Wednesday Blog Post: The Craft of Quoting

One of the hardest journalism classes I ever took - one of my hardest classes period - was Journalism 201 with Professor Harris, Reporting and Writing. While other classes required an essay every once in a while, this was an article a week, 750 words, with revisions due the class after you got your paper back. It was intense - never mind the actual writing and interviewing, but just coming up with story ideas each week stressed me out. On top of tat, Harris assigned us exercises from The Craft of "Quoting," a thin white book he had written and had become an SCSU Journalism Department staple. Even our weekly articles included the patterns, underlined and numbered on the drafts we turned in.

Back then, trying to work the patterns into my articles awas difficult. "I don't want to write like this," I remember thinking. "Who cares if the attribution goes before or after the quote? Who cares if I paraphrase?" Harris cared. And while I'd been baptized in red pen during American Studies, Harris killed pens on our articles. Thank god for rewrites, or else some of us might not have passed.

There was one good thing about having such a regimented schedule of first drafts and rewrites: you're always practicing. And being forced to include quote patterns burns them into your memory. I no longer remember the patterns themselves, but I see them, every time I write dialogue. Writing books often recommend varying your sentence structure to liven up your writing, and I already do that - thanks to JRN 201. I find myself glancing back up every few paragraphs, looking to see how my dialogue is structured and how I should change it up. And I never, ever have two characters - sources - quoted in the same paragraph.

The old adage is true: You never realize how much you've learned until you look back on it, years later. And that is why The Craft of "Quoting" still retains a place on my writing bookshelf.

(If you're interested, Amazon has a listing for the book, though it looks like they're only selling used copies.)