff writer James Williams called “Fighting Bitterness with Beauty When Prayers Go Unanswered” to talk about the principle that good writing puts readers there.
In the video I mention an article by Marvin Olasky, a former editor for World, called “A Wrinkle in Journalism History.” I also discuss the different types of Bible commentaries. But I mainly discuss this month’s writing principle from a chapter in Roy Peter Clark’s book Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser. It’s a chapter about anticipating the needs of readers (Ch. 22).
Some readers, Clark explains, need urgent information, a “just the facts” approach. Think of government reports or instructions for medicine. Other readers want both the wisdom and pleasure that come from compelling stories and writing with a more literary feel. Clark captures the difference between these two types of writing with distinct, memorable phrases. The difference, he writes, is between “texts that point you there and the ones that put you there” (212, emphasis added). And compelling narratives, he argues, put you there within the story or moral lesson, whereas reports and classic journalism point you there.
I won’t say that one is better than the other, and neither does Clark. When I can’t figure out how to get the “check oil” light off my car dashboard, I don’t want my car manual to begin with a story about hiking in the woods. But when I want to fight the bitterness that creeps into my heart, as staff writer James Williams writes about, then I do want a compelling narrative, maybe even an article that begins with a story about hiking in the woods and a bad parenting moment. In this way, Williams’s good writing puts us there.
You can watch all the Writers’ Coaching Corner videos here.